Fowl Damage Preview: Simple, Punishing, Brilliant, Scrambled?

May Gardens and Red Nexus Games Inc.'s innovative platformer, Fowl Damage, revolves around a unique concept: your main character is an egg, making each jump a potential death sentence. Your mission is to explore, collect, survive, and reach the next warp zone, which leads to a stage that's not precisely egg-friendly. The game's essence lies not in dying but learning; a simple and brilliant concept with the challenge of simultaneously platforming and puzzle-solving.

At first glance, Fowl Damage won't wow you. It shouldn't. In truth, it features a very simplistic pixel art style, a lot of purple, and a piano riff that gets old quickly. However, that's the point. With how many times one is destined to die playing Fowl Damage, that piano will become your least favorite constant.

After you peel back a few layers of Fowl Damage or crack the title's shell a bit, you quickly find a sound platformer. Yet, the more you play, the more you realize there's momentum control, collecting, exploring whether it invites it or not, puzzle-solving, and even boss fights or runs.

While exploring is vital to the game, it's not very inviting to the player. Considering the game is simple to play but challenging to master, a decent chunk of one's playtime will be spent simply surviving rather than exploring. That, coupled with no map and no ability to scroll the camera, enables you to see if the stages continue, rendering the player a little cornered in terms of what Fowl Damage can offer. Once you get a hold of the momentum and movement, exploring can prove fulfilling, but it takes a bit to understand the game's language.

Regardless of how long it takes you to learn the game's rules and traversal, the game does assist you. This is done through the lack of any meaningful death penalty, has good checkpoints, a quick respawn, and utilizes good audio cues in boss fights. Dying and trying again quickly so you can learn is the point; it successfully teaches you that organically.

With the added layer of collecting feathers and even adding in boss levels, Fowl Damage's simple look quickly becomes a hellscape with stressful encounters around every encounter. If you want to master each stage, collect all the feathers, and conquer the boss levels, you must bring your bravery. Needing to survive the harsh reality of gravity, all while figuring out the stage, exploring to find feathers, and avoiding the robotic worm boss, all simultaneously can prove a challenging puzzle worth mastering.

I'm filled with anticipation for the full release of Fowl Damage. The game's clever design and hidden complexities have left me genuinely intrigued. Despite the initial challenge of exploration, Fowl Damage is an impressive game that promises a unique and engaging experience. I'm eager to see how the developers will continue to innovate and keep us on our toes, even if it means scrambling that poor little egg.

Preview by Austin Ernst