Gibbon: Beyond The Trees' demo has some real rad backflips

rockpapershotgun.com:

When Broken Rules announced their colourful 2D swingathon Gibbon: Beyond The Trees at the beginning of February, I was immediately on board. Finally, I could live out my dream of sliding down tree branches like Disney's Tarzan, all while playing another gorgeous adventure from the makers of Old Man's Journey and Secrets Of Raetikon. Admittedly, I was surprised when I saw it was going to be part of this week's Steam Next Fest. The developers have said upfront that the game is only around an hour long, and with this week's demo stretching to a generous 20 minutes, part of me's now quite sad that I've already seen a third of it in action.

The other part of me, however, is absolutely thrilled, and it's all down to my gibbon's sick, speed-boosting backflips.

Like Graham noted in his original announcement post, I couldn't quite work out how Gibbon: Beyond The Trees would feel in the hands based on the trailer above. It's being made for Apple Arcade as well as PC and Switch right now, so I knew the controls must be fairly simple to accommodate Apple's touch remote. Happily, Broken Rules have included a variety of control options on PC. With a controller, everything's mapped to the trigger buttons, while keyboard users can either use the arrow keys, WASD or a combination of the two. I was playing on a gamepad, and you run by holding down the left trigger, swing by holding down the right, and when it's time to jump it's simply a matter of releasing your current trigger to catapult them skyward.

Running is slower than swinging, but hold left trigger on a down slope and your gibbon will enter that aforementioned Tarzan slide, cruising down branches at lightning speed. It's all very satisfying stuff, combining the