Retro-inspired indie platformers are hardly in short supply at the moment, so it often requires some sort of gimmick for a game to float to the top of the sea of pixels. Tiny Thor has one such gimmick thankfully, in the form of a magic hammer which can be thrown and rebounded off any walls, enemies and the edge of the screen.
The graphics throughout Tiny Thor have an HD-ified Amiga 1200 look to them [1], and the gameplay clearly takes inspiration from other titles of the ’90s, including Yoshi’s Island – as not only can you bring up a little aiming guide to throw your hammer at any angle [2], but when you take a hit, a little heart with a timer floats away and you have to retrieve it, Baby Mario style.
BEING A THOR LOSER
The hammer is both the best and worst thing about Tiny Thor. We wish that throwing it and calling it back were mapped to different buttons – even hours in, we were still accidentally pressing the attack button multiple times out of habit, causing the hammer to come back to us before it hit enemies.
The rebound gimmick makes for some interesting puzzles and also some fun boss fights [3] too, but this is a game that sometimes gets a little too clever for its own good, meaning anyone just looking for solid platforming action may get frustrated at having to regularly stop and figure out which trick to pull off to proceed.
