Granny Smith

A very jovial runner (or roller) about a granny who’s not willing to put up with any crap!

Mediocre Games is a game developing studio that specializes in making… well, not-so-mediocre games, actually. One of these not-so-mediocre games is Granny Smith, which is really about an actual granny named Smith and not, as many would imagine, about some fake Australian apple.

But, we could also have our apple pie and eat it too, could we not? Why not have a granny named Smith chasing after apples by the same name? I mean, not everything has to fit into an either/or dilemma (and Mediocre Games knows this well). Result: We have a game about Granny Smith trying to recover her Granny Smiths! Brilliant, no?

But enough puns for now. Let’s dive right into the game which, oddly unbeknownst to me, generated a lot of hype about 10 years ago. 

One of the first things worth praising about this game is how well it has aged (as if one more pun could hurt!) since it came out in 2012! I was immensely surprised, after watching some old footage, by how good-looking this game was back then and how it still manages to look amazing even though there’s been hardly any significant upgrades. Impressive, to say the least!

You could claim that a feat like this is not very hard to pull out since Granny Smith is basically a 3D side-scroller and not particularly resource-demanding. You could be “correct” in making that assumption. Still, I’d answer that not many devs did pull this out as successfully as Mediocre Games did (a largely misleading name). And yes, the gameplay is simplistic and streamlined. There are no complicated gestures you need to perform or gyroscopes you need to calibrate or barometers to set up… you get the drill.