Pepper Grinder Review – Bore, Not Boring

A scrappy girl, a giant drill, and a journey through perilous lands. Pepper Grinder is half Celeste and half Ecco the Dolphin, an unusual platformer that dethrones jumping as the main mechanic. Drilling takes its place, allowing Pepper to bore through ice and rock as smoothly as Ecco cut through the ocean. It’s sweet, stylish, and frustrating in equal measure. Hampered by problematic controls and a brief runtime, Pepper’s story nonetheless delivers the thrills, chills, and grinding drills you’d hope for. Though the Italian plumper isn’t handing over the platforming crown, Pepper Grinder is no mere Goomba, and when it’s good, it’s great.

Pepper Grinder Review

Nobody gets away with stealing treasure from plucky Pepper. Stopping the villains who’ve absconded with your loot won’t be easy, however. You’ll need to dive, dig, swoop, and swing through a variety of platforming levels, tackle gigantic bosses, and buy collectible stickers while you’re at it. Though whimsical, Pepper Grinder is far from childish, and if you let your guard down, the mud, bombs, and monsters will eat you up. You can use the grinder to open doors, fire guns, and even operate mechs, though digging remains the meat of the matter. Finicky controls make some parts rougher than necessary, but the core experience delivers.

Story: Fleeting Gems

Getting shipwrecked is bad. Losing your treasure to a horde of Narlings is worse. After those grubby green goblinoids make off with the gems and jewels that are (probably) rightfully hers, Pepper sets out to get them back. Her journey takes her from sandy beaches and ice-capped mountain peaks to lava-filled caverns and stinking swamps. The Narlings aren’t her only foes, either, as a shadowy figure makes it obvious they’re bent on keeping Pepper down.

Pepper Grinder‘s story is simple and abstract in much the same way as Sonic the Hedgehog, but that’s no knock against it. This game isn’t the place for lavish narratives, interwoven themes, and dense character-building. It’s about launching yourself from cannons like a circus acrobat, smashing drill-first through walls of ice, and blasting Narlings with a chaingun bigger than you are. The absence of a deeper story does no damage because the game simply doesn’t need one. A deep plot here would be like bacon on a birthday cake: tasty but conspicuously out of place.

With that disclaimer in mind, there are some lovely little bits of environmental storytelling. In one level you see an Everest-sized giant meandering around in the background. Later on, you visit the giant’s kitchen and even fall into his stew pot. A bit later, the giant rescues you from an otherwise lethal fall before sending you on your way again, content to watch you the way a toddler might a mouse. Pay attention as you explore, and you’ll find there is more to learn about the Narlings, Pepper’s grinder, and other elements. You just have to care enough to notice.

Pepper Grinder is cartoonish in an almost literal sense. Something about Narlings riding snowmobiles or firing oversized cannons from their adorably flimsy flying machines summons images of Adventure Time and other classics. Ahr Ech has made a world in which Finn and Jake would be perfectly comfortable, and there’s an incredible coziness that comes with that kind of setting, even in the absence of elaborate family trees and background stories.

Gameplay: Thrill of the Drill

If you’ve ever played the Ecco games and remember how the dolphin felt as it cut through water, you’ll know how Pepper Grinder feels. The genius bit is that the grinder propels Pepper not only through water but also dirt, ice, and other substances with equally as much ease. You’re a kind of manic Dig Dug, burrowing through otherwise intractable surfaces without the least resistance. There’s a bit of stiffness to the way you curve, but get the hang of it and you’ll move with a liquid grace the T-1000 could only dream of.

At its best, Pepper Grinder has some of the most fluid movement of any 2D platformer out there. At its worst, it’s a mess of near misses, the gaming equivalent of trying to complete a block puzzle blindfolded. The problem is inconsistency. When your drill dives, grappling hook leaps, and other acrobatic feats work, they’re heaven. When they don’t, they’re rubbing elbows in Dante’s ninth circle. The infuriating thing is how thin the line between these two extremes is. Grow a beautiful garden then flamethrow half of it and slap a chalk line down the middle. That’s Pepper Grinder.

In some ways, Pepper Grinder isn’t so much about platforming as it is about navigating the empty spaces between. It shares a great deal with Celeste and Ghostrunner 2 in that way, sometimes demanding you land five back-to-back cannon shots, grappling hook swings, and drill dives without your feet touching the ground. Fail and it’s back to the last checkpoint. Excellent level design makes most areas a pleasure, even if (like me) you platform with the grace of a tipsy hippopotamus.

Grinding isn’t the only thing the grinder does, either. Pepper can use the drill bit to power elevators, cannons, guns, snowmobiles, and even a mech. The resulting puzzle sequences are clever, and the game does a great job of continuing to introduce new mechanics as you approach the end, so things never get stale. Some of the game’s trickiest sequences come from chaining these mechanics together, demanding quick reflexes and stubborn persistence as you string cannon blasts, ice tunneling, and combat.

The game unfortunately trips over its boss battles. Whereas the other stages emphasize speed and fluidity, boss battles are wars of patience thanks to long health bars and poor telegraphing. The Magma Worm and other bosses transition from idling to attacking with few if any frames in between. The result? The safest strategy is to wait (and wait and wait) until a cooldown gives you an opening to strike. One of the coolest bosses in the game also managed to get stuck on a wall, allowing me to pummel it to death with zero resistance. Anticlimactic, to say the least.

If Pepper Grinder has a fatal flaw, it may be its length. The average player is looking at maybe 6 hours of gameplay. Cut that in half if you have a talent for the genre. Granted, legendary platformers like Super Mario and Sonic aren’t delivering 100-hour playthroughs, either. Still, I felt like I was just getting my baby teeth in when I was booted out the door. If the core mechanics were sharper, the short length wouldn’t matter as much. As is, it’s a coin flip on whether or not it’s worth the money.

Graphics & Audio: Potent Pixels

Pepper erupts from the soil, her grinder whirling to a halt, as she stares at the door ahead. The lock is as big as she is, and with solid stone beneath, there’s no way to dig under. Above her head on the cavern ceiling, a nest begins to shake. Narlings drop down from its branches, surrounding her. Leaping over their heads, Pepper jams her drill into the minigun on the far side of the cavern and starts blasting. The watermelon-sized bullets explode the Narlings with a puff of smoke and a rattle of bones. When the last of the goblinoids dies, a key appears.

The pixel graphics are charming, but that’s not why they’re great. They’re great because they get the details right. A tiny light blinks on the giant bombs like a half-hearted warning. Skyborne beetles don’t just plummet to earth when defeated: they glide to safety on parachutes. Yet trees, vines, and rocks have simple geometry and little texture. They’re the kind of objects you’d expect a child to whip up with their first paint set. That’s in the game’s favor. These aren’t the ominous pixels of Blasphemous. They’re a picture book.

Excellent sound design helps a lot. I could talk about the chonky crunch when Pepper bites into a vegetable to heal or the bellhop ring when you pick up a Skull Coin. I’d rather talk about Narling bones. When one of these goblinoid goobers dies, its bones clatter like dice tossed against a wall. I have no idea what Ahr Ech used for the sound, but it’s perfect. When you’re in a rhythm of drilling, platforming, and grabbing goodies, the sound effects make their own music.

Speaking of music, there’s no reason the OST should go this hard. The menu theme deserves a special shoutout. Garage punk evolves into thumping EDM as the grinder bores its way across the screen, surrounded by a yawning skull. While not every track hits as hard as the opener, Pepper Grinder sports a solid soundtrack overall. The SFX and OST move around one another like professional chefs in a cramped kitchen, and it’s endlessly satisfying to hear.

Conclusion: One Spicy Pepper

During my time with the game, I experienced no crashes and only a handful of bugs. Platformer fans will probably enjoy their time with it; it’s just a shame that time will be so brief. Unless you plan on doing speedruns or replaying stages repeatedly to perfect your runs, you’ll burn through Pepper Grinder in a weekend. That said, in terms of fun and ambition, Ahr Ech has done more alone than some entire dev teams. Pepper Grinder is a fantastic first showing and gives me great confidence in the dev’s future work, assuming those pesky Narlings don’t get in the way.

Pepper Grinder is available for PC (reviewed) and Nintendo Switch.