It’s pretty uncommon to see a non-established platformer release without a gimmick attached to it. Hue was built around shifting colors, Klaus had a unique narrative focus and acknowledged the player’s existence, and The Sun and the Moon was all about reversing gravity. All of these games succeeded due to bringing something new to the table, while Shu, a new title from developers Secret Lunch and Coatsink, is a platformer where you play as a cute bird (named Shu) who just wants to make his way from the left side of the screen over to the right.
You know what" It’s actually very refreshing. While other games are trying innovate in the platformer space, Shu helped remind me why I love the genre so much in the first place. It’s the feeling of making an exhilarating jump by an inch, avoiding dangerous spikes, and collecting plenty of objects that are cover levels from head to toe. It’s able to do this for one reason: every aspect of Shu is incredibly polished. From the gorgeous 2.5D graphics to actually controlling Shu, everything just feels right. It’s pretty incredible to create a game that feels second-nature from the title screen onward, but that is what the developers have done here. While there isn’t one particular mechanic that stands out about Shu, it does feature a smorgasbord of platforming moves that almost seems like a history on the genre. Shu’s skill-set is pretty limited as he can only jump and ...