Like a lot of games, N++ has a profile screen in its option menu. It details a number of the player’s statistics—time played, amount of deaths, etc. Instead of a typical completion percentage, though, it displays an absurd number. Despite the fact that I haven’t yet finished all of the game’s more than 2,000 stages, my number is somewhere around 3,000 percent. It’s a cute joke, but it points to a fundamental reality of Metanet Software’s newest: This is as much a game as it is a conduit. With stage-creation tools and extensive cooperative multiplayer—did I mention it has more than 2,000 core stages?—N++ is a seemingly infinite roadmap designed to deliver as many running and jumping crucibles as players can handle. It’s a refined creation, but it’s also more than a little intimidating.
In N++, the supposed final game in the N series of ultra-hard platformers, you play as a tiny wireframe ninja. Due to whatever cosmic punishment that wireframe ninjas incur, you spend your days racing against the clock in a series of challenge rooms, each with a switch and a door. Hit the switch, get through the door, go to the next stage. You’ve got a full repertoire of ninja abilities: run, jump, slide, slide jump, jump slide, and that classic Ninja Gaiden-style wall jump. And you’ll need them. Each stage is a crucible, a tightly crafted challenge whose small size belies the regularly intense challenge. You can easily spend 30, 40, or 100 attempts on a single stage, trying to collect all the time-extending gold without getting killed by the various mines, robots, and shadow ninjas out for your head.
All of this brutality is presented in a slick, modernist style full of clean lines and solid colors. From a distance, each stage looks like a piece of abstract graphic design, as if someone had taken the work from one of the master designers in the Helvetica documentary and filled it with death traps. It lends a layer of aesthetic sheen to the stripped-down immediacy of its platforming challenges. Along with responsive controls and smart level design—both of which have been refined through the series’ evolution from Flash game to featured PlayStation 4 release—N++ feels fundamentally good to play.
The sheer scale of it all is a bit overwhelming, though. With promised future downloadable expansions and the aforementioned staggering number of stages—growing by the day thanks to a community of talented players making custom courses and sharing them online—N++ appears infinite. Every stage that’s completed after a long struggle is met with satisfaction and an enthusiastic invitation to keep plowing ahead. “There’s so much more for you to try!” N++ says.