Any given run is a flurry of jumps and boosts and ledge-grabs and such. I am glad boost gets the colour change, but it does make the lack of feedback for double jump a little frustrating. Both boost and double jump can only be used once before touching down or ramming certain objects. There’s just one little gap on the feedback front which is the double jump. Coupling the visual indicator with the central point of focus is nothing short of genius. At any given moment, the player is staring at the character model. In a chaotic genre like a precision platformer, visibility of information is imperative. If Josie is wearing yellow, you can boost, but if she’s all dressed in blue, the boost is tapped out. Let’s consider the boost function and its associated visual character feedback. To Sunblaze’s credit, it does a good job. In Sunblaze, as with many games, feedback is essential. However, those slim chances and dopamine hits are earned through the labour of dozens of gory failures that preceded. The slim chances the game gives you to successfully defeat a room ensure that each win feels like a truly euphoric achievement. It reflects the central tug of war that defines my personal enjoyment of games with this kind of challenging streak.

It’s a system that makes the margin for error exceedingly narrow. These kinds of intersections and circumstances tend to compound and domino. Some obstacles, such as the explosives, require jumping onto and off of the object in quick succession. You may clamber onto a platform, you may not. You can hit these marks, though it can be unreliable. The jumps and double jumps are barely high enough to reach platforms. The jump, for example, falls a little short. However, in places, it doesn’t quite hit the mark.

It hits a reasonably polished standard for the genre. All things considered, Sunblaze does an admirable job. So much work in programming and design comes down to polish and user-friendliness. It’s worth considering that for as simple as the genre may seem, platformers are hard to pull off. “The slim chances the game gives you to successfully defeat a room ensure that each win feels like a truly euphoric achievement.” This is the kind of game with so much going on, that at times the best thing you can do is follow the rhythm and work on instinct. Each obstacle has audio that can clue you into when these triggers get pulled or help you follow the “rhythm” of timed obstacles. The sound design also plays quite a big role in navigating the levels. Obstacles can and will be triggered at the slightest provocation. Even so, it’s often surprising how narrow the margins are. Obstacles have, for the most part, clear demarcations between safety and death. The simplicity of design is echoed in the presentation. A “mine” themed level, for instance, introduces area-of-effect explosives. Even in the first few sections, where all personality has been sterilised, there’s still a sense of this being the “tutorial” world. Each chapter draws in some new ideas, which match up well with the level’s themes. There is some variety in how you messily exit this plane of existence. That’s an average death every 7 seconds.” “…I died 6287 times, over a 13-hour campaign. You can jump, you can dash, but above all else, you can just get physically obliterated so so many times. This is a precision platformer with some cool ideas. If you watch the trailer above, truly you will understand a lot of what the game is working with. Sunblaze, in many ways, is a very straightforward title. It’s definitely full of controller clutching tension, though it lacks the comprehensiveness of Celeste’s gameplay mods. I personally love a good marriage of story and gameplay, something Celeste excels at, whereas Sunblaze tilts more towards the challenging gameplay side of the spectrum. It is a somewhat balanced comparison, with Sunblaze falling a little shy of the lofty heights reached by the 2018 precision platformer.

Sunblaze is inspired by Celeste, and as a fan, I saw the connection between the two instantly. If you’re not into difficult games, this might not be the title for you. However, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a rough time playing through this one. Sunblaze is a handcrafted, precision platformer that boasts an ability to “keep you dying for hours and hours.” It’s a good game and one I happily recommend.

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