I’ve spent decades of my life obsessing over 3D platformers. It all started with Super Mario 64, and will only end when I’m buried under six feet of dirt next to a Comic Sans adorned tombstone. The problem with spending your entire existence with a genre though is that you get pretty good at jumping about, and when that genre is aimed at children there’s a bit of a lack of challenge in your collectathons. Thankfully there’s one team making 3d platformers for the veterans, starting with the 2021 hit Demon Turf. Now its sequel is almost here, and Demon Tides is a hell of a glow up based on the first area at least.
This sequel continues the story of Beebz, the magical transforming demon girl who defeated a demon king. Now a queen, she receives a mysterious letter from her dad Ragnar asking to meet up. The journey to this meeting quickly ends in disaster, and you’re plonked in the ocean with islands and collectibles as far as the eye can see. The characters are charming and the story is engaging, but let’s be honest we’re all here to do some jumping around.
What really impressed me about Demon Turf all those years ago was the moveset of Beebz, and Demon Tides takes it to a whole other level. From the very first tutorial area you’re shown all the wild ways you can chain together your abilities to maximise your distance, and it makes you feel like a badass speed running god after all of five minutes. You can double jump, dash and glide, but the order in which you do these is important for how you want to move through the air. In most of the earlier areas you aren’t required to completely master these controls, but are definitely encouraged to play around with your skills so you can use them for the tougher challenges that lie ahead.
The gliding ability uses one of Beebz’ transformation abilities, but it’s not the only one you have access to. Another particularly handy shapeshifting skill is turning into a snake, which for some reason makes you incredibly fast. You lose most of your platforming abilities, but can go ridiculously quickly across land and water. This is great for any race objectives you find yourself facing, and of course to explore the vast ocean of platforming goodness.
The biggest change of all in Demon Tides is the scope of the game, which is really impressive. The game takes place across a sprawling ocean, which has a bunch of islands full of platforming challenges to complete. Each island has a plethora of collectibles you’ll need for various reasons, and exploring to grab everything is easy thanks to the scan button which points an arrow to your nearest shiny doodad. It’s the perfect way to have an open world that’s broken up into manageable chunks, and is nice and simple to clean up of collectibles.
The best thing about all the collectibles you’ll grab is how meaningful they are. The most important are gold gears, which are essentially how you progress. There’s also a currency you can use to buy trinkets at the store, and these can be equipped to massively change how you get around or how survivable you are. I used a health regeneration trinket and one that boosted my jump height for this early chunk of the game, but by beating bosses and progressing further you can also unlock way more slots and likely massively change your platforming proficiency.
Even though you have all the quality of life mechanics and perks you can equip, don’t go thinking Demon Tides is in any way easy. There was one specific challenge room which took me close to an hour to beat, which involved flipping gravity around and having to do some precision platforming for an extended period without dying. It’s this occasional level of brutality which I so often find missing from my 3D platformers, and it’s absolutely a refreshing change of pace.
I was already excited to play through all of Demon Tides this year, but after this extended look at the game I’m even more ready to collect every last doodad from this vast oceanic archipelago. The evolution of the series from Demon Turf is seriously impressive, and very few platformers have controls that feel this good with the level of depth on display here.
Demon Tides is coming to PC on February 19th.
