Captain Mayo

Review

The world known as The Fridge is now at peace after a devastatingly long war between two rival kings: the Mighty Onions of Hein Kingdom, and Johnny Mustard, Ruler of the Province Eggplant. The exhausted Captain Mayo is taking a well-earned break to recharge and powers and his cool and cold cabin. The war took a lot out of him, and he hasn’t been feeling the best lately. In fact, he thought he had food poisoning at one stage. Anyhow, he is resting in order to be fit as a fiddle for his mate, Kenny Ketchup’s, wedding with the beautiful Princess Bea of the Hein Kingdom, when suddenly he hears several pressing knocks at his door. His mate Kenny is beside himself, hot and sweaty (yuck, warm ketchup), speaking fast and full of nonsense. But after cooling down, Kenny Ketchup announces to his mate that the eggplants have taken over the Fridge and Johnny Mustard has kidnapped his beloved Princess Bea! Don’t worry Kenny; I’ll save your Princess because I am Captain Mayo!  

Captain Mayo is a platformer game developed by Anders Nilsson and published by Shaved Cat Games on the 17^th of July 2020 on the Steam platform.

The task ahead will not be an easy one to achieve as Captain Mayo needs to collect 5 Ancient Books to get a chance at rescuing Princess Bea. But here is the tricky bit . . . each time Mayo find a book, the book will have missing pages, so not only will you have to find all the pages of each of the books, but you’ll need to collect as many gems as possible to pay the Big Hamburger Bookmakers to stick the pages together.  Then you can go to the Oracle, which is a rather old and wrinkled half carrot (I love the humour in this game), which then will read a segment of each book to open the portal to get to Johnny Mustard’s Castle where Princess Bea is being kept hostage.

The world is basically a reasonably large platformer where you’ll be able to go deep down into the dark cave of the world, but also in up into the sky in search of these missing pages. However, the world will be full of enemies and traps. Expect to crack a lot of jars of Mayo during your fight against Mustard. Essentially, you’ll need to find a button to open the first laser seal door and a blue key. Don’t worry; you will find both very quickly as they are close by when you start the game. Then, as you explore the world, you find doors. Most of these doors can be opened with a blue key. Behind these doors, you’ll find challenging levels of different sizes (small, medium or large) where you’ll have to collect all the missing pages  (10 per level) and another blue key so that you can open the next door. Expect to die several times in each of these levels, and every time you die, you’ll lose some of the gems you’ve collected along the way. That is when you play the Dummy level of difficulty. If you play the Hardcore, you’ll lose all the gems that you’ve collected. Occasionally, you’ll find other items in these levels, such as ice creams, watermelon slices and posters. They are usually pretty difficult to reach, but if you manage to grab them, it will be so satisfying, especially if you grab a poster as you’ll unlock a new skill for Captain Mayo.

As you progress, on some occasions you will not be able to pick up all the missing pages due to the fact that you haven’t unlocked a specific skill.  But don’t worry, it is easy to see which levels you’ve managed to pick up all the missing pages from, as well as the levels where you haven’t managed to do so.  You’ll have a rolled-up page in front of each door you’ve already opened; the door that has a rolled-up page with its contour highlighted in green means that you have already collected all the missing pages in that level.

What you need to be sure of is that you have the specific number of missing pages required to repair one book. For example, you’ll need 40 pages to repair the first book, 80 for the second, 120 for the third and so on and so forth. You’ll be there with Captain Mayo for a while.

I do like the fact that you can save your progress, which you can at a checkpoint marked with a stick with a large red sphere floating above it. When Captain Mayo touches the stick, the ball will become green, and your progress will be saved. When you die, you’ll start from the last checkpoint you reached. Now, I must say that I got stuck in one area and was not able to get back to the door because of a wall of wooden crates that was blocking the way, and Captain Mayo didn’t have anything to destroy these crates. So, 2 hours of gameplay were ruined, and I had to start all over again. The simple solution would be to have an automatic save at the door and anywhere within the level, but if you die, you can choose if you want to restart at the door or at the checkpoint. I know that I probably missed something somewhere, but it is very unfair to lose your progress that way and restart the game from scratch.

Charming pixel graphics and the game is full of humour and accessible for all ages. Bear in mind, it is not an easy game to play. I strongly recommend not playing this game with your laptop if you’re kitchen near fridges, or you might wonder who re-painted the wall in white, red and yellow! You might also wonder why your jars of ketchup, Mayo and Mustard are no longer in your fridge! It can be a bit frustrating at times.

Review written by THE CPT FROGGY for Zeepond.com!