The Dodo bird is extinct…or SO WE THOUGHT! Joon Shining is bringing the Dodo bird back like it’s 1661. Joon Shining is essentially a golf game. What does golf and dodo birds have in common? They’re both tasty! The backstory revolves around saving the Dodo bird…by flinging them with magic into nests. How these eggs don’t break is a wonder to me.
I would totally eat a Dodo bird though. I would imagine they taste exquisite. The flavor profile of the Dodo bird isn’t the only exquisite thing here! The game play is actually quite fantastic. And evil. It’s fantastically evil.
So how is the game play fantastically evil you ask? Joon Shining is not just any golf game, it’s a golf puzzle platformer. That’s right, not only do you have to play golf, which is a game that is already hard enough, you now have to jump around like Mario and get to the end of the level.
This would have been a relatively simple feat but the level designers are evil. Let’s take a look at this one level as an example. You have to fling the Dodo egg around like it’s Spider-man, dodging obstacles and flying over hazards, and then you finally hit the checkpoint. You breathe a sigh of relief. Now if you happen to die you will just respawn at the checkpoint…except you can’t die in this section. If you fall down, you must bounce yourself up and it could take forever. Truly a Sisyphean task.
What gets me is that the egg is impervious to hard ground, trees, rocks, and gravity but water is where the egg says “I’ve had enough”. The earth must be flat in this game. Or the egg has rabies. No wonder the Dodos went extinct.
The game is actually quite fun however. It definitely lulls you into a false sense of security by giving you easy levels in the beginning and then it pulls the rug out from under you like a crypto NFT scam from Logan Paul..I uhh mean untrustworthy content creators.
The game combines the aspects of golf, platforming, and light puzzling seamlessly. It keeps introducing new, intelligent and skill based mechanics. In some of the levels you have to use small bumpers and the game basically turns into pinball. It’s crazy fun, and also crazy frustrating.
There is some replayability for the game where you can collect these tear drops and other items and it’s actually challenging. You have to get the Dodo egg to touch the collectable, and then fling it safely to the nest. If it dies or falls into water you have to try again. The achievements are tied to the collectables so good luck to the completionists, I salute your bravery.
Now as we near the end of this article, I know what some of you are thinking. My usually tame writing style has become slightly more spicy, like putting one red pepper flake onto a hot dog. My friend actually does this by the way, he eats hot dogs with nothing on them except for red pepper flakes. No, I did not use AI to write this preview. You seriously think AI has this level of style. It took me decades of loneliness and living in my own thoughts to reach this level of ADD humor. I just rarely show it because I’m pretty insecure about how people will receive my sense of humor. I’m also a massive introvert with a heavy distrust of other humans.
On a more serious note, I really don’t believe in using AI and my content will be AI free for the foreseeable future, even when I’m made even more irrelevant than I already am by others just mass producing AI generated content. AI took our jobs!
For full transparency I received a review key for Joon Shining for free. Thank you very much again, I appreciate it and the game. I played the game for 2.4 hours at the time of this writing and I have 0 out of 12 achievements unlocked. There seem to be nine worlds and I play this game like I am legally blind and with no monitor so it will probably take me around 20 hours to beat the game and probably around 30 hours to 100% it.
Anyways, thank you guys for sticking around for this long, I appreciate it. Let me know if you like this style of humor, I’m definitely going to keep using it because it’s how I actually think. Thank you for putting up with me. I’ll use it sparingly however in order to not overstay my welcome. Thank you for the support and as always, hope you guys are staying safe and sane out there and I’ll catch you guys next time.
Joon Shining Steam Store Page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1552600/Joon_Shining/
Ducky Obrien 