‘Penny’s Big Breakaway’ is a throwback to 3D platformers with rose-tinted glasses

Penny’s Big Breakaway is a disappointing nod to better games of yesteryear.

March 5, 2024

When it was first teased in a Nintendo Direct last June, Penny’s Big Breakaway made a stunning first impression. While the characters were wacky and the world vibrant, it was Penny and her stylish yo-yo tricks that stole the show. Penny used her yo-yo to swing between platforms and slide down ziplines and at one point the toy even turned into a vehicle of sorts allowing Penny to scale walls.

Fast-forward to the Nintendo Direct from just last month. Penny and her yo-yo appeared once again, only to reveal that the game would be coming out that day. I was hyped. 3D platformers are some of my favorite games and to play a new one right now from the esteemed developers of Sonic Mania sounded like a dream.

Penny starts off on the right foot with a cute cutscene introducing you to the hero and the forgettable central conflict. Platformers aren’t known for their storytelling prowess, but it involves Penny humiliating the King in front of everyone and subsequently being treated as a fugitive. It’s silly.

The first level is a classic controlled playground, allowing you to get used to the yo-yos suite of abilities before letting you loose onto the more challenging acrobatic feats. As I started to dive into the first world’s stages, it slowly dawned on me that perhaps Penny’s Big Breakaway is a throwback platformer in all the wrong ways.

You may not be able to tell from the trailers, but Penny has a fixed camera. You can move it a smidge, and zoom in and out, a la Super Mario 64, but you have no real control over it. This led me to tons of missed jumps due to a serious lack of depth perception. On one level, I fell into an unseen pit that was nested behind the foreground and the platform I intended to land on.

'Penny's Big Breakaway' is a throwback to 3D platformers with rose-tinted glasses

The levels are at least really nice to look. Penny’s Big Breakaway‘s visual style and color palette evoke a 90s Nickelodeon cartoon. Levels are littered with NPCs that either give some flavor to the story or offer side objectives. There are also three hidden collectibles on each level. Doing everything in a level gives you a high score and some gorgeous bonus artwork as a reward.

Unfortunately, doing everything in a level is a chore. Penny’s Big Breakaway absolutely sings when you’re hauling ass through a level, chaining together the different traversal mechanics into a satisfying combo that keeps your momentum going. To do some of the side activities, you are forced to slow down and make your jumps and swings more precise. To put it bluntly, it feels terrible. When Penny’s momentum is broken, she feels like she’s walking in quicksand.

For a good chunk of the game’s 8-hour runtime, I disregarded the side objectives. Instead, I used Penny’s abilities to zip and fly through levels, which I found to be satisfying, but not entirely thrilling.

'Penny's Big Breakaway' is a throwback to 3D platformers with rose-tinted glasses — Penny can use her yo-yo to swing herself like a pendulum.

Penny also has some fun power-ups. One turns the yo-yo into a wrecking ball of sorts, and another turns it into a propeller pushing you up into the sky. The power-ups are on timers; you’re not free to hold onto them or save one for later. They are only doled out at specific points in specific levels.

Similar to the static nature of the power-ups, most enemies are locked to specific segments of levels. The main antagonists throughout the game are an army of penguins that you don’t fight as much as you try to just avoid. If the penguins get near you, they will dogpile you, effectively killing any momentum. And if you get five penguins on you at once, you’re captured and have to start at the checkpoint. There can be dozens of penguins chasing you at once, creating an honest-to-God clusterfuck if you don’t manage them. It’s certainly a unique approach to combat for a platformer, but I’d prefer to just jump on their heads.

One mechanic straight-up did not work for me. Maybe it was a skill issue, maybe it was a bug, but, either way, it made the game a bad time for me. In many Mario games, our lovable plumber jumps on flagpoles, can swing from a trapeze, and generally performs incredible acrobatics. In the Sonic games, the Blue Blur runs at blazing speeds and can lock-on to specific enemies to zip at them. Penny’s Big Breakaway attempts to combine these mechanics into one, in theory letting you use your yo-yo to move quickly through platforming segments and keep your momentum.

However, I’d say 80% of the time when I saw the lock-on icon I’d press the lock-on button, Penny would do something else entirely. Multiple times when I tried to have her lock onto a zipline, Penny would attach and then quickly detach, throwing herself directly into a pit. This is my experience with Penny’s Big Breakaway in microcosm. I recognize the purpose of a mechanic, I recognize the inspiration and the desire to progress the platforming genre forward. But I also feel the game is at odds with its own designs.

It’s a beautifully art-directed 3D world, but you can’t control the camera to look around it. The power-ups add satisfying new abilities to Penny’s arsenal, but only here and only for a limited time. Use the traversal mechanics to blast through levels, but crawl at a snail’s pace to pick up collectibles. Everything in the game is working against itself.

Ultimately, Penny’s Big Breakaway is a disappointing throwback platformer from some truly inspired artists.