Hell Pie is a 3D platformer in which you, a low ranking demon named Nate, must gather ingredients for Satan's birthday cake. To do this you’ll travel to various worlds and navigate them with the help of your enslaved cherub Nugget, who allows you to swing through the air. The underlying tone of the game is reminiscent of games like Conker’s Bad Fur Day. The humor is crude and destruction is oftentimes comically gory. The humor may not be for everyone but for myself I found it somewhat endearing in an odd way. Each large hub world contains a few ingredients, along with several more linear stages which generally reward you with an ingredient at their conclusion. Collect enough ingredients and you’ll be granted access to the next world. Along the way you’ll also find cans of food for Nugget that allow you to upgrade him with new abilities, expanding your movement repertoire. Nate can also unlock new demon horns which grant him different abilities such as a sprint and a chargeable head bash. Levels are heavily focused on navigating over death pits by swinging from small platform to small platform. Combat does occasionally crop up, but most enemies only take one hit to kill, and are rarely much of a threat.

The Switch version of Hell Pie leaves a lot to be desired. To start, image quality is poor, with a pass of temporal anti-aliasing over a very low resolution image resulting in constant ghosting and other artifacts. The frame rate regularly falls below its target of 30 frames-per-second and can at times become debilitatingly poor, especially in later levels. We’re not just talking slight dips, frame rates often felt like they were running in the single digits. Restarting the game did not seem to have a noticeable effect. In multiple instances I clipped through a wall or fell right through the ground. Some times I was able to get back out, but most required me to reload from my most recent checkpoint. Finally, I also encountered issues with the game crashing entirely, sending me back to the Switch home menu.

Hell Pie is that most difficult type of Switch game to review. On a pure design level I believe Hell Pie is one of the best 3D platformers I’ve played in quite a while. Its understanding of ever expanding options for movement and traversal highlight a deep grasp of the genre. Its levels are varied, yet consistently make use of all of Hell Pie’s best mechanics. Unfortunately, the Switch version fails miserably when it comes to delivering that gameplay to the player. It says a lot about the quality of the underlying game design that I kept coming back despite regularly running into issues. I’d love to speak more positively about Hell Pie, and I may very well wind up picking it up on another platform, but the compromises on Switch are going to be too much for most players. I sincerely hope this port can be salvaged through updates because I firmly believe Hell Pie is a very good game, and this version just doesn’t do it justice.