Super Magnetic Neo

It’s a Crash-like with a twist: you can emanate a magnetic field for either polarity, north or south. Magnetized items (with color-coded polarity for your convenience) will respond appropriately, where if you use the opposite polarity, you’ll be pulled towards the object, and if you use the same polarity, you’ll be pushed away. In practice the implementation is rather ticky-tacky, with the actual interactable set being primarily jump pads and swings/ziplines. Not necessarily a compelling hook on its own, and indeed, the game on first pass lacks the elements that might put a game over the top. Dig in past the sparse toolkit and punitive level design, however, and you’ll find a game that never seems to repeat an idea twice while layering opportunities for advanced momentum transfer throughout.

Across sixteen levels the game flips the script at virtually every checkpoint, putting fresh spins on earlier ideas or introducing completely bespoke setpieces and puzzles. In the last level alone, the game introduces:

• Stomping hydraulic presses with temporary platforms and magnetized swings in between.
• A curved rainbow slope leading down to a bottomless pit, with magnetic traversal options directly over the pit.
• Piston platforms raising and lowering from an electric pit on a cycle. The first alternates, and the second is synchronized, with parallel bounce pads to suspend yourself between when the platforms lower.
• Alternating lasers on either side of a bottomless pit, with bounce pads on the walls that fling you to the other side if you’re trying to avoid the laser firing under your feet.
• A series of different cycling platforms over lava with enemies you can throw to destroy doors.
• A race to exit a safe before platforms crumble in sequence, with swirling spotlights that trigger lasers on each line of blocks.

The lava room from 4-4, showing the first and second areas. These seemingly static platforms with green tops sink and raise when the player stands on them, potentially helping them reach enemies flying above. [src]

That’s one five minute level! It’s erratic and creative, switching tempo on the fly between fast-paced, timed platforming and slower throwable-enemy puzzle sections. There’s a Klonoa-esque flair to its puzzles, but where Klonoa would iterate on these to create conceptually driven levels, Magnetic Neo just tosses ideas off and frantically moves on.

Given the trial-and-error environment, a rigid movement system would make the memorization component all the more present.¹ However, the magnetic interactables have proper inertia that lets the player fly off each at variable speeds and angles. While areas with strict top/bottom layer constructions tend to make the top pure polarity memorization, the physics system gives the designers room to design more ambiguous geometry that lets the player change course depending how fast they’re moving coming into each area. In the two layer configuration, one can often seamlessly transition between them depending on how they conduct their movement, without one layer versus the other being explicitly “faster,” especially in cases where you can leverage enemies or other interactables in the bottom layer to skip magnetic interactables on the top layer. Considering the corridor-based level design, the open-ended nature of these setpieces bolsters the explorability of their mechanics and reduces the tedium of repetition.

4-3 juggles multiple concepts: these lasers on circular platforms that stagger and shift up and down, flames from the background, and an array of different floating, disappearing platforms. If you think it just iterates on that: it alternates these with inexplicable top-down miniboss encounters. [src]

In the speedrunning context, which gets pushed explicitly by the game in the form of time trials for each level, having routes based around maintaining momentum and skipping obstacles becomes imperative to avoid time loss. This becomes especially apparent with your main character’s fuel gauge, which drains when projecting your magnetic field and refills during normal movement. While almost invisible in casual, careful play, the mechanic is also tied directly to an additional run action, which shoots you off at a moment’s notice in exchange for steadily leaking fuel. Pumping the gas throughout levels and pacing your fuel usage helps avoid the lockout that comes when emptying your tank completely, and you’ll need to keep a little reserve around for your magnetic field. Jetting around seems like it would make the momentum conservation negligible, which it often is by practicality to avoid bonking yourself against literally any discontinuity in the environment and eating the time loss, but because of this resource connection, being able to avoid running due to good conservation builds opportunities to push the envelope in subsequent sections, looping the mechanics into one another.

Beyond the mechanics, the environments match the design techniques in their commitment to diversity, as demonstrated in level 2-3. It starts at the base of a pyramid, scaling and soaring through it as the player progresses on hieroglyphic-laden checkboard blocks suspended throughout. When finally they reach the stratosphere, having seen the peak of the pyramid cut away into a mere frame with a fire burning inside, the background transforms into an oasis above a bed of clouds, capping off the scene with the stark blue sky above. While simple, it matches the strengths of the Dreamcast nicely: flat lighting, clean and seamless characters, and bright colors.