Idyllic!

If you were to ask the question “what would you get if you crossed Doodle Jump with Okami?” Idyllic! might not be too far away from the answer. Unfortunately, however, sloppy execution sours that intriguing idea.

You assume the role of a winged hero who has the ability to bring the game’s withered worlds back to verdant life.

Simply landing on the various platforms is enough to see their trees instantly bear fruit, with grass spreading across the previously barren base.

In essence, it’s a side-scrolling version of Lima Sky’s iOS phenomenon, with an altruistic bent – although the lack of any fauna to accompany the fresh flora means you’re beautifying a world devoid of humanity.

As such, your efforts feel a little hollow – especially as there’s no end to your horticultural role. You simply keep jumping until you fall.

Rather than starting all over again, however, you’ll begin from the last checkpoint you reached. Here you can enter a shop and spend the money you’ve collected along the way on upgrading your abilities.

Spend money on the ‘stomp’ command and you can destroy the occasional flying enemy as well as shaking loose valuable gold skulls which appear on certain islands.

You can also boost your feeble wings, which initially seem pointless given the existence of a double-jump, but later allow you to glide further when the platforms are more widely spaced.

Indeed, the checkpoints also grow more distant as you progress, and it can be a little frustrating to plummet to your doom with the store in your sights.

This might be less of an issue if the controls were better, but the collision detection is slightly off at times, propelling you unexpectedly upwards when you appear to have fallen slightly short of a platform.

At other times, you’ll seem to be descending towards safe ground only to apparently miss the back edge of a platform by a single pixel. The speed at which you fall can often make these mistakes difficult to recover from.

The ability to increase your jump distance should, in theory, make the tilt controls more responsive, easing the issues where you need to leap larger gaps. But it all feels a bit skittish.

That the scrolling is slightly choppy only exacerbates these issues, while the poorly-looped background music will drive you to distraction. Turning it off only highlights how sparse and feeble the sound effects are.

Even the central idea of prettifying this world loses its appeal when the landscapes barely change throughout. Sporadic mini-bosses, meanwhile, are pointless additions that fail to excite.

If the title conjures up a mental picture of something peaceful and relaxing, the game itself does its level best to shatter such an image. By turns soporific and infuriating, Idyllic! is nothing of the sort.