Greetings, Polygon readers! Each week, we round up the most notable new releases to streaming and VOD, highlighting the biggest and best new movies for you to watch at home.
25.01.2024 - 15:53 / rockpapershotgun.com
Who'd have thought toilet plungers would make for such good jumping assistants when it comes to propelling yourself over big, thorny brambles and angry animals? Well, clearly the trio of developers at Phoenix Blasters did, as their upcoming platformer Telmari puts them front and centre as its main form of traversal. Your titular tiny heroine can't jump very far on her own, you see, so to save her beloved sunflowers from the spiky thorns of an ominous-looking tree, she'll need to fire them around the environment to help hoist her over obstacles to get to the, err, root of the problem. I've been playing its Steam demo this morning, and while it's a little rough around the edges, there's definitely something here for those trained in the Super Meat Boy school of pixel perfect platforming.
The developers describe it as a speedrunning platformer on their Steam page, and I can see why. Each of its early levels are only a handful of seconds long if you manage to do it all in one go, and maintaining Telmari's momentum is often key to getting her over the increasingly large and thorny pits you'll encounter. Her toilet plunger arrows can be fired straight ahead or up and down at an angle, and you'll need to place them at appropriate intervals to launch her through each level's tight twists and turns like a red-haired Sonic The Hedgehog.
It's harder than it looks, though, and there are a couple of important twists that the screenshots and GIFs don't quite capture at a first glance. Each arrow will only stay in place for a short amount of time before it crumbles to nothing, you see, and you also can't lodge one into a wall when you're already flat against it. Telmari needs a bit of distance to land one on her intended target, so there's a lot of quick-thinking involved when it comes to navigating each level. You not only need to shoot them in the right place, but you also need to then jump on them all correctly before your hard work falls apart in front of you. It's a tricky mix, and demands quite a lot from its players even early on.
It makes me both excited and slightly apprehensive to see what challenges lie further on in its 100 levels when it comes to Steam on February 16th (if I'm ever able to get there, that is), but I do have a few other nitpicks from the demo that prevent it from feeling as smooth and friendly as it perhaps could be. For instance, if you die, you have to manually select Restart from the menu screen each time rather than instantly respawning, and Telmari herself could sometimes feel a little slippery under the thumbs when I was trying to navigate small ledges, leading to some (aka: several) untimely and accidental deaths.
Here's hoping the final game manages to iron out some of those
Greetings, Polygon readers! Each week, we round up the most notable new releases to streaming and VOD, highlighting the biggest and best new movies for you to watch at home.
Before the world of A Quiet Place became a quiet place, it was a LOUD PLACE. And based on the first trailer for this June’s A Quiet Place: Day One, it was particularly loud on day one, when a species of snarling echolocation-reliant aliens crashed on Earth. As teased in John Krasinski’s newspaper-clipping mosaic in the first movie, New York City went into full lockdown after the ETs arrived. Day One, which gets a big spooky trailer that will premiere to the masses at 2024 Super Bowl LVIII, chronicles that fateful day in the Big Apple.
It feels like prequel series are a dime a dozen these days, with barely a franchise that hasn’t dipped its hand into the origin story well. We know how Han Solo got his last name, how Poirot got his mustache, and soon enough, we’re probably going to find out how Gandalf got his hat.
Developer Rocksteady Studios has taken its new live-service multiplayer shooter set in the Batman: Arkham universe, Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice Leauge, offline after Early Access players hit a «story completion» bug. While the standard edition of the game doesn't hit PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC until this Friday, February 2, players who purchase the more expensive Deluxe Edition, which costs $99.99 compared to the Standard Edition's $69.99 price tag, can jump in three days early.
Rocksteady Studios has been forced to pull Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League offline just one hour into its Deluxe Edition's early access launch due to a bug that automatically completed players' games.
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The public criticism aimed at Pokemon Scarlet and Violet will influence future games in the franchise, an industry insider has said. This claim is likely to be welcome news for the vocal section of the fans who repeatedly expressed skepticism about whether their criticism of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet has been heard.
Marvel fans are curious about whether Wilson Bethel, who played Bullseye in ‘s third season, is reprising his role as the highly skilled marksman villain for the Disney Plus series. Here is what we know.
cutscenes don’t always play out in ways that are necessarily ideal, but there’s one easy technique that can help make characters look more presentable at virtually any point in the game. Unlike the first two games in the series and many similar RPG competitors, features extensive voice acting and motion capture to bring conversations to life. This can provide enormous benefits to overall immersion, but it also provides plenty of opportunities for minor things to become distracting.
is a bit of a misnomer. It certainly ups the visuals from the original 2020 release of, but it also provides a fair amount of new content. The most significant is No Return, a roguelike game mode, but it also includes three Lost Levels, galleries of concept art, new skins for characters and weapons, a developer commentary track for the main game, and a few more odds and ends. Developer commentary piques interest, and its implementation in the campaign is middling, but the Lost Levels, which also include it, are a revelation.
Details of Intel's next-gen Arrow Lake-S desktop CPU platform have been leaked and pointed out up to 24 cores on the 800-series motherboards.
We should know by now never to count out Indiana Jones. First The Last Crusade was proven to be a misnomer when it was followed up by 2008’s Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and then even that was replaced as Indy’s final adventure with 2023’s Dial of Destiny.