Grapple Dog: sometimes less is more
There’s an Eddie Izzard bit I’ve been very fond of ever since I first heard it back in 1996, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it any time Grapple Dog paused its action for another unskippable dialogue sequence. In it, Izzard interrogates the well-known truism “he doesn’t suffer fools gladly”.
“Who does suffer fools gladly?” she says. “Who can you go up to and go ‘hello, I’ve got a pig in me trousers, whoo-whoo!’ and they go ‘come in! Come in, you fool!” No-one, obviously. No-one. And yet, frequently, Grapple Dog feels like it wants to be that fool — that particular breed of self-consciously wacky, “lol so random”, Rachel-from-Accounts, “oh no, am I not supposed to put my hand in the toaster?” sort of humour pervades all of the narrative content in the game, and it is, at this point, after myriad other western-developed post-irony attempts at overly forced humour, kind of exhausting to endure.
I mention this up front purely because Grapple Dog is actually a very good game — but I can’t help but feel it would have been even better if it had stripped out all of its dialogue altogether and simply committed to being a classic, mute Mario or (16-bit) Sonic-style platformer in which the game itself was the star.
Grapple Dog is certainly good enough to be the star without any embellishment — and thus its often rather intrusive attempts to hammer the player over the head with what a “good personality” it has tend to end up having the opposite effect. They bring the action to a grinding halt, don’t really add anything meaningful to the experience, make several of the characters (particularly the protagonist) actively dislikeable and, as previously noted, cannot be skipped.
But I appreciate that is almost certainly a matter of taste rather than a universal criticism, which is why I wanted to get it out of the way first — that and the fact that, for the most part, once you’ve endured the introductory sequence to Grapple Dog, you can focus much more on the game itself. And that’s where things get really good.
In Grapple Dog, you take on the role of Pablo, an irritatingly stupid dog who inadvertently unleashes an evil robot called Nul onto the world, and thus kicks off a race to rediscover all the lost artifacts of The Great Inventor. Unfolding across 33 levels divided into six worlds, your job is simply to make your way from the start to the finish of each stage — ideally collecting five purple gems and as much fruit as possible as you proceed.
Gems are required in increasingly large quantities to unlock certain stages; fruit allows you the opportunity to earn up to two extra gems per stage according to how much you successfully gather. There are also sometimes bonus coins to find, which unlock challenging bonuses stages that, if completed, award you with three more gems.
The twist on the usual platforming formula is that Pablo is not, by himself, super-agile. He doesn’t run that fast and his jump isn’t that high, so you need to make good use of the environment in order to get around. Narrow vertical passages allow you to wall jump up them; anything blue can be grappled onto with the grappling hook Pablo finds in the introduction; anything green does something if you do a ground pound into it.
The game does an excellent job of gradually introducing these concepts to you completely wordlessly and without patronising tutorials. Developer Joseph Gribbin has clearly studied the way Nintendo does things with its Mario games in particular: Grapple Dog demonstrates a clear understanding of how to structure a level in such a way that new concepts are introduced in a safe place to experiment, before challenging the player to make practical use of them in a more dangerous context. It works extremely well, and certainly early in the game, new game elements are introduced with practically every level, keeping things fresh and interesting.
Grapple Dog starts very easy — and can optionally be made even easier for those who want or need a stress-free experience with an admirable array of accessibility options — but the difficulty ramps up at a good pace, presenting more and more elaborate platforming challenges with each passing level. Before you’ve cleared the first world, you’ll be pulling off exciting, dramatic chains of grapples, swings and flying leaps across dangerous territory — and thanks to the game’s responsive controls and overall fluidity, you’ll feel in complete control of the action while doing so.
Moreover, Grapple Dog’s secrets and optional objectives are often hidden in relatively plain sight if you know what to look for — the challenge then becomes figuring out how you can make use of the mechanics the game has taught you in order to reach them. There’s never a feeling that you need to quasi-glitch your way to an optional objective as in some other games; instead, here, there’s always a logical, achievable solution to every problem — it might just take a bit of keen observation, practice, timing and sensible position to pull off the plan perfectly.
Grapple Dog’s presentation is very good, adopting a modern pixel art aesthetic that isn’t specifically trying to channel a “retro” feel; rather, it’s simply making use of pixel art as an aesthetic choice. Backgrounds feature vibrant colours and foregrounds present clear level elements — though it might have perhaps been nice to see a bit more variation in the block types that make up the overall level scenery as the game progresses. That said, the actual layout of the levels is consistently interesting and well thought out, with plenty of variation in how you get around — so that’s a minor nitpick at best.
Soundtrack-wise, the game features an excellent selection of music from Jazz Mickle, featuring distinct (and unashamed, judging by the OST’s cover art) inspiration drawn from Hideki Naganuma’s work on the Jet Set Radio series. My only quibble with the music is that the fact individual stages are quite long (with plenty of checkpoints, don’t worry) means you’ll be hearing each track looping a lot of times.
To compound this, every stage in each world features the same song, making it distinctly likely you’ll be quite tired of each track by the time you’re done with each world. A more Mario-esque approach, where you rarely hear the same track twice in a row, would perhaps have worked better for my own personal preferences — but again, your mileage may vary on that front; make no mistake, the tracks themselves are excellent in isolation, I just didn’t need to hear them repeated quite so many times before I could finally leave them behind.
Also, while I’m nitpicking, it would be nice if it was possible to skip the four unnecessarily lengthy splash screens that appear before Grapple Dog loads, not during — and if it followed the conventions of every other Switch game by putting “Confirm” on A, not B. But these really are the most minor of minor complaints.
To sum it up then, Grapple Dog is a great game, albeit one with more than a few elements which give me a certain amount of pause in recommending it unreservedly. For some, these issues won’t matter at all — in which case I encourage you to pick Grapple Dog up right away. For others, though, you’ll need to weigh up whether the promise of an extremely solidly designed platformer is enough to make up for a few potentially significant annoyances along the way.
Either way, I think we can safely say that Grapple Dog is a great start to Super Rare Games’ new Super Rare Originals publishing initiative — and if this is the standard of games we can expect from the label, fans of creative indie games will absolutely want to keep an eye on future releases.
Grapple Dog is available from February 10, 2022 for Nintendo Switch and PC via Steam. Thanks to Ryan at Super Rare for the review copy!
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