Oddmar Works

There’s this specific feeling—your thumb on the run button, the jump already queued, knowing exactly how far you’ll travel through the air because you’ve done it enough times to know. That’s what the Super Nintendo was for. Mario, Donkey Kong Country, Kirby—all of it built around that one sensation of having perfect control.

Oddmar is a small Viking obsessed with that same feeling. It’s not trying to reinvent the platformer. You can feel influences from Hollow Knight and Ori in how it’s built, but it’s not copying—it’s more like someone who loved what you loved made the thing they wanted to play.

The world is loud and detailed. Poison mushrooms, flying squirrels that are somehow charming, treasure hidden in weird corners, a sheep for reasons nobody’s explaining. Very straightforward, very Norse without taking itself seriously.

What matters is that it works. The game moves the way you want it to, responds when you expect it to. You die, you’re back. There’s no lag between intention and action, and that’s what separates a good platformer from the dozens that try and miss.

I played it on iPad and it clicked immediately—that moment where you stop thinking about whether you like something and just go. That’s the whole thing right there.