Indie game studio Frying Jelly has announced that their debut game, , will hit PC and mobile later this year. Described as “fiendishly difficult”, 99 Fails is a precision platformer where players will have to traverse through🦄 increasi💮ngly difficult pillars. The studio claims that the game is hard, almost too hard, and anyone who plays it will inevitably fail, but they are quite certain people will still try.
Set in the recurring nightmare of p🐷rotagonist Zeebo, the game focuses on an in-game Dream Journal that players need to travel through to find the source of Zeebo’s nightmares. There are 11 dream layers within the journal and each layer has 9 dream iterations for a total of 99 levels that get increasingly 𝓀more difficult. For each layer, Zeebo is morphed and the way he is controlled by the player changes, making each level different and more difficult to master. For example, some levels will give Zeebo springs for legs, making him more bouncy and harder to balance on the pillars, while others will make his legs extremely long, making balance harder to control.
While travelling through the levels, players will perform dream analysis within a unique game-long puzzle mechanic that aims to find the source of Zeebo’s nightmares. While this all sounds like a cute and fun romp through a dreamscape, that is all a lie. The further into the dreams that Zeebo ♋goes, the more bizarre and surreal the events and creations he will encounter becomes. These include transforming fairies, giants that manipulate the pillars, and much more. In fact, the game is so bizarre that the studio jokingly refuses to dispel the rumors that psychedelics were used during its development.
The game also features three modes for each level: the basic 99 pillars, 666 pillars for those who want to be more 🎉challenged, and the insanely difficult endless pillar mode for masochists. Each of the levels are proc🌌edurally generated with dynamic rules to make no playthrough the same, no matter how many times you must play a level. Plus, every time a player fails a level, Zeebo will fall from the pillars into a purgatory below. Here, you will encounter roaming Zeebo ghosts and the more often the player dies, the more ghosts will be waiting in the purgatory below.
If you think you have what it takes to get Zeebo to the source of his nightmares, then 99 Fails is definitely for you. Just be warned, while the studio claims the game is so easy your grandparents can do it, nobody can fully master the pillars in Zeebo’s dreams. 99 Fails is expected for PC, Android, and iOS in Q4 of 2021.