Super Cloudbuilt

Super Cloudbuilt is a third-person 3D parkour platformer built around one very specific feeling: the moment you stop thinking and just move. You play as Demi, a young soldier lying unconscious in a ruined hospital, and every stage you enter is a projection of her psyche, a floating sky-bound architecture of walls, voids, and hostile robots. The narrative framing is genuinely touching in its ambition, even if the story itself stays vague and underwritten. Four endings exist, but the writing rarely earns the emotional weight it reaches for. That said, the world it builds around Demi, the lonely corridors of the hub hospital, the cel-shaded void-stages glowing with that strange comic-book light, the music that several critics called absolutely incredible, all of it creates an atmosphere that lingers longer than the plot does. The movement is the game, full stop. Demi carries a rocket-powered exo-suit that enables wall-running, wall-sliding, air-dashing, and a boost system tied to a rechargeable energy meter. Pick up fuel canisters mid-run to stay airborne, or lose your charge and plummet. Jump, double-jump, boost-jump, and wall-jump layer together into a vocabulary that takes real time to learn. Early on, the controls feel loose and argumentative, and plenty of reviewers bounced off exactly here. Stick with it. The looseness resolves into a fluid, high-speed language once you stop fighting the physics and start reading the levels as puzzles in motion. There is no single path through any stage, which means the platforming sequences can unfold like a high-speed puzzle, with energy management threading every decision. Beyond the story campaign of roughly 30-plus stages spread across four thematic branches, Super Cloudbuilt stacks on 177 challenges, Ranked mode (global leaderboard time trials for each stage), and Rush mode (multi-stage runs under specific conditions). Collectible keys hidden across levels add extra lives and unlock performance upgrades, rewarding thorough explorers without gating casual progression. The challenge modes include distinct types like Pathfinder, which restricts boost usage, and Supercharge, which grants near-unlimited energy and demands you to go absolutely fast. The gun is a secondary concern for most runs, offering a regular shot, a charged shotgun blast, and a grenade shot for the assorted turrets, mines, and drone enemies scattered through each level, but combat rarely competes with movement for your attention. The lives system is the genuine sticking point. You have a limited pool per level, refills carry a cooldown timer, and losing your stock mid-attempt feels punitive in a way that the rest of the design does not. It is an arcade-era mechanic sitting inside a game whose movement vocabulary deserves the freedom to experiment and fail without a clock on recovery. Some players find it sharpens focus; others find it snaps the rhythm entirely. Your mileage will depend entirely on your tolerance for consequence-heavy repetition. On the visual side, the cel-shaded default style is striking, and alternate render modes like Painted and Sketchbook are genuinely different looks worth trying. The soundtrack, understated in most coverage but lovingly noted by a few, earns a separate listen. This is not a game that hands itself to you. It is a game that waits, arms crossed, until you learn its language, and then suddenly you are rocket-surfing over a void at absurd speed and it all makes a kind of perfect sense. For speedrunners, completionists, and anyone who finds Mirror's Edge too well-mannered, Super Cloudbuilt is a singular, handcrafted thing that most people walked past. That is their loss.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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