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Cloudbuilt is Titanfall parkour for speedrunners

Cloudbuilt has a Borderlands-ish art style which is very pretty, if you like that sort of thing.

Cloudbuilt is a game about momentum and optimism, which when you think about it are pretty much drawn from the same place. It’s about speedrunning your way through a series of abstract environments populated by walls (for running on), robots (for dodging) and infinite drops (for hopping over). It is validation for those of us who spent far too many years jumping about Quake. It is the fever dream pilots have after long Titanfall parkour sessions.

It looks like this.

Remember that ace Mirror’s Edge DLC, which swapped out its whitewashed city for primary colours in the sky? Cloudbuilt is that, but moving at such high speeds that its camera can’t keep up and grudgingly decides to be third-person.

You’ll sport a handy rocket-powered exoskeleton, best used to annoy the laws of physics. Otherwise fatal hazards can be avoided, would-be murderous assailants can be navigated – and if you manage to do it all in the same run, you might trouble the leaderboards.

It’s about 20 multi-routed, secret-secreted levels long, and features four alternate endings. When’s it out? Er, two weeks ago, on Steam. We missed this one.

To be frank, I thought we’d written about it before – but I was remembering Spire, the Dustforce follow-up inspired by top Quake players. D’you think we’re in for a whole speedrunning spin-off genre borne of breakneck FPS games?