Sometimes, when I have the spare cash to just throw away, I'll spend $5 to $10 on Steam Wallet funds. With these funds I'll craft a badge by buying the cards I need to make one against those that have already dropped.

Aside from a useless wallpaper and emoticon, as I rarely chat on the service, it drops a coupon. If the game fits under the remaining funds, or is something I really wanted, I'll buy it.

This is basically the story of how I came across Peter Gutenko's "Prompt".

Prompt advertised itself as one of those 'brutally hard precision jumper platformers'. I've had several issues with these before as they tend not to train the player well enough and the difficulty comes from poor design more than an actual challenge.

Prompt however, does things correctly.

The tutorial levels teach you basic movement and jumping, before touching on double-jump techniques and various timing ideas. Double jumping has no hold-to-jump, and you always jump at the save velocity, this makes certain levels only passable by performing it at certain period of the first jump, rather than at the highest point.


And it deliberately leaves a few non obvious tricks with the notice that you can return at a later period. "Keys" in the levels are not required to exit, and when you complete a difficulty set you can return and see what levels you missed them in.

This is doing things right. Rather than forcing the player to get a MacGuffin to progress any further into the game, the game allows the player to have some degree of their own pace.

While you do need to complete a level to get to the next one, you don't need to be perfect.

For me it was a fall-slide-double_jump technique. Something I picked up a few levels later when the design of the screen had clearer indication that this was possible to do.

Sure. I died a few times. A few dozen times... But I learnt new ways to counter the game and could go back to previous levels and pick up a few keys I had missed.

I could also pass some levels faster, and without dying.

I'm including a drop in the difficulty curve in this as there is a little odd balance to them. Some levels teach you a few things to such an extent that you can fly from the next one or three by only looking at the screen for a second before you dash forward.

After this I found a layout that required me to take things slower. I'm not really twitchy when it comes to games, but was able to build up a rhythm in this one.

There's no huge spike in difference between levels. And with the respawn time being very very fast and each level only being a single screen most of the deaths I did have were from forgetting that I was holding down that 'run' key and stupidly ran into a death spike 30 times. Looking back on it, the challenge curve is very very nice.

Aside from the main level sets, there are some fun things to do.

There's the usual Time-Attack challenges which I still call bullshit on, but thankfully they are not impossible. And... Well, if you really want that achievement you can cheat for it.

Steam Workshop support is also available. It's really simple to mock up a basic resign, refine as you go and test out all areas of the map before submitting it to the workshop. Sadly there are only 28 levels there right now, but if this game had a large enough audience I can see a great community of challenges here. From the basic achievement-got design to the type of insanity that can only be completed by impossibly fast savants.

Around this time I found you could also change a lot of the graphical options. Scanlines, CRT refresh, colour, grime, and so on. If the appearance is too 'busy' it can be softened to the players liking. And with all these options, I feel there are some neat 'graphical options' based layouts you can choose from. If only more people were designing.

I really enjoyed playing "Prompt". It was far easier and responsive than I was expecting, there's a good amount of hidden stuff to figure out, and the sound design was well done.

If, like me, you have had issue with twitch platformers but still want to try one out, I recommend giving this one a shot.

Game Acquisition: Steam Coupon.
Platform Used: Steam
Tweet Threads: 1 - 9 October 2016
PC Used: Scorptec Venom 2009 MK2

OS: Windows XP or higher
Processor: 1 GHz
Memory: 1 GB RAM
Graphics: OpenGL 2.1
Storage: 200 MB available space