First things first: It's a free demo, stop reading this and go play it.
No separate launcher, no account creation, it's like half a gigabyte.
Just as a singleplayer game should be. Go, have fun.
Now for the actual review.
There's two types of platformers, those with a million moves where you only need one, and those where a move gets you to a million places if you know how to use it. This one's the latter.
As most platformers have double-jumps while some others have a glide, this one has wallrunning as the defining movement you can do all the time. The mindset is a little different, but it's easily learned while playing.
Doesn't stop at that, though.
There's rails you can jump on, which will let you go faster and faster. There's propellors which you can hook onto for a free launch. There's weird ball-things stuck in the ground you can use to catapult yourself with. Grapple onto vines, jump off and use your rod to swing off a ceiling hook and preserve momentum with wallrunning to reach that high overhang, all in one go! Maybe use a slippery slope downwards to gain massive momentum?
Speaking of:
The speed of your character actually matters; jumping on a grind rail will NOT reset your current speed, velocity WILL transfer over to the rail. It'll also be transferred over to anything you do that keeps you moving!
Now, for the level select:
Each "level" is a place in a large open desert, if you want to switch what "level" you're playing, all you have to do is blow a whistle and hook onto one of the little guys which'll pop out of the sand, allowing you to go there in a pretty short timeframe. It's technically an open world because of this, but it really doesn't feel like it, which is nicely done.
TL;DR: Distant place that looks cool? You can go there without any loading screen decently quick!
But what about the levels themselves?
Each level focuses on one type of movement primarily, one will focus on grind rails while another likes to have a lot of slopes.
Levels will eventually become harder, but still solvable if you think about them and look ahead. The more levels you complete, the better you'll get at solving the next ones. Also worth noting that when you've collected most of the items, the compass will start flashing parts of itself, blinking faster as you get near the last few missed collectibles.
A bit casual? Don't worry, it's not hardcore platformer levels of hard either, it's also very fair with failure.
It's somewhat hard to find bad stuff to talk about, but if i had to pick one thing, it's the fact that there's no shortcut rod in the big tower with all the ropes, considering you have to climb it several times for a 100%.
For visuals, it's a very obvious pastiche to older mascot platformers. It knows how to pull it off, considering it does way more than simply keeping graphics low-poly. The textures are actually detailed compared to the poly count, which not many people know was actually done quite a lot. Combined with the proper use of (vibrant) color theory, it really gets the job done. On top of all that, there's a large world with distant structures, which makes you wonder what's truly out there. Except that unlike all the older mascot platformers, you can actually go there and it's a whole damn level in itself. They knew exactly what they had to do and went for it, which i'm very, very glad for.
TL;DR²: Great platformer which does a whole bunch of things just right, all the way from gameplay to visuals.
Roughly 12 hours of playtime. Hit me like a brick when i got 100% completion and realised this was just the demo.
