The only negatives are the wooden crates and the skateboard. Yet I must have said “wow” close to a hundred times during my playthrough and found a few of the levels to be stunning. On a personal note, I play a lot of video games and I am finding it harder and harder to be impressed after over 25 years of gaming. It has its own flair, but isn’t too flashy or over the top. Those games all have iconic soundtracks, but My Friend Pedro treats music and sound effects as more of a background to the action that’s going on in the foreground. The music isn’t as dominating as games like Hotline Miami, Super Meat Boy, or Furi, but in this case, that’s a good thing. The music and animation are unique and stylistic, but also subdued.

When it all comes together, it’s the stuff that dreams are made of. The game does a phenomenal job of introducing these mechanics to you one at a time, as to not overwhelm players. Combine that with slowing down time, dodging bullets, split aiming, wall jumping, rolling, and even skateboarding, there’s plenty to keep you engaged and entertained.

Wielding guns, ranging from pistol to assault rifle to sniper rifle, you are the conductor and main performer of a brutal, bloody ballet. Regarding the story itself, it takes a major backseat to the game’s mechanics and controls. In reality, you are just being pushed further and further down a path of mayhem and bloodshed. Main characters are introduced in each new area and glimpses into the nameless main character’s identity and motives are slowly revealed. Pedro informs him all of the people in the area must be killed, the only reason being because they’re bad.

The masked human controlled character awakens to a talking banana named Pedro. The Hotline Miami comparison mainly comes from its story. Although it shares some similarities with Hotline Miami and The Matrix, My Friend Pedro is its own entity. It’s a wild, and frequently chaotic, side-scrolling shooter that is an absolute blast to play. They just so happen to also be great descriptors for the game itself, coincidentally. All of these words are used for end of level grades in DeadToast Entertainment’s game My Friend Pedro.

My friend pedro story