Circus platformer Penarium still holds up 11 years later

Penarium drops Willy into a circus with no exit and a crowd that wants him dead. Self Made Miracle built the game, Team17 published it, and it landed in 2015 on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, Mac and Linux. The pitch is one sentence long: a trapped man runs and jumps through deathtraps while a bloodthirsty audience cheers him on. That is the whole idea, and the game rarely pretends otherwise.

Willy and the Circus That Won’t Let Him Leave

The setup is comedy played straight. Willy is not a hero and the game never asks him to be one. He is a man who wants to see his family again, and the only route out runs through a sinister circus built to kill him. The crowd is the joke and the threat at once. It watches, it cheers, and it wants the traps to win.

Penarium is a side-view platformer. That perspective matters. You see the whole arena, the hazards on every side, and the space you have to cross. There is no camera trickery and no hidden angle. The game shows you the problem and then dares you to solve it while everything moves.

The themes are action and comedy, and the game holds both without straining. The deaths are meant to be funny. The crowd is meant to be awful. The combination gives Penarium a tone that is nastier than most indie platformers and lighter than its body count suggests.

Traps, Crowds and the Side-View Arena

The traps are the game. Penarium is built on deathtraps, plural, and the design leans on variety rather than a single gimmick. A platformer lives or dies on whether its hazards stay readable as they pile up, and this one keeps the arena legible even when it fills with danger.

The crowd is the second mechanic, and it is the one that gives the game its name and its attitude. Being cheered on by a sadistically bloodthirsty audience is not decoration here. It is the frame around every run and every death. The game wants you to feel watched.

Modes cover single player and multiplayer. The single-player mode carries the Willy story, the escape, the family waiting somewhere outside the tent. Multiplayer turns the same arena into something you share, which fits a game whose whole premise is performance in front of other people.

Poor Willy. Trapped in a sinister circus, his only hope of seeing his family is to run and jump his way past an array of deathtraps while being cheered on by a sadistically bloodthirsty crowd.

That summary is the game in full. Penarium does not hide a second act behind the first one. What you see in the opening minutes is what you get for the length of the run.

What Works and What Wears Thin

The strongest thing Penarium has is a clear identity. It knows it is a circus game about a man being watched while he suffers, and it commits. The side view keeps every hazard visible, so failures feel earned rather than cheap. The comedy and the action sit in the same place instead of fighting each other.

The weaker thing is scope. A game built on one arena and one joke has to keep escalating, and escalation is where this kind of design gets expensive. The traps have to stay fresh. The crowd has to stay funny. The moment either one becomes routine, the premise starts to show its seams.

Here is how Penarium’s pieces rank in what they actually contribute to the game:

1. The deathtrap arena — the core of every run and the reason the game exists.
2. The bloodthirsty crowd — the tone, the comedy and the pressure all at once.
3. Willy’s escape story — a clean motive that gives the running a point.
4. The side-view perspective — plain, readable, and right for the hazards.
5. The multiplayer mode — a good fit for a game about being watched, but not the main event.

That order is the game’s own priority list. The arena is first because everything else serves it. The story is third because it motivates the running without ever competing with it. Multiplayer is last because it extends the arena rather than replacing it.

A 7.5 Out of 10, and Why That Number Fits

The published critical score for Penarium is 7.5/10, drawn from an IGDB critic aggregate across seven outlets. That number is a fair read on what the game is. It is good, it is confident, and it is narrow. Nothing in the design suggests it was trying to be more than a tight arcade platformer with a mean streak, and judging it as anything else would be unfair to what it does well.

A 7.5 is not a shrug. It is the score for a game that nails its premise and then lives inside it. Penarium’s premise is strong enough to carry a full release, and the execution is clean enough that the traps read, the deaths land, and the crowd stays funny. What keeps it out of the higher range is the same thing that makes it work: it is one idea, executed well, with nowhere much to go after you have seen it.

The comparison that matters is not against bigger platformers. Penarium is not competing on scale. It is competing on tone, and on that front it wins more than it loses. A sinister circus, a man who just wants to go home, and an audience baying for his death is a sharper hook than most indie platformers manage.

The Verdict on Self Made Miracle’s Deathtrap

Self Made Miracle made a game with a clear voice and Team17 put it out on five platforms in 2015. The result is a platformer that knows exactly what it is: a side-view deathtrap run with a comedy streak and a cruel crowd. It does not waste your time pretending to be a story game. It does not pad the arena with systems it does not need.

What is worth watching here is the tone. Penarium treats its own violence as entertainment, and it makes you complicit in that by putting you in the ring. The crowd cheers. You keep running. That is a sharper idea than the trap design alone, and it is the part of the game that stays with you after the deaths stop being funny.

Penarium is a good game with a mean sense of humor and a clean sense of purpose. It earns its place in the 2015 indie platformer pile, and it earns the score the critics gave it.

2015 games · indie platformer · Penarium · Penarium review · Self Made Miracle · Team17