Daniel Johnston Menezes
Game Developer, Font Designer & Green Activist
Maddening Euphoria | |
Genre | Platformer |
Series | Maddening |
Developer | Chequered Ink |
Release Date | 05/11/2017 |
Windows Opera GX Nintendo Switch |
Maddening Euphoria is a unique, challenging arcade game with randomly generated level design, in which you control brother and sister duet Mason and Millicent Zane as they flee from their own imagined realisation of their troubles in life – an inescapable wall of death – while avoiding bottomless pits, deadly spikes and speed-reducing pools of thick goo. Keep within spitting distance of the wall to receive a short, colourful Second Wind speed boost and gain the opportunity to be one eighth euphoric.
Not enough for you? Don your favourite fedora, go for eight pieces, and enter the multicoloured rainbow world of Euphoria where time goes even faster, spikes disappear and your survival speeds up dramatically. Or tackle some of the game’s 150+ challenges ranging anywhere from trivially easy to borderline unfathomable.
Meanwhile, choose from 36 game themes (or throw it on Shuffle), each with themed poetry telling tales of your demise with anywhere from innocent whimsy to incomparable filth, and ranging from surprisingly clever to embarrassingly hideous. If you’re English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, German, Spanish, Japanese, American, or from Bristol or Norwich like we are, I apologise profusely. Also have the game mock your failures in one of 51 ways of varying levels of Britishness. And all of this while other people’s highscores pop up and you wonder what some people do with their time.
This is the flashiest, fleshiest Maddening to date. It even has some diamondy bits. And you can turn those off if you’re only in it for the circles.
Just don’t buy it if you suffer from epilepsy. (Please.)