Air grapple and jump into a new adventure!
Super Sami Roll is an indie game developed by Sonzai Games and published by X PLUS and released in July, 2021 for Steam, Nintendo Switch, and Playstation 5.Sami's girlfriend Vera has been kidnapped and Sami must take on a quest to rescue her. Sami has the ability to roll through levels but, being unable to jump to defeat enemies, he must hook and grapple himself away from hazards to stay safe. The game contains a mix of 2D and 3D environments as well as dozens of homages to older platform games.
Tropes for Super Sami Roll include:
- Achievement System: The game has lots of unlockables that can be found within regular stages. Even the multiplayer mode has to be discovered and unlocked!
- Anti-Frustration Features: Unlike coins which vanish upon failure, any collected raspberry stays collected even should the player fail a stage. A saving grace given how hard or even suicidal some of them can be to reach.
- Badass Adorable: The little dragon Sami
- Big Bad: Albert VII. A monkey that kidnaps Sami's friend Vera, driving the plot and is fought at the end of each world.
- Character Customization: Sami can be customized with various costumes and colors you buy in the shops using the coins and raspberries you collect.
- Checkpoint Starvation: The games difficulty levels function on the basis on how many check points there will be per stage. Relaxed and Normal will have checkpoints, while Advanced will set the player right back to the start if they fail anywhere in the level.
- Excuse Plot: Vera has been kidnapped! You need to roll away to save her!
- Green Hill Zone: Like most games, the first world is your typical grassy homeland.
- Lethal Lava Land: The fourth world is a volcanic land and the place where you fight Albert VII in a final battle.
- Multipurpose Tongue: Sami can use his tongue as a grappling hook to help with platforming.
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Nintendo Hard: While the game starts innocently enough with fairly easy stages, they quickly ramp up in challenge with them getting hairpullingly difficult as early as the second world. - Rise to the Challenge: The boss stages at the end of each world have Sami try to outrun rising lava to reach the boss.
- Shifting Sand Land: The second world is a desert landscape with all the usual trappings. Also, the sand can severely slow down Sami if caught in it.
- Slippy-Slidey Ice World: The third world is a ice/snow landscape with some levels having you to traverse icy pathways with the usual ice physics.
- Timed Mission: Each level is timed, usually at around 60 seconds. Collecting coins adds some time to the clock. Some stages however have very strict time limits that not only require speed to complete, but also diligent coin gathering to keep the timer from running out. And this on top of often precarious platforming over narrow walkways, sometimes with bumpers around that can really screw the player up. Relaxed Mode however removes the time limit altogether.
