Telmari's toilet plunger arrows are one of my new favourite platforming tricks

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