Pepper Grinder Alpha Trailer Shows Off Drilling Action

Pepper Grinder is, thankfully, not a game about grinding pepper. Instead, it’s about a pirate with a drill as big as her, digging her way to fortune and fame. There’s a trailer from the alpha version on Youtube, showing off the game in action for the first time.

Pepper Grinder is the work of lone developer Riv Hester, with music from composer Alexander Aslani. In it, you take on the role of a tiny pirate, presumably called Pepper, with a large drill. Although you can traverse the world by jumping around, the core of the game is the drill. You can drill through certain types of terrain, which allows you to move in all directions, including up. Bursting out from the ground gives you some momentum, letting you propel yourself farther than you could jump.

You steer across the world using your trusty drill, collecting thingamajigs along the way. The drill can also be used to operate machinery, like cannons and switches. You make friends with beefy platypuses, and fight some weird blobby creatures with unicorn horns. You also have a grappling hook you can use to grab rings and perform acrobatic feats. As you may already know, grappling hooks make any game concept inherently better.

There’s a boss near the end of the video, a giant red beetle with a blobbycorn holding its reins. It all looks a lot like the kind of thing Dustforce does, where it mixes precision platforming with the imperative to keep your momentum no matter what.

There’s no mention of a release date yet, which is kind of understandable since it’s only in alpha, but we know the game will initially be released on PC only. Mac and Linux ports are to follow, and there’s no word of console releases at this point.