When you first look at Quigley's Quest, you'll probably see a Sonic rip-off with average graphics. This is not to say the graphics are bad. Infact, I rather like the artwork, it's pretty well executed, and while it's no Rayman Ultimate, we're talking about a Playstation game compared to a game made by an independent developer. The animations itself are pretty fluid and nice, despite the game being locked to around 30 FPS (unless you change the game speed, this will be explained later) There are even idle animations and you can see Quigley struggling to stay on a platform when you're near a cliff. These are surely nice touches, and while they don't add anything to the game, they're fun to look at.

One of the game's highlights however is its particle engine. Definitely one of the higher aspects of the game, fireballs will have glowing trails, stars explode when you complete the level, and, a trail of sparkling, floating particles when you have the invulnerability powerup. A sort of white light etches the title into stone when you first start the game, which looks very well done, and demonstrates the flexibility of it's graphic and particle engine. All of these are all alpha blended, among with other, static, objects in the game, and look very nice.

Quigley's Quest has some parallax scrolling, however I felt this could've been used much better. In it's current state, you'll see various backgrounds, which while not too unique, don't seem to get boring, and chains occasionally obstructing your view. These don't seem to fit in with the theme at all, however they can help greatly with positioning blind, exact jumps, as suggested in the readme. Combine this with pillars in the background, which let you know there's a platform on the ground you're about to land on, and the game becomes a bit easier in the later levels.

Sound

Pocket PC games are usually lacking in the sound department, and while Quigley's Quest has its highs, most of it is sadly lacking. To get the lows out of the way first, the variety of sound isn't all too great. Picking up rings sounds like a clipped sound from Windows, ball and chains are silent when swinging back and forth, and the spikes just don't sound all too fearful. Adding environment sounds, like sizzling and bubbling when your near lava, or the fore mentioned sounds will make the atmosphere of the game many times better. Quigley's pain sound just doesn't fit with what I would imagine, something more squeakier. Maybe even footsteps when your running would help. This would probably make up for the lack of music in the game too. As it stands right now, the game is just silent, and what sound there is, sounds as if it were from the Windows 3.1 era of gaming.

Here's where Quigley's Quest really shines. The game is incredibly enjoyable, and so far, I've encountered only one crash, so it's quite stable. Like was mentioned before, Quigley's Quest is a platformer similar to Sonic with a focus on exploration. If you don't like the whole "running around in endless hallways to find a small object" type of gameplay, you can play the game like a traditional platformer, and still have a very challenging experience. This itself adds many hours to the replay value.

As for the mechanics, everything seems good. Physics are solid, level design is pretty extensive at points, with multiple paths to complete some levels. I do wish there were a look-ahead button as seen in some platformers, however the visual cues alleviate some of the problems caused by this lack of feature. With 17 levels in total, there's plenty of variety to be had, while the later levels become devilishly hard. The readme suggests that you have 20 spare lives once you reach the Volcano unit. Playing for days, I've only been able to get to the 3rd unit, so I'm unable to substantiate this claim.