Spitkiss review - "Polyamory and Angry Birds get it on in this ace platformer"

How do you create a unique platforming experience for mobile? Well, if you're the dev behind Spitkiss, you take concepts from other genres, squish them into a wonderfully gross game of swapping saliva, and see what happens.

What happens is a brilliantly odd game about modern relationships that manages to say something important without forcing it down your throat. You're going to let that spit trickle in willingly. God that's a horrid metaphor.

Let's make out

The game is all about getting a wad of sexy mouth juice from one character to another. You do that with a slingshot move, twanging the spit from A to B and trying to avoid all of the glob-destroying obstacles that the game throws in your way.

Levels all take place on a single screen - you can see where you need to get to, and everything that's trying to stop you with one glance. You'll also have an organ at the bottom of the screen, which is where you control everything.

Drag on the heart, spleen, or lungs, and you'll see an aiming arc sprout from your love-phlegm. This shows you where you're firing. Lift up your finger and off-flies the spit. It sticks to some surfaces, and bounces off others.

Really then, this is a game of angles. You're trying to get from A to B without your spit disintegrating. Things start off reasonably simple, but soon you're testing your reactions as well as your geometrical skills. It's here that the game really kicks into life.

You'll be sliding down safe surfaces, then pinging off to land on another before you hit some spikes. There are extra jumps to collect, bounce pads to figure out, and plenty more besides. And because the challenges are so small, even when you do get stuck it's not too hard to figure out what you need to do.

Then there's the charm that dribbles through everything that the game goes. It's filled with cute characters, funny situations, and it tells its story about polyamorous love without ever getting preachy. That might be the underlying theme of the game, but on top of it there's some brilliant fun.

Frenching

Spitkiss does everything it sets out to do with a swagger and confidence that's going to fill your heart with glee. Even when it gets tough, there's still enough heart here to keep you pushing through.

Above all else, it's a really good platformer that takes a look at its own world, and the world in which we live in, in really intriguing ways.