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Super Adventure Pals is much like a classic SNES platformer, with a strong debt to Super Mario Bros., but executed not with nostalgia but with freshness, as if the genre were still young.

It has an RPG element as well, with characters you talk with between levels who provide quests, and a level-up system that allows you to increase either your combat skill or health with each level. In a nice touch, increasing combat skill changes the look of your weapon, and increasing health changes the color of your hat. The dialog is light and charming, and the story, such as it is, somewhat absurd -- the villain has stolen your beloved pet rock, which is why you're pursuing him.

For a Flash title, it's quite a long, and detailed game; the graphics are quite cute, the controls responsive, and just about all the platformer tropes we've become used to are there -- wall jumps, moving platforms, spikes, one-way platforms, platforms that disappear when trodden on, and boss battles. Or to put it another way, there's nothing particularly innovative here, but the game has style and panache, and the level design is quite good.

If you like this kind of thing, I suspect you'll become quite fond of the game.