Job the Leprechaun

Job the Leprechaun takes me back. It’s exactly the type of small, unassuming game I used to crank out four or five reviews a week for back when I launched Indie Gamer Chick in 2011. A quick, forty-level platformer that isn’t quite retro-authentic, but close enough to be titillating. Not that I have high expectations for such games. I always try to keep that shit in check. But stuff like Job catches my attention on marketplace pages. That doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll actually play the game. It turns out I bought Job the Leprechaun on Steam way back in 2015 and just never got around to playing it. In a completely unrelated story, I have limited-edition candy bars as old as this blog in my desk drawer that I swear I bought with the intent of eating, but I wouldn’t now because they’re old and moldy.

Oh shit, segue into what’s happening recently on Switch..

You can see why I’d want to at least play Job. It has a very old school, single-roomed NES quality about it. I didn’t even grow up in that era, but I have more faith in indies based on those for absolutely no reason. It’s so weird.

Nintendo’s latest console has recently become a dumping ground for significantly older indies that never found their audience originally. Now, I’m all about helping smaller games find their audience. It’s why I created #IndieSelect. But the issue is there’s now so many new games hitting the Switch every day that it’s getting tougher to stand out in the increasingly crowded field. There’s a gold rush feel to the whole thing, and I get it. No console’s primary marketplace has been more accessible to developers as Switch is now. And no console has been this popular or had this enthusiastic of digital buyers in the modern indie game era as the Switch currently has. Devs are bringing their full catalogs to Switch because it just seems like they have a better chance to finally make it.

And they probably do. Let me make that clear.

But, maybe, just maybe, developers should refine their older libraries before these re-releases.

Job the Leprechaun is a good example of this. It’s pretty much a direct port of the Steam game from what I can tell. That would have been fine if the PC version from four years ago was so good that there wasn’t much to improve. But that’s not the case at all. Job is extraordinary in its blandness. It’s not horrible by any stretch. You hop around, smacking baddies with your hat while trying to collect all the shamrocks in a level to open up an exit. It’s a simple, beginner’s type of indie that is both uninspired and inoffensive. There’s forty levels that you can probably knock-out in an hour, give or take.

But, here’s the thing: Job the Leprechaun has a lot of stuff wrong with it. The controls are too loose. Levels that require you to transition from ladders to platforms are frustrating because I was constantly slipping off the ladders. Job’s stages have a tight time limit, sometimes without items that give you extra seconds, and fumbling with the ladders more than once are likely to leave you losing a life by running out of time. In fact, as far as I can remember I’ve never played a platformer that I died more as a result of timing-out. Well, except Plug Me, which is designed specifically around that. There’s jumping “puzzles” and the margin of error allowed by the timer is so thin that it’s almost unfair. There’s also limited lives and limited continues. Use up all your continues and you get to start all the way back at level 1-1. Allow me to get Irish for a second: fuck that.

I made the text green. That’s Irish, right?

The problems with the timer are compounded by levels that force players to wait for things, like the moving platforms or an EXTREMELY slow-moving cow that you use like a trampoline. If you’re going to have such a short timer, it’s not exactly fair to include slow-moving gameplay necessities. It’s just not!

And that whole starting over shit sucks because you’re not 100% assured the lives you’ll lose will be your fault. Sometimes the game shits the bed and doesn’t work the way it was supposed to. I played one stage with an odd platform that seemed to vibrate. I didn’t get what was up with that, but I was able to beat the stage regardless of it. Later in the game, another vibrating platform showed up, and I realized what was going on: the game was glitching out and the platform, which is supposed to move left and right, had somehow gotten stuck and wasn’t moving. And this time, it did cost me a life because the stage was unbeatable as a result. This combines with weird collision detection (the hat weapon felt flimsy and unreliable, to the point that I wanted to avoid directly confronting enemies if possible) and floaty jumping controls to make me really dislike Job. Playing it felt akin to being Job. In the biblical sense.

And this is what developers really need to avoid when porting your older games to Switch. I’m not singling out developer Herrero Games, who seems like a nice dude. A lot of developers are porting their previous work to Switch with minimum effort or polish. But in the case of Job, the game is four-years-old, and according to user reviews on Steam, a lot of the stuff I’ve been bringing up is stuff that’s been troubling the game all along. So why not put more development time before bringing it out for the most hungry, rabid, word-of-mouth spreading user base indies have seen on consoles? It’s not like we’re talking about an all-time classic that has to be ported exactly as it was before. You know, “for the fans.” As of this writing, it’s only had 32 user-reviews on Steam. In four years. There’s no valid reason to not give it a few months of extra development time and polish. Even if you’re only able to eliminate a couple of the issues, it allows you to say “I’ve grown as a developer, check out the progress I’ve made.” Especially when there is a good game in here somewhere.

Challenge yourselves, Switch developers. Because there is an audience waiting for you. But you do have to earn them. And if your games didn’t find an audience the first time around, take a long, hard look at your work and ask “what can I do to make this better for my customers?” Maybe you’re the victim or bad luck or rotten timing. It happens. Just ask Beyond Good & Evil. But maybe your work was just flawed enough to prevent it from getting that all-important word-of-mouth. Just because it didn’t happen before doesn’t mean it won’t happen now. But make sure when that game hits the market that it’s the best it can be. If you don’t, it’s unlikely you’ll find that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Job the Leprechaun was developed by Herrero Games
Point of Sale: Nintendo Switch, Steam

$2.99 wants to get me Lucky Charms in the making of this review.

In fairness, Job the Leprechaun was also on Wii U. So basically this is its console debut 😛

Seriously Herrero Games: make a sequel, right every wrong, and make me eat crow. I believe in you.