Cyber bunny shooter Cicadamata reminds me of nu-Marathon and Jumping Flash and has a flipping cool shotgun

Cicadamata” – yes the rogue apostrophes are part of the official title, yes I will exclude them in future because they make my thalamus itch – is one of those games that makes me incandescently sorry I didn’t spend the past 20 years studying graphics design so that I could, for example, tell you what exactly is going on with that icecream bar HUD, those landscapes of bright diodes and cubes sliding through checkerboard obelisks, those twirling android digits, that wrist-rolling Muji paperweight of a shotgun.

The best I can do is defensively blurt words like “stylish” and “stylised” and fish desperately into my decreasing pocketful of “Cool” pop and gaming precedents and trends. This looks like… a frantic arena FPS set inside the menu of a classic WipEout game? Like, er, a playable vaporwave album? I feel like we’ve invoked vaporwave a lot on here, and need to start identifying subgenres of vapors and waves. Look, why don’t you watch the trailer while I try to nail down a gloss. Usefully for my dignity, you will not be able to read the words below the video embed because your eyes will have popped out of your skull.

Hello again! Assuming you still have connected retinas, I have some updates: people on the socials have been comparing Cicadamata to nu-Marathon, and it seems the developer, flowergarden, is some kind of fan. I can certainly see a little of the upcoming Bungie game’s art direction in there, though thankfully, none of its extraction-shooteriness. As the Steam page explains, this is a mix of platformer, shooter and speedrunning game in which you “hop, skip, and jump to become one with joyeuse, until you are no longer you”. At the risk of blunting the hyperactive swagger of that Steam page, it looks like you play some kind of robot rabbit, Fawn-A2, and you’ll be “tearing flesh from bone” in “15+ freeform levels across 6 spheres”.

Hang on, robot rabbits! I know what this reminds me of: Jumping Flash! All those downward-looking ground-slams in the trailer are a dead ringer for the 1995 PS1 game, as are the chirrupy whoops and bops of the kill and platforming effects. Robbit wasn’t this lethal, though – it’s like he’s been modded into Ultrakill. Cicadamata is out in 2026.