At first glance, World Gone Sour looks like a game that’s sole purpose is to advertise something to you while you play.  Fortunately, not only is that not the case, but Playbrains manages to pump out a rather enjoyable platformer that looks kiddy but somehow ends up being a little on the adult side.

For those who ever wondered what goes on in the minds of Sour Patch Kids, it’s actually quite simple: their life’s purpose is to end up in your mouth and into your belly – in fact, they look forward to it.  However, as the green Sour Patch Kid that you control, that wasn’t how things turned out. Though you made it into a bag of candy, some dufus tripped at the movie theater and you wound up on the floor, alongside a few other candies.  Some of those candies, particularly the red one that never even made it out of the factory, turn into bosses that you face along the way.  These SPKs are not very thrilled that they aren’t being eaten and they are hell bent on taking it out on you.

As you make your way through the game’s nine levels (which are pretty long), you’ll traverse the theater, a little girl’s room (a demented one at that), and other areas as you climb, jump and break through various obstacles.  You can find plenty of SPKs along the way that join you on your journey.  As they follow you along, you can pick them up and throw them to defeat enemies such as batteries, blobs of gum and more, while sending them to their death actually nets you points.  You can impale them, burn them, slice them and more, all for the greater good, though luckily they respawn after a time lapse.  You can also combine yourself with your friends to become large or larger, which is helpful when trying to break through wooden walls or to throw other SPKs, since your strength also increases.

The platforming itself is pretty straight forward, but it can get difficult as you progress.  One of the challenges though is that once in a while, you’ll be unable to properly wall-jump, as the game won’t correctly recognize your moves, and double jumps can be tricky to time too, especially when you have a saw right above you.  These were times that I found myself dying more often than not.  Outside of those problems, the rest works well, even when swinging or gliding down objects.

And then there’s the game’s narration, which is done by Creed Bratton of The Office.  Creed drops in plenty of one-liners that are both comical and dark.  These are not kid jokes by any means, and its dark humor made me laugh on a number of occasions.  Easily the narration adds quite a bit to a game that would have been decent on its own.  During a few levels, Creed’s commentary is sorely missing as there were some stretches of time where he was a little too quiet for my taste, but generally speaking, he was present to keep me entertained.

The issue of advertisement is also not really that present, as Sour Patch Kids bags and ads aren’t really there much; in fact a lot of the candy boxes and stuff that you come across are outrageous stuff like Chocobacon and Puss Poppers (yuck!).

Players will also find some co-op multiplayer to be had which was fun to play, while online leaderboards keep you motivated to try and best your score after each level.  Unlockables include the offbeat music video by Method Man which must be seen to believe.

All in all, World Gone Sour is a fun little game that doesn’t seem like much at first, but ends up being more of an enjoyable game that it had any right to. For $5 this downloadable title is definitely worth the price of admission.

Final Score: 3.5 out of 5