platformer

Gothic platformer Love Eternal turns Celeste into a full-bore psychological horror game

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The precision-platformer is a torturous genre at the best of times, and now developers Brlka and publishers Ysbryd Games have seen fit to combine it with Silent Hill. Their forthcoming Love Eternal is the story of Maya, a girl whisked off to a “castle built of bitter memories” by a weird, lonely god, and obliged to make her way “through over 100 screens filled with spikes, lasers, switches, and traps”.

When not getting spiked or lasered, Maya appears to spend her days in a kind of metaphorical suburban household. Here, she will contend with things like people crawling on the ceiling and coming over all Babadook. Maya does have one major advantage: the ability to reverse gravity. Watch her put that ability to use in the new trailer.

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Neva review: a Ghibli-esque platformer with tight visuals and loose combat

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Neva is the Sophomore effort from Nomada Studio, who you may remember from their beautiful, dreamy platformer Gris. Neva is not a literal sequel to Gris, but it certainly seems to be one in a spiritual sense, as it, too, is a floaty hand-illustrated platformer fond of metaphor. Neva introduces some drama, with combat and a health system (if not actual stakes because of near-instant restarts), and although neither the platforming nor combat are precise enough to be neat bedfellows, I think we should be willing to forgive most of the mess.

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Buster Keatoncore platformer Silent Sadie harkens back to the roaring, jumping, sliding twenties

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Credit where it’s due to Silent Sadie, whose Steam Next Fest demo is out now: even within the confines of a 2.5D platformer, I don’t think it could lean any harder into its love of pratfallin’, piano-tinklin’ 1920s comedy cinema.

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Mask Quest is a deceptively gimmicky platformer where you must press A to breathe while avoiding the cops

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Out 17th October on Steam, Mask Quest is a platform game in which you hold and release a button to refill your character’s lungs while dodging police batons, bullets, gas grenades and drones. Neglect to do so, and you’ll pop your clogs. It’s the kind of mechanical tomfoolery you’d associate with Peter Molydeux, but in this case, it’s all the fine work of Stephen’s Sausage Roll developer increpare and Quadrant developer undef. The developers have somehow gotten 50 levels out of this meme-ish premise, and it looks like quite an elaborate hop-and-bopper with some less-cheerful political overtones. Here’s the trailer.

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Print isn’t dead, insists origami platformer Hirogami, in which you fight a digital Blight

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What exact percentage of unacknowledged irony is it when a digital game wants to sing the praises of paper-based art in the context of a story about fighting off a “blight” of digital creatures? If you were serious about that moral, Hirogami, you’d actually be printed on hammered-down treemulch. I decry thee, pretender! You’re one of the very electronic critters you want me to battle. On the other hand, you do let me transform into an origami armadillo which can roll around like a pinball. Here’s the announcement trailer.

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