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The platformer is one of the fundamentals of gaming, right up there with shooting and playing tennis. However, Assoupi and The Arcade Crew’s MainFrames is a colorful, “retro” PC aesthetic-inspired platformer where you play as Floppy, a “rogue” adventurous program controlled by you on a PC network as they explore “the digital world.”

Floppy is a program without a function, so to speak. Along the way, Floppy will explore the network to discover its purpose while collecting and saving as many Daemons as possible. Sounds simple, right? Well, MainFrames, despite looking charming and delightful, is a tricky little puzzle platformer with some extra ideas to sometimes break your brain.

With only movement left, right, down, and up with a jump and a spin before a double jump, MainFrames offers some tricky and sometimes slightly frustrating precision platforming challenges. Though much like the precision platforming darling Celeste, the accessibility offers those with extra needs the ability to enjoy this delightful title, too. However, despite being so damn delightful and charming, there are things to be said about the experience that are a touch less savory.

Beyond simple jumping and avoiding perfectly placed hazards to make you scream at 3 AM while everyone else is sleeping, it uses the PC-based setting to its advantage. It is also similar to two titles in different ways. Skookum Arts’ The Pedestrian had you jumping from sign to sign, while Polytron Corporation’s Fez used 3D structures in a 2D world to break you. MainFrames uses windows that you can sometimes move, sometimes will move due to character movement, and several other “I feel like I’ve just smashed my skull off of a wall” scenarios.

From beautiful, charming little pixel-art characters to the entire aesthetic, MainFrames is more than just its inviting look. However, as you get through each computer, which acts like the typical worlds of platformers, you get progressively harder challenges to face. Not just hard-to-reach places, which can be reached by selecting some windows with platforms on them and dragging them across the screen. Later on, you’re playing with gravity, jumping off of jump-pad icons, and changing the direction of others, all while collecting the adorable little Daemons that are scattered throughout the network.

Though for all the charm that comes from its delightful characters and pitch-perfect soundtrack for what MainFrames is, I think I ran into a bug. Not one of those weird meta ones, either. Failure is part of a precision platformer, and of course that means being reset back to the start of a level within the world (the individual PC in this case) which is admittedly quick, sometimes. On occasion, while playing with a controller (PlayStation 5 DualSense), Floppy would be reset but wouldn’t actually move. The animation of movement would happen on the spot, but the delightful little fella wouldn’t move or jump.

It is a simple fix of escaping to the main menu and returning, but it is no less annoying to happen several times throughout a playthrough. Be it getting into a rhythm of jumping through levels and taking what I think were shortcuts through certain worlds to just enjoying the fact I was banging my face off the precision-platforming wall, it was frustrating to have that flow disrupted semi-regularly.

Storywise, I can’t say there is too much to write home about, with a short run time and the fact that it doesn’t grab you with out-of-this-world writing. Certain things could grab you, given they are repeated, such as the coffee machine that makes coffee or the penguin that looks familiar to a certain open-source Unix-like operating system. Beyond the occasional pun, the story acts more as fodder for the gameplay and aesthetic than a story itself that needed to be told. Not that this is a bad thing, but worth mentioning.

Ultimately, the aesthetics and puzzles of MainFrames prove to be a delightful charm for a precision-platformer that doesn’t outstay its welcome. Some puzzles are frustrating and make you want to scream at someone, but with quick resets, the comparison to Celeste is easy. Unique, charming, and sometimes frustrating, Floppy’s adventure is one worth the 3-hour runtime. Be it pixel-perfect platforming, trying to break the puzzle by going over it rather than through it, or otherwise, nothing is really left on the table once MainFrames is completed, and that’s a good thing.

A PC review copy of MainFrames was provided by The Arcade Crew for this review.

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MainFrames

$12.99

7.5

Score

7.5/10

Pros

• Beautiful, captivating aesthetic.
• Fun yet challenging precision-platforming.
• Accessibility.

Cons

• The story is sort of just there.