Among the subgenres and styles of games I’ve tended to dislike the most in my indie game adventures, while aggravation climbers aren’t my absolute least favorite to play, they’re typically in the running. If you’re unfamiliar with them, at their worst they’re designed with sub-par and potentially inconsistent controls in mind. You’ll typically be challenged to simply pick your angle and power and then hope that you’re able to land higher than you were. The classic feature of all of these titles though is an abundant number of opportunities to not just lose a modest amount of progress, but the potential to practically go back to the starting zone if you aren’t careful.

To its credit, I will say that Chicken Climber manages to try to moderate its annoying tendencies a bit better than most of its competition. There’s just something more fair about the stage layouts, a little more area to typically land in, and in general I’ve encountered far more irritating controls for you to work with. All that said, this is still a game whose core design involves being frustratingly hard, and there are still those spots where you’ll be either tempted or forced to gamble a fair chunk of your progress on getting the timing, angle, and power just right to get by a tough spot.

What’s better or worse, depending on your perspective, is that you’ll also have plenty of distractions along the way as you ascend to the heights. Coins will dot themselves along the way, tempting you to pursue them foolishly instead of progress, and while some aren’t too tough to get to, if you’re a completionist your restraint will be sorely tested as you struggle with passing tougher ones by. My biggest complaint is actually the size of some of these stages though, which makes them not just predictably tough to complete on a general level, you can also have them eating up more time than they’re worth, since the longer levels tend to drag on, naturally creating more opportunities to make a mistake. While I might argue this is the least annoying game of its kind that I’ve played, that’s still hardly high praise.