Pippa of Caerbannog

Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy spawned a whole small genre of deliberately, gleefully punishing platformers, and Pippa of Caerbannog is the latest to join it — swap the pot and hammer for Monty Python and the Holy Grail and a blade you swing to traverse ledges instead. The premise is short and the store page doesn't pretend otherwise: five levels, three difficulties labelled hard, harder and much harder, and a bluntly honest tagline promising you'll "enjoy losing all your progress, over and over again."

A review section that's mostly a bit

The game's own storefront assets are copyrighted to Phase Connect, the talent agency behind the VTuber the playable character is named after — which goes a long way toward explaining the tone of its review section. This isn't a mystery indie release building an audience from nothing; it's a fan community that already existed showing up in force for something built around a character they already follow.

Reading through this game's review sample is a genuinely different experience from most titles this library covers, and it's worth saying so directly rather than pretending otherwise. The overwhelming majority of its 38 reviews are memes, running jokes and community in-references — repeated strings of "PIPIPIPIPI," ASCII art, one-word entries, and a wave of jokes referencing Walmart that appear to be a specific community in-joke rather than commentary on the game itself. One review is simply the game's subtitle riffed into a Lord of the Rings joke; another reads only "pipples." That's not a criticism of the game — a small, enthusiastic, meme-fluent community forming around a free release fast is its own kind of success — but it does mean the 95% positive badge measures enthusiasm and community energy more than it measures a consensus about design.

A few reviews do say something real underneath the jokes, and they're worth reading closely because of how rare they are in this sample. One, written in a deliberately medieval-English style, still lands a specific point: "Pippa doth chiefly traverse the many lands by means of a double-edged blade. Yet the blade shall not easily catch upon the ends of platforms, and oftentimes shall instead carry its wielder into a crestfallen freefall... There remaineth a few oversights and crafts that is in need of mending." Stripped of the affectation, that's a specific mechanical complaint: the core traversal tool doesn't reliably do what it's supposed to.

The complaint that shows up twice

What makes that worth taking seriously rather than treating as one player's frustration is that this game's only detailed negative review — written independently, in Spanish, by a different player entirely — makes the identical point in plainer language: "this game is so incredibly hard in normal mode specially because the sword interactions with the objects, physics and its lagging on my rx7600... we gotta improve the sword collisions, jump and performance." Two reviewers, writing in completely different styles and languages, independently converging on the same specific mechanical issue is a real, if narrow, signal — especially in a game whose entire design premise already accepts brutal difficulty as the point. The distinction that matters here is between difficulty the game intends and inconsistency the game doesn't: a rage platformer living or dying on precise input timing needs its core interaction to behave predictably, even when it's punishing.

What else is worth knowing

A few smaller, practical details round out what this review sample offers. One reviewer confirms the game runs well on Steam Deck without any adjustment needed, a useful data point for anyone considering it on handheld hardware. No Steam achievements currently exist, and at least one reviewer specifically requests them. No news posts or patch notes are on file as of this review, so there's no visible evidence yet of either complaint above being addressed, though the game is only days old.

Final verdict

Pippa of Caerbannog delivers precisely the experience its own store page promises — a free, Monty Python-themed entry in the deliberately cruel platformer tradition, embraced fast and enthusiastically by a small, meme-fluent community. The headline score reflects that enthusiasm more than it reflects careful critique, and reading past the jokes surfaces a real, independently corroborated concern: the blade-swing traversal that the whole game is built around doesn't always catch reliably, which matters more here than it would in a gentler platformer.

Worth trying since it costs nothing and won't take long to find out if its specific brand of brutality is for you — just don't be surprised if some of the frustration comes from the mechanics rather than the level design.

Players who want that same sense of hard-won, deliberate progress without input reliability working against them, sustained across a much longer and more forgiving world, may also want to look at Wanderer.