Plok

 I just played Plok.

This is a SNES game from 1993

I played it on the proper SNES. I bought the cartridge from CeX the other day.

This game has never been re-released on anything. It's been SNES exclusive since the day it came out.

I had seen this game mentioned before a few times here and there, but I had never actually seen much of what the game was actually like until I played it just now.

Plok is a platforming sidescroller starring a funny yellow and red cartoony character named Plok.

The graphics are quite cute in this game. It's very cartoony and colourful. The sense of humour is also pretty good - Plok himself is very irritable, and he always has something to complain about between each level.

Plok has the ability to throw his limbs forward - his two arms and his two legs. His limbs will boomerang back towards him and reattach themselves automatically. 

Plok throws his limbs primarily to attack enemies.

You can throw out all four of Plok's limbs rapidly, but then you'll be left hopping around on your torso, unable to walk normally until you get at least one leg back. 

Rapid attacks aren't too useful anyway, since enemies who take multiple hits to defeat have a moment of invulnerability in between hits. So don't spam the attack button! It rarely helps.

There are also certain switches that will require Plok to leave behind a limb to activate. Plok can then pick his limb back up from the corresponding coat hanger, which is usually nearby. There are several sections of the game where Plok has to leave behind a few limbs in order to activate a sequence of platforms. And if you don't come back for them, you'll kinda just have to play the rest of the level without arms. It's funny.

The character kind of reminds me of Rayman in some ways, though the limb-throwing system in Plok is actually a lot more meaningful than in Rayman.

Rayman is kind of just a regular platformer with animations that depict detached limbs, without it really meaning anything in the gameplay. Whereas Plok's main gameplay gimmick is the whole detached limbs system.

Plok has two jumps - a short jump, and a somersaulting high jump. The high jump doesn't allow you to throw limbs, which complicates matters a little - you need to make sure you're using the right jump if you also need to attack.

I think this system is decently unique and interesting enough for this game. They make good use of the high jump with the level design, as there are plenty of jumps that require the extra distance. 

There are two main types of level in Plok - regular levels where you just need to reach the end, and flea-hunting levels where you need to find and defeat every flea before going to the end. There are around twelve or so fleas to find each time.

Every once in a while during a flea level, an arrow will appear on screen pointing to the nearest flea to keep you on track. And additionally, you can collect little beehives that allow you to summon friendly hornets that will chase after enemies, including fleas. 

The flea levels tend to be more exploration-focused and open-ended, while the regular levels are linear.

The level design in Plok is.... honestly, a little hit-or-miss. Overall, I'd call it "...maybe not so great". I think the camera is just a little bit too zoomed-in, it's often difficult to see where the enemies and platforms are. They made the characters and background so big and detailed, which looks nice on-screen, but can be a bit of a detriment to the playability. A moving platform can take you directly into a cluster of spikeballs, without much opportunity to get out the way. Or other times, you have to make a blind jump because you can't really see where you're going to land. 

Plok is always centred on screen, even when moving quickly, which means that there isn't a lot of time to react to oncoming obstacles. It would have been better if they had some sort of system to pan the camera, but I can understand that that isn't always so easy to implement.

Some of the levels are pretty long, and this game has no mid-level checkpoints at all. You only have one health bar to do the whole thing, and if you lose a life, you just have to start again. Thankfully, if it's a flea level, any defeated fleas will remain dead, so it's not quite as bad as it could have been otherwise. Even so, it is very harsh, especially in the longer levels. Healing pickups are very few, especially later in the game where most levels only have one healing pickup in the whole level.

Many of the flea levels have quite confusing layouts as well - it's often a puzzle just to figure out how to get anywhere.

I get the feeling that... a lot of these levels weren't playtested sufficiently enough to iron out the unintuitive parts.

Plok starts with four lives,

Each level has collectible shells - 100 shells gives Plok an extra life, though annoyingly, the number isn't really shown on screen - instead, you get a little Plok head silhouette in the hud that fills up yellow the closer to 100 you get. Would have preferred seeing more precise numbers, but whatever.

The continue system is very strange in this game.

Whenever you collect four "Plok Tokens", you earn a continue. You can find them hidden in certain stages (pretty rarely), and you get given one token every time you beat a level without dying once.

When you lose all your lives and use a continue, it doesn't start you from where you died - instead it starts you from the level where you obtained that particular continue.

So if you earned a continue in level 4, earned another continue in level 7, and then lost all your lives in level 10... you would be sent back to level 7 to try again. And if you lost all your lives again, this time, you'll be going all the way back to level 4. The continues are single-use, and it remembers exactly which level you earned each one...

The checkpointing system feels so harsh in this game. If you're dying just a little bit too often, you'll need to be prepared to replay a whole bunch of levels to get back to where you left off.

It's honestly quite demotivating.

Thankfully there is one saving grace - there are "Permanent Continue Positions" in the game. After specifically level 19 and level 29, the game sets a new starting point for when you Press Start on the title screen. So even after losing all of your continues and receiving a Game Over, as long as you don't turn off the SNES, starting a new game will actually start you from either level 20 or level 30, instead of the beginning. ... which is nice. Thanks for that. Though that still doesn't make me any less demotivated if I lose all my continues in level 27 and have to redo so many levels anyway.

Plok does not feature a save system, password system, level select menu, cheat codes, or anything else that can help. There is no way to fake it - you NEED to actually play through the levels properly in order to get to the end. 

There are a few hidden warp zones that can skip levels, but in order to actually successfully warp, you need to complete a challenge room first - and if you fail, the warp is missed with no opportunity to try again unless you die. They really want to make you work for your progress, huh.

The final stretch of levels take place in the Flea Pit, the home of the fleas. Annoyingly, every single Flea Pit level is a gimmick level where you need to ride vehicles through obstacle courses - there are seven: a unicycle, a car, a jetpack, a motorbike, a helicopter, a tank, and a UFO.  These levels really test your patience, because these are long courses with enemies shooting at you everywhere, very few healing opportunities, and each one has its own awkward set of controls to figure out. And it's during these levels that the poor camera really feels problematic, as the shooting enemies can aim at you even when they're offscreen.

To be quite honest, I'm not really a fan of this at all - the final levels kind of don't have anything to do with what the rest of the game is about, which is limb-throwing and flea-hunting. It would be one thing to have vehicle levels dotted throughout the game, but shoving them all in one after another right at the very end just doesn't feel right.

It took me two play sessions to finish Plok. The first time, I lost all of my continues and didn't feel like redoing seven levels just to get back to where I was, so I gave up.

The second time I played, I actually beat the whole game without using a single continue - I had managed to earn enough extra lives through collecting shells to last me the whole game. It was pretty close, though! I only had one spare extra life during my encounter with the Flea Queen in the final level. I was worried, but thankfully the final boss was actually kind of easy.

Phew!

Overall... I'm very glad I played Plok. It's a really interesting little game, and I had a lot of fun with it. I do think it has some very questionable game design choices, especially in regard to the checkpointing and continue system, but once you are skilled enough to not die too much, it matters less... so it's less of an issue. 

The level design unfortunately did not impress me, but the game is funny and charming enough that I am a fan regardless.

Hooray for Plok!