When I was young platforming games were flower and pony affairs, everyone was so happy, and spikes were where they belonged...in pits. Nowadays the platformer has become the most cut-throat and ruthless genre since Starcraft. Used to be we'd run around collecting coins, smashing goofy moonsters with our butts, and saving the fairy forest from Dr. Robomachimecha. Nowadays it's all about games like Super Meat Boy where our girlfriends get punched out and we die thousands of times to buzz-saws and other nasty things that grind us up into paste and spew our innards all over the pretty grass.
You take one look at the title of this game and you know what to expect. It's all a lie though as there are far more than just a thousand spikes. Imagine trillions of spikes, as far as the eye can see, spikes on the floor, the wall, the ceiling, even your cellular make-up has spike DNA in it. Your body is a veritable spike-magnet and when the two of you come together it makes the kind of poetry that would get your middle-school self sent straight to the Principal's office and then the Psychiatric Ward.
Aban Hawkins is a man with a treasure map. Only a man with 1,000 lives would dare brave a trap-filled labyrinth. I'm not even sure why he's doing this to himself, I'd rather get put on the electric chair 999 times. Nevertheless he's got an infinite supply of knives, a regular jump, and a high jump. If objects have to be pushed he can push them as well. Above all however he has 1,000 lives because the game expects the player to die.
When you die in this game it's not always because you made a mistake or that your reflexes weren't up to snuff. You die in this game whenever the developer feels like it. You're running along, dodging a huge mass of spikes and falling platforms, you land on some nondescript block and oops, spike floor straight up the booty. Sometimes you're jumping along some platforms and hey that platform just fell right out from under you and you're dead again. This game is all about trial and a crapload of error.
You might call this game unfair but definitely don't call it badly designed. Since the game has so much control over how and where the player can die that means it also has the freedom to do whatever it likes to keep the player alive. It's tough but all of the stages are quite do-able and the level-design tends to be really impressive. It totally captures the mood of "okay these natives totally don't want anyone to get their treasure" and at the same time pulling through a stage without dying really feels like you've cheated the system somehow and in real life you should be awarded a lost treasure from Aztinca.
One of the options available in this game is that the player can skip stages. This is good and yet also really bad. For one the game tends to build up on the trap designs. So what was just a spike floor could be mixed up with a flame trap, rolling boulders, and who knows what else. If you can't figure out the spike floor there's no way you'll get past any of the more serious combinations. Another thing to keep in mind is that only up to ten stages can be skipped. It's really not something that can be abused and somehow I bet doing this will lock the player out of the best ending.
Then again I don't know because I haven't beaten this game. I won't even throw in the word "yet" because I can't guarantee anything. It's more than just having a thousand lives, I only have one and so does the controller in my hands, playing this game puts the both of our lives at risk. There are some stages where literally every spot the player could be in will result in death. If that sort of thing tickles your indescribable spots then by all means give this game a look as it is fantastic. On the other hand even if you're a veteran of modern platformers the possibility exists that this game will break you.
