Gimmick! 2 expands and improves on the best possibilities of the original game. Now that it’s made its way to PlayStation 5, J.J. has a lot of great things to say about it.
I respect the original Gimmick! It came from a time where this sort of twitch platforming wasn’t really feasible so it felt really awkward, especially so playing the recent remaster on modern consoles with modern controllers. Gimmick! 2 isn’t a remake; in the 30+ years since the original there never was the chance to make a sequel until late last year when fans of that game, developers Bitwave, were able to finally publish their passion project.
Gimmick! is a very interesting game because it really wants you to speed run. That’s the whole goal of this: we are going to fail, that’s part of the deal. This new game takes what the devs loved about the original and brought it up to modern standards. They’ve fine-tuned the physics. Instead of the original’s single screen now we have more of a longer level to explore, with multiple screens and locations within it. They’ve added checkpoints to make the spans a little shorter because fail games require us to restart often, hoping that we’ve learned what we did wrong, so these align closer to the original’s single screens.
The game is all about momentum. Do not stop moving. Once we’re in action we have to understand the momentum of Gimmick!, of what the star does, of what things are doing around us, of how the enemies appear on the screen — how all of this stuff plays out. We need to master the point that we use our momentum to jump off of the hill, but we don’t want to overshoot things because the upcoming platform is going to be a tiny little square that we need to land on. Enemies are going to be in the way, so we may have to have a star loaded up that we can either use as a weapon or as a little platform that we can ride.
We have to just roll with the punches, and just cross our fingers and pray, for the most part.
It’s a very hard game, but It does have one of the coolest difficulty select screens I’ve ever seen. Do we want assist mode, which will help us with the platforming? Or do we want to play just standard Gimmick? And in order to select the standard Gimmick mode, you have to do Gimmick platforming to get to it on the screen. If we can’t do this little small little snippet of what it is to play Gimmick! to get to the mode then we have to go with the assist mode until we’re able to do what the main gameplay challenge is. It’s like the game is telling us, “You’re not ready for this yet. You don’t know how this game plays. Play on assist mode for a little bit.” We can change the difficulty at any time, but for new players this is a neat way to onboard.
Gimmick! 2 is a great game. The soundtrack is great, the aesthetics are beautiful (it has a curvy looking feel to it), and it controls really well. I like this exponentially more than OG Gimmick! It’s hard, but that’s the point, and that’s what makes it well worth our time.
This review is based on a PlayStation PSN code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. Portions of the video originally appeared on The SideQuest LIVE for February 2, 2025. Images and video courtesy publisher/developer.
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