Promenade Review (Switch eShop)

In games, we often talk about ‘levels’ and ‘levelling up’. Promenade takes that to the – ahem – next level. France-based Holy Cap Studios and Red Art Games bring us this 2D puzzle-platformer collectathon that connects a mix of lands via a Great Elevator. Inspired by other titles, it may not be the most original, but true to its name (French for ‘ride’), it’s a pleasure to play — for the most part.

Promenade opens with your character, Nemo, getting lost (don’t). He’s less the Pixar fish and more Finn the Human. You fall from a great height to somewhere underground, where a little ‘poulp’ (which we just learned is another word for octopus, from the French poulpe) saves your life. A wholesome montage shows you making a home, before the day you decide to embark on the big wide world together.

The underground serves as a tutorial. Like the rest of the game, it’s pretty light on words, allowing the player to experiment. The functions should be familiar to anyone who’s run across a platform to jump to another platform before. Your poulp becomes a lasso for catching and throwing enemies and objects – and later, to latch onto hooks.

When you first reach the Great Elevator, Nemo collapses as a dark purple smoke pours out to form an evil tentacled doppelgänger who could be straight out of Adventure Time or Final Space. He steals all the cogs from the lift – dun dun dunnnnn! The story seems pretty basic here: protagonist, antagonist, objective, obstacles. But the game rewards you for exploring because that’s how you’ll find Nemo(’s past).

Your task is to collect cog pieces and restore the elevator to its former multi-storey glory. Find enough cogs and it’ll take you to the next level. Your colour-coded notebook keeps track of your progress with cryptic quest titles. As the game continues, you’ll uncover rockets, paper planes, and other items we won’t spoil here. Armed with these, you’ll want to ride the lift back down and unlock new pathways that previously piqued your curiosity.

The central lift is the gateway to a beachy paradise, low-gravity outer space, a blooming garden; we found ourselves eager to get lost in every new land. In each, cogs hide behind perplexing puzzles, rough runs and tricky trials. The puzzles get the proverbial and literal cogs turning and are satisfying to solve, even when they have frustrating gaps between solution and execution. Seasoned jumpers and sprinters will be at home with the platforming, but those coming for the cute aesthetic might be in for a bumpier ride, with timed races and combat where a millisecond or a millimetre can make all the difference. Of course, if you don’t feel like increasing your heart rate, you can earn cogs by donating enemies or objects to a museum, cooking food, painting artworks, and more. But rising to the challenge will earn you extra abilities and get you through the end sequence. There are settings to scale difficulty, too: automatic healing and colourful hints assist you, while timers and cutscene skips up the ante.

The downside with such a vast world is that we often asked ourselves, ‘Have we got this cog already?’ The puzzles and courses reverted to their starting positions whenever we left a section: the canvas is blank again, the people are still hungry, the chickens are back out of the coop. Where Super Mario Odyssey’s Moons turn transparent after you find them, this game has balloon cogs – which look confusingly like the original.

Promenade is immensely satisfying purely because parts of it are hard. We ‘phew’ed and wiped the sweat off our controller when we survived a sky-high route. We fist-pumped after beating a tough boss. And when we completed the gruelling yet heartwarming final chapter (no spoilers but for us it dragged on, with over eight hours of trying and dying), we cheered and then ‘aww’ed. You might not have so much trouble, but those expecting a light, breezy challenge may be surprised.

Promenade touts itself as ‘inspired by the best 3D platformers’. That inspiration is noticeable, but not derivative. Each cog is identified by a clue-y quest name like ‘Upstairs with no stairs’ or ‘Who turned off the lights?’ (Super Mario Odyssey). Your friend helps you catch items (Cappy captured so your poulp could pull). Directives are visual (Inside). There are worlds-within-worlds puzzles (Cocoon). Metroidvania elements are present, too. And minigames reference retro titles like Space Invaders and Pong.

Overall, Promenade runs well on Switch, considering its sheer amount of content. We only encountered a couple of performance issues: slower load screens as we progressed, and one big bug where we had to restart. The physics aren’t perfect, either – we felt sometimes things should’ve moved differently, that our jumps didn’t land right, or that our poulp flung out at odd angles. It doesn’t put a massive downer on the fun, though.

We’ve mentioned Adventure Time’s style, but of course that in itself borrows from children’s cartoons – pale colours, simple lines, cute otherworldly characters. There’s a sleep theme throughout: each realm’s entrance is surrounded by cushions, you restore hearts in a hammock, and the backdrop has a stitched appearance. It complements the dream-like atmosphere. Likewise, the music accompanies the environs. We mean that in two ways, as the tunes — as you'd expect — always suit the turf: xylophones for beach scenes, heavy drums for the jungle, festive-sounding jingles for the snow.