A time trial parkour game in a brutalist world, as a premise, is hard to beat. Opposite to Mirror’s Edge in almost every way, its approach to parkour, one based on Counter Strike’s bunny hopping, is a momentum-based platformer with no ties to realism whatsoever, a strictly gamey approach to system and level design.
What starts as a game where you just run forward, with occasional crouching, climbing, wall jumping and wall riding, rapidly fades away: the less time you are in the ground, the faster you go. And suddenly you’re in the flow. Bunny hopping comes in, you discover coyote jumping, bounce off every wall and now that place which was barely out of reach is easily accessible. But too much momentum and you’ll just fly past the platforms you need to step on and jump from in order to keep going, which creates an interesting back and forth that prevents the game from feeling unidimensional.
The levels, first closely resemblant to actual places, at some point embrace that brutalism in a more abstract, sculptural way, and what started as a city, a bunch of streets, buildings, rooms, doors and windows that you pass through becomes a bunch of rocks and concrete slabs weirdly put together -sometimes even floating- resulting in oddly interesting level layouts that would be impossible otherwise. And it manages to do so while being cohesive both visually and thematically, with a dense, at times suffocating atmosphere even in places that seem to exist in a vacuum, floating in the sky.
All of this I adore, but what prevents the game from excellingis that the selection of levels feels somewhat inconsistent, not only because some are better than others but because the approach to level design varies throughout, a few including pathfinding or a variety of gimmicks and others just structured in a way that prevents that flow from even happening, with constant slowdowns and/or counterintuitive changes of direction.