Guacamelee 2 feels great to play. It’s a demanding platformer with elements drawn from the beat ‘em ups of old but executed with such precision they feel modern. The way throwing a punch can be intertwined with hoping over a pit of lava transforms every obstacle into a puzzle. Despite surface similarities and homages…
Gris is one of those great-looking indie games, the type that has no trouble hitting a Kickstarter funding goal, though in this case it was publisher Devolver Digital whose attention it drew after months of sending snippets of art and gameplay footage out onto the wilds of social media. Now it’s headed to Switch and…
Celeste is pure. Each room offers new challenges, but the solution is always the same: jump. Jumping is remixed in dozens of different, exciting ways. Celeste is the very soul of simplicity, and that’s what makes it such a beautiful game.
Sometimes you need to punch a skeleton and use their severed arm to smack a ghost in the face. Long Live the Axe is an exciting action platformer about exploring crypts and finding keys. It mixes the sensibilities of Metroid with an arcade brawler, and it’s this week’s Indie Pick.
Super Lucky’s Tale is a delightful take on Nintendo 64-era 3D platformers. The titular fox hero wanders through a mix of free-roaming 3D and 2D platforming levels, searching for coins, letters and other collectibles in a very pretty game with responsive controls. It could use a bit more personality, but otherwise it’s…
You know that feeling you get when you ride a roller coaster? The breathless anticipation, followed by the shrieking joy and terror as you plummet down to the bottom? That’s the feeling I get when I ride the pen in Super Fancy Pants Adventure, an action-packed sidescrolling platformer.
In Mushroom Heroes, I’m looking at a fast-moving platform over a bed of spikes. Timing my jump is one thing, but figuring out which character should jump first is another. There could be a monster on the other side of the ledge, and there’s only one person who uses arrows. There might be blocks to push around,…
Slime-San is the type of twitchy, lighting-quick platformer I‘m happy to spend hours dying in.
Standby is hardcore platformer by Noclip. Blazing a trail through technicolor obstacle courses, players slide along walls, dodge lasers, and leap massive gaps. It is demanding, technical, and beautiful in motion. We rush our way through in this Kotaku Plays.
Gonner is a roguelike-inspired platformer that does not care if you think it’s too hard. When you’re playing, you tend not to care, either. It’s so damn cute and smart that every punishment, even the ones you might not deserve, is easily forgiven.
Those are some wicked lighting effects. The GIF comes from the devlog for MegaSphere, an action-RPG-roguelite-platformer currently being developed for PC, and is one in a series of GIFs demonstrating a newly introduced weapon, Storm. Lots more info here.
Pleasant. If I had to sum up Ori and the Blind Forest in one word, that would be it. The new Xbox One and PC platformer looks like a magnificently drawn kids' fantasy book sprung to life. It has the lush, magical aesthetic and inoffensive charm that gamers have come to accept—and expect—from indie games.
Since late 2013, Robert Topala's Geometry Dash has been the first gaming app I load on any new iDevice I come across. Now the devilish rhythm platformer will be the first game I load on new gaming PCs as well.
In Rolling Sun, you're a rock. Well, technically, you're a god whose avatar is a rock. Point is, you control a rock and solve physics puzzles in some really fancy environments, all the while unlocking new skills. See? Already better than Rock Simulator.
Wayforward has released their last Shantae platformer, Risky's Revenge, on PC. The game, which originally came out on the DS in 2010, comes with updated, HD artwork, Steam trading cards and achievements, and controller support. The two new Shantae games, Half-Genie Hero and The Pirate's Curse, are still in development.
In a grim, dystopian future, a lone delivery girl-slash-ninja who works for her dad's pizza parlor must overcome her biggest enemy: a clique of rival, megacorp-allied delivery girl-slash-ninja.
The magical time-traveling metroidvania, Timespinner, has managed to reach its Kickstarter goal. It is currently working towards two stretch goals, a PlayStation 4 port and a PS Vita port, for which it needs to collect an additional $13,000 and $23,000, respectively, in about three weeks.
