If you don’t have anything else on this morning, perhaps you’d like to fill the life of a small clay golem up with purpose. I cannot be certain, but at present I believe that the easiest way to do this is with the demo for Tall Trails. It reminds me of playing old N64 3D platformers round my mate Liam’s house between watching VHS recordings of Keenan and Kel, which is a nice place to be. It’s also got Breath Of The Wild’s stamina wheel and freeform clamouring, although you don’t need to worry about that too much because you can stuff chilli peppers into your boot and use it like a jetpack.
Watch on YouTube
Tall Trails is very generous in many of the best ways. It’s generous with the sonorous cheer of its colour palette and wobbly strumfoolery of its music. Most of all, it’s generous with its movement tricks. You pluck peppers and sunflowers and mushrooms from the soil and stuff them in the boot you carry on your back. Spend a mushroom for a big jump. Use a chilli pepper to rocket off to a better life in the sky for several seconds. Commandeer a sunflower to fly, watching the individual petals tick down to mark your remaining air time.
It’s also just rhetorically doofy in ways that make me smile.
Here are some features:
- Blast off with your Rocket Boot! Use items as fuel in your Rocket Boot to blast yourself upwards! Each item has different powers: jet pack with hot peppers, hover with whirligigs, or swing on webs with spiders!
- Explore a weird & wonderful world! Summit mountains, help out at camp, and search for treasure. Traverse 5 unique biomes, each full of new and exciting ways to move and explore.
- Find your purpose in life! Every golem has a purpose… but not you? What’s up with that??
- Customize your look & build! Find & upgrade powerful badges to increase your platforming abilities to unreasonable levels! Or just focus on collecting hats!
- Tons of Replayability! Once you’re done with the main story, start your adventure anew in a randomly generated world. Explore islands no one else has seen before!
If you like the demo, the full game is out next month, August the 4th. It’s made by Brady Soglin. Brady Soglin is an anagram for Yr Sad Boglin. Don’t be sad, Boglin. Play some Tall Trails. It’s very nice.