You Should Be Playing… Umihara Kawase | Hidden Gems On PC
412Our new weekly series looks at hidden gems on PC, and Noa kicks things off with the exceedingly odd grappling hook platformer, Umihara Kawase. It’s one girl versus an army of fish, with just a the magic physics of her fishing line to swing and climb through. Gulp.
Here’s why you should be playing Umihara Kawase… at a time when every platformer was just trying to copy Mario’s bounding behaviour, Umihara Kawase gave us a far more adaptable tool to get over death pits and ascend to victory. Her fishing line doubles as a weapon, an abseiling rope, a grappling hook… as long as you’ve got the finger dexterity it can slingshot her to victory.
Around this versatile tool is one of the quirker platformers we’ve ever played. Ignore the giant fish and you’ve got the surreal (and slightly nightmarish) level art and backgrounds to make sense of. And then there’s the general lack of context, this is just climbing and swinging for the sake of climbing and swinging. No wonder the game has become a favourite of speedrunners in the following years.
But hey, I’m only telling you what is already explained in the video. Watch that instead and within seven minutes I guarantee you’ll be asking yourself ‘why am I not playing Umihara Kawase’. Of course, we’d like to hear suggestions of games you think other people should be playing, too - maybe we’ll make a video about one of those, too.