Duck Souls+ from Ratalaika Games and Green Dinosaur Games is a fast-paced and challenging single-screen puzzle platformer on PS. Learn more in our Duck Souls+ review!
The spirits of ducks from ages past will provide you with the all-powerful Golden Cherry, an artifact that grants you a mighty directional dash. This can be activated on the ground or on the air after you jump, to give you an extra push in any eight directions so that you can hopefully land on solid ground, or at least make it to a wall to which you can cling on as you desperately wall jump up to safety. Once you land on solid ground, your directional dash ability will be restored, so that you can use it once again.
The goal for all stages is simple and to the point: run, jump, and dash your way towards the egg for that level. Once you’ve collected the egg, you’ll be sent to the next level so that you can do it all over again. The first stage in the game will also have one extra item: a clock. What does the clock do? It allows you to know how much time you’ve spent playing the game from start to finish! This is great for speedrunners who want to replay the game multiple times in order to lower their overall time total for the game.
As you take on each of the 100 stages that Duck Souls+ has to offer, you’ll be carefully jumping and dashing as you try to stay far away from the different hazards you’ll run into during your journey. There are spikes, moving platforms, jump boost platforms, switches that remove blocks or sets of blocks, guns that fire in set directions, guns that fire heat-seeking lasers, blocks that disappear after you step on them, and more. While you’re going to die in this one – a lot – the game will at least throw you a bone by offering checkpoints – marked by checkered flags – from which your duck will quickly respawn after reach dead.
Levels are small, and of a bite-size nature, so you can certainly complete each one in a minute or depending on the level’s overall complexity and your skill level. The first ten stages or so can easily be completed in a few seconds, but later stages are going to demand more from you as more and more hazards are combined for each stage. On top of this, you’ll start to run into regular cherries that look like the cherries you’d expect to find in video games. What these do is give you an extra single-use dash boost that must be used with the right timing to keep your duck alive. And if you have trouble seeing what each small pixel cluster is representing, there’s the option of zooming in on the action by going into Options Menu, which changes the overall experience by zooming in on your duck and its surrounding area.
As for the trophies, Duck Souls+ is one more to add to the long list of Cross-Buy games from Ratalaika Games that offer a Platinum trophy with separate lists for each version (and region) of the game! You’re basically going to get one trophy for every five levels you complete, which does mean that you’ll have to play and complete all 100 levels in the game to get that Platinum trophy for your collection! The other extra trophy is for finding a hidden Easter egg, which, to save you some time, is on level 75.
Duck Souls+ is a challenging 2D puzzle platformer that was a lot of fun to play on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita thanks to the game’s Cross-Buy nature – buy one version, and you’ll get the other one at no extra cost. It offers 100 levels to play through, and other than some slow down on the PlayStation Vita – that I was able to adjust to – there’s not much to complain about this budget release. Trophy hunters are going to dig being able to get two Platinum trophies in a couple of hours and change, so there’s also that.
Disclaimer
This Duck Souls+ review is based on a PlayStation 4 copy provided by Ratalaika Games.
