Here’s an amusing little platformer over on ItchIO called Eats Shoots and Leaves. The name is a parody of the famous writing device expressing how a simple lack of punctuation makes a sentence mean something completely different, especially phonetically. “Eats Chutes and Leaves” and “Eats, Shoots, and Leaves.” This game takes this idea and literally makes it the theme.
If you’ve never played an indie game like this, it’s not a broad blanket experience for the whole genre, but many of us who play these types of pixel art platformers love, love, love this genre. And I assure you I did.
The reason I mentioned JAM in the title is that that is what devs call group practice projects. Okay, overexplaining there, but I have no idea who reads this stuff sometimes and I don’t want them to be confused.
I’ll have a link to the game at the bottom, but the main thing you need to know is this is a free small game that would probably work on any computer.
Gameplay of Eats Shoots and Leaves
The game is about a panda, so this is most certainly true. In the game, you play a mama panda who needs to rescue her cubs from bad guy poachers wandering around the jungle.
Collect leaves, climb vines, and open cages. You can also, appropriately, shoot little missiles at enemy poachers. This game is simple but really well made and I really loved playing it. It also offers full controller support.
I don’t really know how the game dev wanted this game to turn out, but there are some key development bonuses that I see here. The controls are very simplistic, which is definitely a plus. Yet, it almost feels like maybe they weren’t for a long time until simplicity ruled the direction of it.
I know it’s kind of unnecessary to critique these things, but I know the developers and other people working on such things like to learn about them.
That’s It
And that’s it for my super chill free game review. I might cover more of these, or I might not, but they’re around.
Thanks a lot for reading Mr. Dave Pizza. I appreciate you reading my article and I hope you find more useful content on my website.
If you’d like to try it, you can find the game here: https://ghostiegames.itch.io/eats-shoots-and-leaves
