Pavel Quest Review

Do you remember your first injection? The first time you fell over on gravel and skinned your knee? Ever suffered a multi-day migraine, a broken bone, or a sprain? When was the last time you stubbed your toe or stepped on a plug? Got all those experiences amalgamated into one and planted firmly at the forefront of your mind? Good. You're going to need a suitable frame of reference for pain in regards to Pavel Quest.

Pavel Quest is an endless runner game like Canabalt, but has the added twist of including a puzzle element. Do you see the problem of framing a puzzle game with a mechanic where you must always move? It is impossible to think out solutions to puzzles when you're moving at such a fast pace, which means your deaths will be fast and frequent, leaving you scratching your head as the game tells you “too bad, too sad”, kicks you in your teeth, and tells you to try again. However, unlike the super-difficult Super Meat Boy, the ‘challenge’ of this game is in no way nuanced or exciting.

The element of Pavel Quest that differentiates it from other games is a wall jumping mechanic. As you are trapped in an endless run and can't change direction on a dime, you must collide with walls in order to either turn around or jump into them to reach higher planes, for instance, by ping-ponging between two narrow walls, which causes the game's action to whiplash back and forth nauseatingly. This creates a tedious experience where players have to wait to position themselves properly before continuing, which only serves to make the process feel dull, thereby chipping away at the high speed element that Pavel Quest leans so heavily on.

What results is a game that is equal parts boring and mind-meltingly frustrating. Through about 70% of the game, you'll be tapping the spacebar to jump with the same intensity of a tortoise on a Sunday stroll. Players will be aggressively bored for the duration of this game, as 'puzzles' never really provide a challenge – as long as you avoid pitfalls, spikes, acid, and flames; you will get to the goal in the end. Then, towards the end, the game's difficulty gets ramped up out of nowhere, but be assured: this is not genuine difficulty.

Pavel Quest is littered with fake difficulty designed to inflate the game and disguise it from being seen as the pitifully short experience that it is (you'll be done in about 2 hours) – your success in any given level is not based on finding a solution (the actual solutions are easy to figure out), it is taking that solution and concentrating it into a painfully choreographed level run so you may live to see the next. In a puzzle game, your mind should be strained to come up with a solution for the puzzles. Here, the puzzles are all easily solved; the only thing getting in your way is the mechanics. Frequently, one will find the jumping to be temperamental – it somehow works perfectly on long stretches of terra firma, but is absolutely hopeless when a crucial jump needs to be made. You will find yourself careening to your death more often than you should: I 'managed' to rack up 550+ deaths in 2 hours of playing the game; which is about 4.6 deaths a minute. In no way is a game a good one when you constantly fall to your death because the controls did not respond in time – the jump should have been more lithe for a game like this.

Perhaps more odious are the deaths that you can't see coming. One can adapt to a bad jump; they can adjust their timing accordingly. Not that they should tolerate sloppy programming, but it happens. However, Pavel Quest is full of traps that you would need mind-reading abilities to detect. Players will find themselves trying to go through a level, then, out of nowhere, hiding behind a blind turn or at the end of a narrow set of  jumpable walls, a fireball will shoot out and hit them before they even have the chance to react. Who would even see that coming? Worse still, this can happen several times in a row, which requires perfect timing on wall-jumps. However, there is absolutely no way to tell what 'perfect' is, which means that, ultimately, your success in the later missions is all based on sheer dumb luck to avoid an obstacle that you had no way to predict. Be warned – you will not clear through the later missions in quick succession, as Pavel Quest is the kind of game that will necessitate the creation of a swear jar on your part.

The presentation is perhaps the best part of Pavel Quest, but it, in and of itself, is nothing to write home about. It uses the familiar pixel art style, but fails to capitalise upon it by only using dark, maudlin colours that really fail to invite the user into its world. The music is woeful, too – the developers attempted to create a soundtrack in the vein of European trance circa the mid-2000s, but it's as skilfully done as the rest of this awful game. The absolute sole thing of note in this game is the final boss music; which is the only thing worth keeping from this entire game as it's an outstanding trance track. However, that's it. Nothing else in this game is worth paying for, and it really says a lot when £1.99 feels like way too much for a game. My advice? Run fast and run far from Pavel Quest. I'd recommend running in the opposite direction, but if you learned about movement from this game, that might be too difficult a feat.