In all my not-that-long career as a person who judges games with big numbers, I’ve only ever given out a single 10. Although that may be more of a statement about my editor’s reluctance to award any game such a high honour, and testimony to my stubbornness in that one case, I stand by that score. In case you can’t tell from the honking great title, that game is Kalimba – an underrated gem that deserved far more of a fanfare, especially given that it was made by a studio within 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Microsoft’s own ranks.

Kalimba is my only perfect score, and for damn good reason. On paper it’s nothing colossally exciting – a simple 2D puzzle-platformer that has ꦦyou controlling two characters at once – but as soon as you get the hang of the deftness and intense concentration the game requires, you&r▨squo;re hooked. The only bad thing I can say about it, other than the fact that it made me curse like a 12-year-old on Xbox Live, was that there wasn’t enough of it.

Sadly, the studio behind Kalimba was shuttered at the same time as Lionhead – in the same press release, in fact – and poor Press Play’s demise was buried under stories about how great Fable 2 was. Which, of course, is true – but so w꧑as Kalimba. (And Max & the Curse of Brotherhood, Press Play’s other, also excellent release. They had a great track record, did Press Play.) But I woꦬn’t forget the time I spent with Kalimba, partly because it was a wonderful experience and partly because I’m incredibly bitter all my friends currently look down on me from their comfortable positions atop the online leaderboard. So smug.

At the heart of Kalimba is a simple design choice – to use “trixels”, triangular pixels, rather than the standard boring square ones. The slight change in appearance this causes makes a ꩲbig difference to the feel of the game, imbuing otherwise confident but fairly conventional platforming with the kind of charm I p🍷robably raved on about in my gushing ten-out-of-ten review.

Tiny black triangles bounce around pretending to be lava, ice glistens in triangular blue crystalline structures and your character pieces themselves a🦹re like something out of Jumanji – brightly-coloured totem blocks that grimace and gurn as you tumble over gaps and somersault across the level.

All of this gorgeous chaos is presided over by Hoebear, a relaxed, drawling magical bear that guides you through the tricks and tips and secret levels, instructing and cajoling you as you go. The goal is to get to the end of the level without dying – standard platf🌳orming fare – but colour-coded segments, collectibles, and various shape-shifting make this a difficult feat. I’ve decided to be satisfied with merely reaching the finish line in one piece, but the leaderboard makes it clear that my friends are much more perfection-minded than I. A similarly competitive person might take this for a challenge. I do not.

Instead, I choose to revel in Kalimba’s unique take on a genre I don’t really like all that much. I generally find platformers tedious, repetitive, simplistic and far too difficult to keep my attention for long. I think they can be needlessly challenging and – well, this isn’t about my disdain for the platforming genre, it’s about the one that showed me I&rsqu𒁏o;d been too quick to judge. Kalimba impressed me so much that it became one of my favourite games despite being one 🌜of my least favourite genres, and that’s hard to do.

I st🦄ill find myself restarting levels over and over again, not because I am failing but because I can see exactly what I need to do𝔍 and I’m merely struggling to get the jump timings just right. I imagine it’s a bit like that with ballet, but ballerinas don’t have to collect 70 hard-to-reach triangles as they flit around the stage – although I haven’t seen a ballet in a while, so I could be wrong.

Kalimba has one of those deliciously devilish difficulty curves that makes eve🍌rything look easy but keeps perfection just out of reach, leaving you grasping and trying and failing and striving for the game’s approval in a way that could be considered Freudian🐼. It’s so beautifully balanced that frustrating mechanics always feel like the price to pay for fun, rather than a hassle or a tedious chore. And when you get it right, you get a gold star – or a gold totem piece, at least.