4.5/5 ★ – ItsATM's review of Pepper Grinder.

From the moment Pepper Grinder was first revealed, I knew that we were in for a remarkable, unforgettable 2D experience. Developed by a small independent team based out of Oregon, Ahr Ech brings a unique approach to the platforming genre, resulting in one of the strongest indies thus far in 2024. Pepper Grinder has been a passion project for the last seven years, and was first revealed by Devolver Digital on November 9th, 2022. Fast forward to February of 2024, where they made another appearance by dropping a demo through Steam, followed by a release date reveal from Nintendo later in the month. At this point, having seen the years of development and now experiencing the demo firsthand, I was more than sold. Ahr Ech has brought the soul of classic platformers combined with an aesthetically pleasing pixel art design, topped off with exceptionally polished gameplay. Pepper Grinder plays and controls as smoothly as it looks. Another notable aspect of Pepper Grinder is the incredibly strong level design aspect, as each stage also contains five collectibles in the form of golden skull coins. These are acquired in various ways such as digging through a suspicious looking crack in the wall, grappling up to an unseen section of land, or interacting with the environment in unique ways that I don’t want to spoil for you here. In conclusion, Pepper Grinder effectively improves on the already strong platforming genre, taking its primary focus away from the actual platforms and placing it on the environments around you instead. I played through the demo twice on Switch, half of the full game on Steam Deck, and the other half on MacBook with a DualSense controller connected. All versions of Pepper Grinder performed at the same high quality across the board, so you can trust that your preferred platform will give you the optimal experience. $15 also feels like a fantastic price point for this title. You should be able to finish the main game in 5 hours or less and also reach 100% completion in less than 10 hours.