Technical Information

Developer: Memes Games
Publisher: Memes Games
Release Date: August 6, 2019

Zueirama is a platformer filled with memes (both Brazilian and international) and references to Brazilian culture.

Everything starts when Zoinho’s motorcycle is stolen and his girlfriend is kidnapped shortly after. In search of his loved one, Zoinho discovers that behind it all is General Sádipo, who wants to put an end to nonsense in the world. Now, in addition to rescuing his girl, Zoinho must prevent the world from becoming dull and joyless.

Final Considerations – Analyzing the Game as a Whole

Graphics and UI

The game’s art is incredible! Everything is very well detailed, from the characters to the environments.
I really enjoyed the art direction, seeing such well-crafted sprites was what motivated me the most to play the game!

The menus and HUD are easy to understand, but I found it a bit annoying that there isn’t a dedicated button to skip cutscenes. To skip them, you need to press the “Esc” key, go to the menu, and then select the option to skip scenes. It would be much more practical if there were an instant shortcut during the cutscenes themselves.

Soundtrack and Sound Effects

The sounds and music are very well done. I found them quite charismatic!
The music style changes depending on the stage, giving the player a greater sense of immersion. They fit perfectly with the game’s laid-back vibe.

Gameplay

The game offers two difficulty modes (“nutellinha” and “raiz”, that mean something like “easy-peasy” and “hardcore”), but personally I didn’t find the hardcore difficulty particularly challenging in most stages. One or two gave me a bit of a headache, but I still managed to finish the game in approximately 4 hours and 30 minutes. I think this could be easily balanced by limiting the player to only one life.
Platformer fans usually enjoy games that are extremely difficult, if you fall into that category, Zueirama might leave you wanting more.

The stages feature very different patterns, and not all of them are traditional platforming sections, which gives the game a break from linearity. This is a very positive point, as it keeps the player curious about what will come next.
The memes and references are well integrated into the story, making the gameplay flow smoothly.
In addition to the stages that deviate from the usual platformer formula, there are also some mini-games to distract and entertain you!

The game supports controllers, and I found it much easier to play with a joystick than with the keyboard. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to remap the action buttons.
There is also a save system, so you don’t need to rush through everything in a single session!

The only thing that really bothered me throughout the entire game was the fact that the team left behind MANY easy-to-reproduce bugs. Visual bugs are tolerable, but gameplay-affecting bugs are much harder to deal with, especially when they prevent the player from progressing.
This type of issue could have been easily avoided in two ways: by leaving the game in early access for a couple of weeks (to gather and fix the main bugs, while also making the community aware that issues were expected), or by releasing the game a week earlier to a group of beta testers.
I don’t want to sound unfairly harsh, but it’s important for a game to have quality control, otherwise, it can negatively affect both player retention and the game’s reputation. No Man’s Sky is a good example of this.

On the positive side, Memes Games kept a close eye on community reports and were extremely quick and eager to fix the major bugs.
So for those who didn’t play the game in its first few days, the experience will definitely be better and more positive than for those who played on day one! 🙂

Replayability and Game Retention

For me, the game didn’t present much of a challenge on hardcore mode, so I’d only come back to unlock achievements.
However, for those who found the easy difficulty challenging, playing on a higher difficulty will significantly increase the replay value.