Leo’s Fortune – Leo the Invincible

Leo’s Fortune

Leo’s Fortune is a charming 2D platformer, originally released for mobile and tablet. As a game designed for mobile, it features very simple controls, with not too complex level layouts which are designed to flow smoothly.

Leo, the endearing engineer protagonist, embarks on a journey to find his stolen gold, traveling through forests, canyons, snow covered mountains, and even the inside of a factory. The turquoise ball of fur glides through these beautiful landscapes and is capable of jumping, inflating himself to glide, or quickly dropping. These are the available actions, and obstacles are designed accordingly.

All in all, Leo’s Fortune features 20 individual and very varied stages, with obstacles becoming more deadly and hazardous as the game progresses.

Leo the Invincible

After beating the game for the first time, Hardcore Mode is unlocked. In this mode, all 20 stages must be completed back-to-back, on a single life. One mistake or quitting the current run means starting from the very beginning.

Before attempting this challenge, I started playing through each individual stage, clearing it without dying, utilizing these single-stage playthroughs to identify problematic hazards, and practice troublesome sections repeatedly. What becomes clear from the start is that the first half of the game – perhaps the first two thirds – is very easy to clear deathless even without too much practice. The first run killer appears in level 13.

These wheels… With time, they become easier to clear, but due to some weird physics, depending how Leo touches a vertical wall, it might happen that he suddenly drops at high speed without time to react, killing the run. These wheels are over half an hour into the approximately hour long run, and I would thus always be pretty tense when reaching this point.

That’s probably the biggest challenge I personally had to overcome when attempting the Hardcore run. A mental challenge. In the back of my head, I was always thinking how a single mistake during the second half of the run would send me back to the start, forcing me to run through the – frankly boring – first half of the game again, costing me upwards of half an hour to reach the first tricky section.

And that’s why at some point I started clearing the stages from the point I had died (through level select) to the final stage, trying to what I had left of the run without dying. For practice purposes, really, and to help me clear those stages during an actual run even when nerves kick in.

Unfortunately, my strategy didn’t save me from repeated chokes. I am very prone to choking in general, and it was no different here. Besides losing multiple runs to the wheels in stage 13, I also had a couple of deaths later in the run. However, nothing was as heartbreaking as losing three runs in a row on the final level. That was gut-wrentching.

All in all, I think that achieving Leo the Invincible is not a too difficult task. However, approaching this with the right mindset can definitely help in staying calm, preventing heartbreaking chokes.