The End Is Nigh (v2020.01.15)

Ash is a squishy, miserable survivor stumbling through a ruined world where every wall, spike, and mutant creature seems designed to finish the job apocalypse started. The End Is Nigh is a brutally precise 2D platformer from Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel, built around fast restarts, grimy pixel art, and a sense of humor that finds something funny in complete hopelessness. Its premise is absurdly bleak: Ash wants a friend, and he intends to assemble one from the body parts scattered across the wasteland. Beneath the gore and deadpan jokes sits a demanding adventure about persistence, timing, and accepting that failure is part of the route forward.

Players guide Ash through compact obstacle courses filled with spikes, collapsing platforms, moving hazards, hostile creatures, and dangerous jumps that require careful momentum control. Ash can run, leap, cling to walls, and survive several hits before dying, which gives the platforming a different rhythm from one-hit-kill precision games even as later rooms become intensely punishing. Levels are short and restart almost instantly, encouraging repeated attempts while secret routes, tumors, and cartridge collectibles reward players who test suspicious corners of every screen. More than 600 stages spread across numerous interconnected chapters, while collectible cartridges unlock playable retro-style mini-games with their own rules and challenges.

What makes The End Is Nigh stand out is its mix of cruel platforming and playful exploration: it feels like Super Meat Boy’s nastier, stranger cousin, but with more emphasis on navigating a large, branching world and uncovering secrets. The grotesque art direction is deliberately ugly in a memorable way, turning piles of flesh, polluted caverns, and ruined landscapes into a coherent post-apocalyptic cartoon nightmare. Completionists get an enormous amount to chase through alternate endings, hidden areas, achievements, tumors, and the cartridge collection, while players who only want to reach the credits still face a substantial campaign. It suits platforming veterans best, though newcomers with patience can enjoy its generous checkpoints, instant retries, and steadily escalating lessons.