Playing 1001 Spikes feels like trying to follow Dune’s Golden Path: On every side lies disaster and death, and only by perfectly navigating every single decision in front of you can you possibly emerge victorious. Jump too early and you’ll catch an arrow in the eye. Hesitate a microsecond too long in the wrong place and a spike trap will turn you into a raw mess of a shish-kabob. But if you can find the exact rhythm required, you’ll soar through each level in less than a minute, brushing shoulders with death every few seconds.
You take control of Aban Hawkins as he battles his way through the lost ruins of Ukampa, and eventually Antarctica. His father, Jim Hawkins, earned his fortune through adventuring and insists that his son does the same, leaving Aban no part of his estate or inheritance. When Jim goes missing, and is presumed dead, Aban decides to try and find the legendary treasures of the ruins, both to spite his father and prove himself to the old man. The story unfolds through artfully composed graphic stills in between gameplay sections. While it takes a backseat to the gameplay and is barely integrated with, it still serves as a nice bit of contextualisation for why you’re risking life and limb over some stupid treasure.
Each level sees you platforming through a short maze of varied death, getting a key, and making a hasty exit. Most of these levels are only 30-60 seconds long, but successfully getting through them will take much, much longer. Aban is equipped with throwing daggers, but is otherwise unable to do much more than run, duck and jump. He’s a fragile hero, dying in a single hit to anything that threatens him.
This is a game of absolute precision. There isn’t any crazy momentum from sailing through the air at breakneck speeds like in Celeste. There aren’t any complicated triple jump or air twirling manoeuvre to pull off like in Mario. Instead you get a simple and tight control scheme that excels at giving you agency over where you want to go. Nowhere is this more apparent than in 8bits Fanatics' decision to include both a low and high jump, rather than having a variable jump assigned to a single button. The focus of the challenge is on nailing the correct timings, not on entering complicated button inputs and crazy gimmicks.
And let me tell you - this game is hard as nails. On the more challenging levels I easily died upwards of 50 times, and even the relatively easy ones casually consumed 20-30 lives. When you first start playing it isn’t immediately obvious just how difficult 1001 Spikes is going to be. It all seems relatively innocuous at first - don’t jump on the spikes, push some blocks about, and avoid the dart traps. But before too long, it starts to reveal its true colours, and you start to question whether you’re ever going to beat certain levels.
Correctly timing jumps is one thing, but it's the layers of deception and trickery on top that push it over the edge. There are seemingly safe spots to rest after difficult platforming sections that are secretly harbouring spikes if you stop for even a microsecond. The game also constantly delights in subverting your expectations - you’ll dodge 2 blocks falling from the ceiling only for the third to hover there defiantly. Meanwhile, the ice block that you were meant to catch as a ride has slid into the abyss. It leads to a trial and error style approach, where failures must be remembered and learned from lest you fall into the same trap twice.
Getting through each level in 1001 Spikes is about coming up with robust strategies to successfully survive each section. You memorise the correct timing to enter a gauntlet, figure out when you should jump to avoid the dart, remember to wait a second to avoid the roof spikes and immediately jump on the disintegrating block so you don’t get trapped. You can’t just react to visual stimuli, or play in a mindful way and rely on muscle memory - you have to know with certainty how to beat the level from start to finish.
I understand that this description may sound utterly unappealing. Gameplay through trial and error sounds almost dirty, and often is, with Super Mario Maker’s ‘troll’ levels being the biggest offenders. But one notable stage aside (10-3, Concordia), the potentially repetitive grind is saved by the difficulty of execution. It's not enough to know where a trap is - you have to consistently deal with it, and you have to do so for every single obstacle in front of you. Otherwise you’re going to die 8 different ways just trying to reach where you got to last. And even with a working plan, you’ll still repeatedly die to early obstacles without discipline.
What makes 1001 Spikes truly stand out from amongst its peers, however, is the way in which it continually escalates just how close to danger you are. One of the tools at your disposal are throwing knives, mainly used to kill enemies in the earlier stages. But they can also be used to destroy darts flying your way, once you get the timing down. In worlds 1 and 2, the game has you using boxes to block those dart traps, or jump over them in safe spaces. A short while later though and you’ll be running down narrow corridors, stopping at exactly the right time to throw a dart before moving a few more steps forwards.
You’ll similarly become increasingly intimate with the spikes that liberally litter every stage. It starts with the titular 3-1, which has you moving from safe spot to safe spot as hundreds of spikes briefly flash death before receding back into the ground. Eventually, you'll run out of safe spaces, and are forced to jump up in the air with every swish of spikes. It all culminates in my favourite stage, Beneath Vostok (9-5), a gauntlet with no safety and no brakes for its 40 second runtime. I accumulated 177 deaths on that level before I finally cracked it, and could claim victory with a triumphant shout.
I would be remiss not to mention the few missteps that stand out in a flood of brilliant design though. In a game that punishes you with death so frequently, the worst thing it can do is waste your time. Levels 4-3 and 4-5 feature extremely slow moving lifts that you have to impatiently wait for, before you promptly die and are forced to twiddle your thumbs once more. And 9-1 makes you methodically murder about 15 penguins in a laborious and time consuming way, with my successful run of that level clocking in at 2:40. I don’t care if a level kills me 100 times, just let me get stuck back into it immediately.
I also think that the very final boss stinks. The entire game you’re being taught to play with care, making and executing plans until you perfect them. Jutulstraumen feels like far more about converting a lucky run than mastering a boss fight start to finish. What you do to take out the weak spots just feels too disconnected from your actions, and the random debris killing you out of nowhere is a complete farce. It would be something else if it challenged you to act without thinking ala The Mountain King challenge in The Witness, but it's more random repetition until you strike success.
Luckily I could at least sit back and enjoy the brilliant music. Its 8 bit themes are beautifully composed, filled with an energy and tension that suits the game perfectly. The themes transition from a more reasonable pace to full blown hysteria whenever you pick up the key, reinforcing the pressure as you desperately dance through the level’s final hurdles. World 5’s theme, and particularly the boss of world 6 are a dropoff in quality, but Antarctica brings it back with banger after banger.
The visuals are inspired by 8bit NES titles like Spelunker, but with far more attention to detail to help set the Indiana Jones’ atmosphere. Every spike in the game is coated in the blood of other foolish adventurers, water runs down the walls and vines coat the cracked and decaying tiles that make up most of the level. In Antarctica small snowflakes lazily float down your screen, and everything has a blue or black sheen, making you feel cold just playing its levels. It all combines into a remarkably cosy aesthetic, even as you are violently torn to pieces the 50th time in a row.
While the main game’s 60 or so levels will take you a healthy 10-15 hours to complete, there’s also a wealth of bonus content if you want more. As you play, you can unlock bonus characters from other games like Curly Brace and Commander Video, which hilariously trivialise certain challenges. There’s also bonus arcade modes and extra standalone levels to plough through if you really crave more punishment after finishing the main story. To be honest, it's mostly fluff, but it's still something to mess around with if you’re so inclined.
1001 Spikes is a simple but brutally difficult platformer, refined in its elegant divide between death and safety. It will make you swear at your screen, jump in surprise, and yell at the top of your lungs as you finally see the silhouette of Aban Hawkins strolling through the exit door. It will trick you and trap you relentlessly, but is ultimately always fair. You will fail many times trying to dodge a single stupid trap, and you will have total ownership over every victory.
When you see at the start of the game that you have 1001 lives, don’t laugh. You might just need every single one.
