Review: The Impossible Game

Posted by Curtis H on September 12th, 2011 | 4 Comments | Tags: The Impossible Game

With very little experience with the original flash game I had only a slight idea of just what I was getting into with The Impossible Game. Starting up the first level my initial thoughts were “well, this doesn’t seem so bad”. Pressing X to jump over deadly triangles wasn’t that hard and it certainly helped that the beat matched up perfectly with each jump. The initial moments felt much like a rythmn game. All I had to do was match up my jumps with the beat and I’d be set. Impossible game? Nah. Ten seconds after starting the initial level however everything changed. The music intensified and suddenly the beat wasn’t quite matching up with my jumps. Completely caught off guard I immediately died.

The Impossible Game is very good at misleading you into thinking that the game isn’t really that hard before ramping up the difficulty. It’s a slow curve but one that is quite effective. In those first few moments the game gets you hooked and with the ability to immediately respawn after each death it’s incredibly hard to actually put the game down. The Impossible Game lives off that ‘one more go’ mentality and before long the top of the screen reads ‘Attempt 200’. Not that that’s a bad thing though. Each death was almost always followed by me thinking that I could easily get farther on my next try. The game does a great job at balancing difficulty with the appearance that the end goal is achieveable. It also helps that each level only ends up running for around a minute and a half. Each death results in very little lost time allowing for a game that’s never really frustrating.

Some people likely just won’t be able to complete any of the levels. The game requires fast reflexes and a crazy level of skill to actually complete certain levels. Thankfully the game includes a practice flag system that allows you to lay down checkpoints anywhere in the level. The idea being that these flags can help you perfect difficult sections and hopefully help you progress farther. It’s not going to make the end goal any easier to achieve but it’s an absolute godsend.

Gameplay aside The Impossible Game also offers medals for achieving certain requirements within the game. There’s a medal for beating each level with and without practice flags as well as a medal for jumping a set number of times. The game also features statistics that track your number of jumps as well as the percentage of each level that you can make it through without dying. The extra statistics are fun for people like me who love to look at numbers and percentages but likely won’t affect most people.

So The Impossible Game isn’t exactly impossible. Maybe it’d be more fitting to call it The Impossible Game To Put Down because that’s exactly what it is. A simply addictive game that fits perfectly on the Minis platform.

A copy of this game was provided by the publisher for review purposes. For more info on our review policy click here. This review is for the PlayStation Portable version of the game.