Another in a long line of homages to the classic, single screen platformers of the early 80s from indie publisher Flynn’s Arcade (spot the Tron reference there!), Freddy Farmer is out now for Nintendo Switch and for PC via Steam.

Poor Freddy’s daughter has been kidnapped by a dragon who lives at the top of an abandoned castle, and Freddy’s only hope of getting her back is by gathering the ingredients to make a magic potion (no, I’m not sure about the logic of that either!). However, the wizard assisting Freddy informs him that he needs to collect ingredients, which he drops into a cauldron on each level, in a specific order to succeed, adding a further layer of challenge to each level.

As mentioned in the opening paragraph, Freddy Farmer is a single screen platformer, and it feels somewhat like Burger Time, or perhaps more like the recent Donut Dodo. All Freddy can rely on is his ability to jump, and levels are filled with a wide variety of creatures of different shapes, sizes and behaviour.

With a game of this nature, you can often time your ascent or descent to certain platforms by stopping midway on a ladder, but there’s no such luxury in Freddy Farmer, which sends you to the top (or bottom) of a ladder once you’ve begun your movement on it; you’re unable to stop.

This makes an already massively challenging game even more so, with the random placement and order of the potion ingredients being another element that can prove frustrating (though you’re not required to complete the ingredient collection in order, it does help with your high score!).

There are points in each stage where you can essentially get trapped with no way of escaping, which is another point of frustration; in most games of this nature, even though the difficulty is dialled up to an extreme level, they usually play fair and you can put any failure down to your own impatience or ineptitude; that’s not always the case with Freddy Farmer, which can feel unfairly designed at times.

Still, it’s possible to select your set of levels to tackle at the outset, and you can approach each set of stages in any way you choose, which does help to alleviate the frustration at least a bit.

Mini games can also be unlocked; these offer a nice respite from the difficult platforming action which forms the basis of most of the game.

High score chasers are well served by the Flynn’s Arcade QR-code system here, which is a fantastic, clever way of handling global leaderboards.

If you’ve enjoyed the other single screen arcade homages from Flynn’s Arcade, you’ll probably enjoy Freddy Farmer too. However, despite some clever level design and a lovely audiovisual aesthetic, I have to say I’ve found it to be the weakest of them.

It’s just a little too frustrating, and even though there’s a lot of variety in the level designs, particularly between the different stages on the map, it simply doesn’t feel like it’s playing fair.

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