Do any of you remember Sonic Mania? Of course you do, it was one of the good ones. A blast to the past that managed to recapture what made older Sonic The Hedgehog games good while at the same time ascending it to new heights. What a joyous affordable adventure it was, and it was by a team of what was basically indie devs. Christian Whitehead started off as a rom hack maker for older Sonic games, then started porting older games to mobile, and eventually got to make a full fledged Sonic game. Quite lovely. Quite lovely indeed. Last time I heard they were getting ready to work on a sequel to Sonic Mania. Dozens of fans including me were excited and jumped out of our seats. Where does this story go next? I wo- canceled…. What. Canceled, any plans for Sonic Mania 2 were canceled and Christian Whitehead’s team left the company to pursue their own projects and dreams. Wow that sucks, and instead of Sonic Mania 2 instead got the middling Sonic Superstars which tried to emulate classic Sonic, but failed and somehow feels cheaper and more soulless in comparison. Not all hope was lost though as Christian Whitehead and friends went off to form their own indie studio called Evening Star. Now they have the freedom to create whatever they want with their first project aiming to be grand.
Penny’s Big Breakaway, a speedy 3D platformer inspired by the likes of Sonic the Hedgehog and the linear 3D Super Mario titles. It was colorful, expressive, and teaming with personality. You could sense the Sonic the Hedgehog influence just by looking at the characters designs and then watching a few minutes of gameplay. During development of Penny’s Big Breakaway, the studio was approached by Sega to make it another licensed Sonic game. Have an easier time getting a new idea out there without having to struggle so much within the indie market. However, they were confident in what they were making and instead got a Private Division to help. Sega would then get Arzest to make Sonic Superstars for them, and here we are now. Christian Whitehead and all of Evening Star’s first big outing. A project that spent almost seven years in the making and expected to be the spiritual successor to the Sonic the Hedgehog formula. Would they stick the landing? Was all the time, money, and love dedicated to Penny’s Big Breakaway worth it and is it as good as they hoped? The answer to that question is yes. For the most part. The game was received pretty well, but as Evening Star’s first major project it had some problems at launch. The game had some weird design choices and the bugs made it a rough mess for those trying to have the most fun possible. I remember seeing the Steam average be 7/10 for a while, but with time they’ve patched the game and currently Penny’s Big Breakaway sits at a 9/10 average.
I was skeptical whether to pick this game up or not. On the one hand I love 3D platformers. It’s a genre I grew up with and I’m always excited to see a new entry that isn’t Super Mario related. I love the Psychonauts series, Tinykin, A Hat In Time, Pseudoregalia, and I really want to pick up the new Astro Bot when it goes on sale. These are very charming games and they’re proof that even today people are still up for pure childish fun. With Psychonauts specifically being a test of how many mature themes can you cram into an animated comedy. I love 3D platformers, but on the other hand there were the bugs surrounding Penny’s Big Breakaway at release and the fact they were charging thirty dollars for it. Not too much, but from what critics have told me the game is kind of short. So I held off until the game got fixed and went on sale, which it did recently and I beat within the span of three days. This game is good. It’s great even and if it were not for the release of Astro Bot this year it would probably be the best 3D platformer of 2024. It has problems though. Flaws that make it a good game rather than an excellent one for me, and it is to a frustrating degree personally because I can tell Evening Star truly cared about what they have made here. There is a lot of fun to be had with Penny’s Big Breakaway and I do recommend it at the end of the day. If you can work around its problems and weird design choices it’s a title worth the buy. Let’s talk about Penny’s Big Breakaway and why it deserves your attention.
Story
Our journey with a young rabbit creature named Penny making their way to the Edditorium. An event known as the Gala is coming up and auditions are being held for any performers wanting to cheer the crowd and perform alongside the grand Emperor Eddie. Longtime entertainer and crude rule of the people. Penny has always dreamt of being a star. She constantly prances around in jester clothing and has been practicing yo-yo tricks for decades. As she walks the city streets she wanders into an alleyway where she finds a mystical string. She interacts with the string and it magically fuses with her yo-yo. Transforming it into a sentient creature and allowing Penny to perform crazier tricks. Penny has made a new friend and together they plan to give one heck of a show during the auditions. Once they make it to the stage they begin twirling and dancing. The audience gasping at what stands before them Emperor Eddie is impressed, but at the end of the act the sentient yo-yo lunges at Eddie and bites his clothes away. Making him stand with nothing but his underwear in front of a large group of people. Emper Eddie is embarrassed by this act and Judge Rufus, who enforces the law in the kingdom, writes Penny down as a felon. An army of penguin guards are summoned to take Penny in, and Penny runs away hoping to escape. Now a felon for life Penny always has to be on the run. Going from place to place hoping to find a way to become innocent again. She’ll learn more about the world, why her yo-yo became sentient, the past, and why things are the way they are now. Time will tell my good sir.
Gameplay
In Penny’s Big Breakaway you’ll navigate a series of worlds each containing a set of levels and gimmicks. The goal is very simple. Get to the end as soon as possible. You’re not on a timer, but what you do have is a score meter. It goes up whenever you perform combos, maintain speed for a good amount of time, alternate tricks, collect items, and help out denizens. When you reach the goal you can land on one of three spots, and if you land on the higher spot you can increase the chance of getting a higher end level score. Perform some button presses correctly and you’ll gain a maximum bonus. Penny has a whole slew of moves to navigate through each level and interact with the world in fun ways. She can jump, do an air flip, wall jump, and her sentient yo-yo will allow you to do even crazier moves. Launch yourself forward and across long distances. Swing on the bar to reach high areas. Twirl around to perform a whirlwind maneuver. Roll along the ground and if you’re going down a slope you’ll get increased momentum. Break objects or pick up objects that you can use. From torches to light candles, peppers to transform the yo-yo into a gas fueled motorcycle, propeller cake to launch yourself into the air and glide, or jackfruit that can make you invincible. There’s a lot of options and the game rewards you for being as flexible and expressive as possible with your selection of moves. That’s why there’s a score system to begin with as expression leads to better end level results. Low difficulty, high skill ceiling.
Each world is themed and has fun mechanics for you to mess and work around with. There is a water world where you can ride across currents as long as you have good momentum, and pipes that can blow you over if you get caught in their way. A magical level where you use books to teleport to different palaces, and hit floating books to create platforms. A level where hitting a rolled up carpet creates a path you can ride along. A level with quicksand, so you gotta always be on the move otherwise you get drowned in sand to death. Within that world are these bulls that are also golf balls and if you score a shot you create poles you can ride up. This game is always throwing new ideas at you, and this variation between mechanics that prevent this game from ever going stale. What you do need to be careful of though is Penny’s health bar and penguins. The game will throw hordes of penguins at you at times, and if five latch onto you they capture Penny and you lose a health point. If Penny loses too many health points from being captured or taking damage it’s game over. You lose 10,000 points and are given the option to either continue from a checkpoint or restart the whole level. Do you care more about mastery or do you care more about progressing the journey? Some worlds have bosses at the end that’ll test your skills and understanding of level mechanics. Either way you’ll always be in a rush to reach the end. The hope that you’ll get away and live to see another day on this weird colorful playground.
Thoughts
Penny’s Big Breakaway is quite good. On paper everything about it should work and for the most part it does. It’s a linear 3D platformer at heart with traversal options that leave tons of room for expression. You could take the slow way around and navigate obstacles like a 3D Super Mario game, or you can go full Sonic The Hedgehog and wing it. Players who master the movement system are given more rewards, but I will say it’s a really high skill ceiling. This is somewhat of a complaint depending on who you are, but reaching the high level of mastery that this game has is really difficult. You have to play efficiently, and if you want the maximum amount of points for each level you have to get through it perfectly while collecting every major item and landing at the top spot of the end level goal. All to then do a quick minigame that you have to perfect. I never once got a perfect score on a level and near the end I lost the motivation to do so. It also doesn’t help that the rewards for getting a high score on a level are nonexistent. You get maybe a few more coins to buy extras, but nothing much else. Nothing that adds to the core gameplay, and this kind of hurts the score system. Why bother engaging with skill mastery and a big chunk of the mechanics when it means nothing at the end of the day? The game doesn’t even do much to push you to utilize these mechanics. A problem games like Devil May Cry 5 and Pizza Tower run into. Practically any game with a score system suffers from not doing enough to make it a tad bit worthwhile for the player. Again, Penny’s Big Breakaway is still really fun.
The movement while taking a bit of time to get used to is really fun, and while I never managed to maintain consistent speed throughout a level there were chances to feel awesome. Levels often have segments where you ride across long distances while hell breaks out around you. Dozens of penguins chasing after you and all you can do is gun it. I already expressed how each level and world brings new ideas onto the table, and it’s the stacking of ideas that keep the game fresh and never feeling stale during the five to six hours it took to beat it. I do feel as if the yo-you could use a target system though. There are moments where you have to do tricky platforming but also hit an object in front of or next to you. So you try swinging at it only to miss. That or the yo-yo ends up hitting something else entirely. You do have the right joystick of the controller to have more precision and accuracy when swinging the yo-yo, but it doesn’t work at times as well. The game sometimes does what you want it to do, and other times it doesn’t. Platforming is great and there’s a good amount of challenge, but I wish Penny had some sort of icon below her to signal where she’s going to land. Especially in a game brimming with color and lacking any shadow to speak of in its vibrant world. It leads to misfiring jumps you personally knew you could’ve made. What makes it worse is that this is a set camera game. I like it because it’s easy to know where Penny is at all times and you don’t have to constantly readjust. I don’t like when the game turns the camera and I have to quickly readjust my movement to handle oncoming traffic.
I don’t know how to explain all this. These are problems you have to witness yourself. The game has a nice art style. I love how they tried to make it feel like a Sega Genesis or Dreamcast game as much as they could. With every character and environment having this polygon look to them. The game is colorful, but it never got hard to tell what was what. I knew what was a hazard, what I could land on, where to go, and despite environments being big there were always clear signs of where to rush next. The music is quite good, trying to mimic soundtracks of the era as well, and again this game is expressive and packs personality. Penny’s animations are joyous to watch and I love the little hand animations they have for cutscenes. Often displaying the most charm amongst the game’s cast of characters. The game doesn’t take too long to beat, but there’s extra stuff to keep you coming back. Whether that be collectibles you missed, getting a better score, the time attack mode, and much more. Penny’s Big Breakaway has some faults which I tried to the best of my ability to explain, but I still really liked the game. Evening Star’s first outing was impressive, and if they ever make a sequel to this game which I bet they will I hope they can learn from some of the mistakes they’ve made. I recommend this game and think it’s worth the buy now that they’ve patched it. There’s still some bugs, but the package here is still splendid. In the end I am going to have to give Penny’s Big Breakaway an 8.5/10 for being pretty good.
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