My Friend Pedro

We oblige, bursting into the room and roundhousing the suggestively placed knife into the nearest face

Reality can be a downer. For instance: would you rather admit to your deeply ingrained emotional issues, and a weakness for the bloodshed that leads to the slaughter of hundreds of security guards just doing their jobs? Or would you prefer to blame your problems on a talking banana, who gives you the power to control time and hypes up your every kill with exclamations of “lovely” and “snazzy”? No wonder My Friend Pedro’s masked protagonist spends so much time ignoring the real world: there are no high scores in therapy.

The trouble is that you can only get away with doing so for so long before it all catches up with you. So it proves here. This wickedly silly side-scrolling shooter has one of the best immediate hooks we’ve seen in a while – acrobatic gun-fu shooting, augmented by a Matrix-style slow-motion ability and some brilliantly gory gimmicks – but struggles to sustain the initial thrill, tripped up by the nitty-gritty details of its design.

For a good while, however, it certainly seems as though we’re the ones slipping. In its first few levels, My Friend Pedro walks the line between accommodating and challenging admirably. The tutorial’s explanations of everything you can take advantage of in combat – the slow-mo ability that can be toggled on and off, a bullet defying spin, kicking objects at enemies and splitting your aim to fire at two goons at once – are basic, but enough to set you going. Little breadcrumb trails are laid out: a knife stuck into the ground in front of the door you’re just about to open onto a roomful of unsuspecting guards; a pan on the floor just below three more. We can almost see solo developer Victor Agren wiggling his eyebrows at us.