When it comes to tough-as-nails platformers, the past generation had a number of notable titles that pushed players to execute at a higher-than-normal level and did it well. Most notable among the bunch were two games that were wildly different from one another, Celeste and Super Meat Boy, but the thing they had in common were tight and precise controls to match each game’s difficulty level. While others have dipped their toes into this arena, most have struggled, whether with ensuring the controls are without flaws, or in featuring great stage design that generally managed to avoid using cheap traps to slow people down. Now, on the tail of the Switch generation, and at the beginning of the one for the Switch 2, we have Through the Nightmares, which obviously aspires to that level but comes up a bit short in the process.

To the game’s credit, its primary mechanic that’s featured pretty well throughout, allows you to control your character shrinking and then growing again. There’s no question that this immediately gives every challenge a unique sort of feel, and the nuance of when and how to grow or shrink continues to need some refinements as you encounter new scenarios. To start it’s quite simple, just requiring that you use it to get into small areas, but quickly enough you’ll need to be fully in control of the timing behind it. Whether you’re needing to grow right before you jump, in order to ensure you’ll get enough distance, or to shrink yourself to keep branches or other structures from bending or breaking, you’ll need to constantly pay careful attention to it, and that does help to clearly set the game apart from its competition.

The problem is that there are certain situations where the game lets itself down, with sections where the challenge lies less with precision execution on the part of the player, and more with visual ambiguities in the environment, or just plain sloppy execution that can be infuriating at times. Falling into the trap of featuring what can feel like cheap traps, there are simply some areas where the lighting level is too low, or elements in the environment are partially obscured, making it hard to see holes or other hazards. With trial and error you can work these out, but they’re still a needless problem. More serious are sections like one where you’re falling through caverns while trying to avoid a flailing troll, where the combination of slow movement, some visual sloppiness concerning the troll and its limbs, and an overly long stretch without saves simply ends up feeling punishing. If your movements were more crisp, or it was easier to see why you died a portion of the time rather than being left wondering, this could have been very different, but as implemented it’s a great example of where the game’s design falls down quite a bit.

Taking all of this into account, Through the Nightmares is a pretty steep challenge that earns some credit for doing things its own way in many cases. The fact that it doesn’t simply feel like another game trying to crib off of the success of a known property isn’t something you see very often, so when it happens that deserves some praise, for sure. That said, even for people who love a challenge, there are aspects of the controls and visuals where the game lets you down and expects you to simply muscle through for the sake of saying you did it. That doesn’t make for the best overall sell, but if you don’t mind wanting to throw your controller around the room periodically, it may be a game worth checking out.