Awesome Pea is a retro-styled platformer where you control a supposedly greedy pea who enjoys collecting money. The game clearly wants to be reminiscent of old-school games, with green-tinged graphics and an unforgiving nature, sending you back to the start of each level whenever you mess up. The demo consists of the first three stages of the game, which took me roughly 10 minutes to complete.

There’s really not much to say about this game. It’s extremely simple, and your little pea-tagonist’s (I’m sorry) moveset consists only of a jump and a double jump. The levels I completed weren’t terribly difficult, though I remember hitting oddly-placed spikes a lot. And fortunately, being sent to the beginning of the stage whenever I made a mistake wasn’t too bad because the levels were quite short.

While the game is extremely simple, I think the worst thing about it is actually the distorted screen. There is this odd effect that makes it look as if you’re playing on a cruddy TV screen. I assume it’s supposed to be some sort of CRT effect, but I’ve certainly never owned a CRT TV that looked this bad. When you have to deal with precise platforming with no tolerance for mistakes, it’s a big problem when looking at the screen makes my eyes scream in pain.

The game is 1-2 hours long, consists of 30 levels, and costs $5.99. Perhaps if you were in the mood to play something really short and simple with an old-school feel and difficulty, then maybe you’d get something out of this game. But considering my eyes couldn’t even handle 10 minutes of it, it seems the most difficult feat would be completing this game without developing severe eye strain. And that, kids, is why you should always eat your peas….