There is some variety in how you messily exit this plane of existence. Each chapter draws in some new ideas, which match up well with the level’s themes. Even in the first few sections, where all personality has been sterilised, there’s still a sense of this being the “tutorial” world. Subsequent sections get a bit wilder. A “mine” themed level, for instance, introduces area-of-effect explosives.

The simplicity of design is echoed in the presentation. Scenes morph from one room to the next. Obstacles have, for the most part, clear demarcations between safety and death. Even so, it’s often surprising how narrow the margins are. Obstacles can and will be triggered at the slightest provocation. The sound design also plays quite a big role in navigating the levels. Each obstacle has audio that can clue you into when these triggers get pulled or help you follow the “rhythm” of timed obstacles. It can really sync you up to the world. This is the kind of game with so much going on, that at times the best thing you can do is follow the rhythm and work on instinct.

It’s worth considering that for as simple as the genre may seem, platformers are hard to pull off. So much work in programming and design comes down to polish and user-friendliness. All things considered, Sunblaze does an admirable job. It hits a reasonably polished standard for the genre. However, in places, it doesn’t quite hit the mark. The jump, for example, falls a little short.

The jumps and double jumps are barely high enough to reach platforms. You can hit these marks, though it can be unreliable. You may clamber onto a platform, you may not. Some obstacles, such as the explosives, require jumping onto and off of the object in quick succession. These kinds of intersections and circumstances tend to compound and domino. It’s a system that makes the margin for error exceedingly narrow. It reflects the central tug of war that defines my personal enjoyment of games with this kind of challenging streak. The slim chances the game gives you to successfully defeat a room ensure that each win feels like a truly euphoric achievement. However, those slim chances and dopamine hits are earned through the labour of dozens of gory failures that preceded.

In Sunblaze, as with many games, feedback is essential. To Sunblaze’s credit, it does a good job. Let’s consider the boost function and its associated visual character feedback. If Josie is wearing yellow, you can boost, but if she’s all dressed in blue, the boost is tapped out. It is a frankly brilliant idea. In a chaotic genre like a precision platformer, visibility of information is imperative. At any given moment, the player is staring at the character model. Coupling the visual indicator with the central point of focus is nothing short of genius.

There’s just one little gap on the feedback front which is the double jump. Both boost and double jump can only be used once before touching down or ramming certain objects. I am glad boost gets the colour change, but it does make the lack of feedback for double jump a little frustrating. Any given run is a flurry of jumps and boosts and ledge-grabs and such. It’s hard to remember exactly what resources you have at your disposal and it can be hard to track when resources replenish if there’s no indicator. Many times the lack of double jump feedback was exacerbated by how often I worried about getting “up there” rather than “over there”. It wasn’t always a major issue, but there were times I would realise I had no double jump at a rather inopportune moment.

I appreciate the inclusion of difficulty options. Difficulty options in my mind need to be in more games. The ability to modulate the type and severity of certain challenges really helps you dial in an experience. Sunblaze would occasionally bounce past my threshold, so I decided rather than smashing through this wall headfirst, I’d manipulate the options a little. Sunblaze’s difficulty options lie on a spectrum of impact on the gameplay. The lower-end changes are, for example, higher jumps and double jumps. Of course, this isn’t always helpful, given some levels have low ceilings. On the other end of the spectrum, some options feel like they overcorrect. Invincibility, infinite double jump (i.e. “The Kirby”), and infinite dash all feel like they trivialise a lot of the rooms.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get as much utility from the difficulty options as I would have liked. I spent most of the game with them off. The exception was the last two or three chapters where higher jumps essentially fixed my previous issues. What I really wanted though was more finite control. Often, it felt like lowering the difficulty would swing the needle a bit too far in the other direction, making things too easy. This is most notable in running the easy version of Sunblaze in “Zen Mode”.

If you really want to, you can just play through the story with Zen Mode. The idea is it lets you play the story with only a few levels, most of which are rather easy. How easy? Well, remember how it took 13 hours to clear the regular campaign? I finished Zen Mode in 36 minutes. Hell, I could easily have cleared that with 0 deaths.

Zen Mode’s difficulty has two main side effects on the campaign. Firstly, the story, as we shall discuss, isn’t terribly exciting. It’s definitely not awful but it’s certainly not a solid enough foundation for an entire game mode. In Sunblaze, the gameplay will be and should be the main focus point. The other issue is that difficulty is so core to the game’s design, removing it entirely doesn’t play to Sunblaze’s strength. As much as the game was arduous, you can at least sail on the euphoria of achievement from rolling credits. However, chopping out the challenge undermines your ability to get the whole experience.