Sometimes I just want to take indie game developers by the shoulders and be like, dude, the reason big, chunky pixel art is so popular in precision platformers is because having movement and collision snap to a relatively coarse grid makes it easy to sight-read the hitboxes. It's not just for show. If your precision platformer uses chunky pixel art but doesn't have movement and collision snap to the grid, you've fundamentally misunderstood the functional reasons for your aesthetic choices. You want me to make pixel-perfect jumps in an engine where whether or not I get spiked depends on sub-pixel bullshit? Fuck off.

Precision puzzle platformer which initially appears to have a cliché "it was all a dream" ending involving the protagonist being found unconscious by the side of the road, except it's actually everything after your first "death" that was a coma hallucination, with different endings depending on how far you got before dying for the first time. You can tell whether you're still on the deathless route because certain of the game's more fantastical movement gimmicks do not appear in the "real world", obliging the player to devise alternative solutions for many puzzles.

The fun thing about following speedrun progression for obscure precision platformers is that nearly without fail there's some random Youtuber out there whose PB is a full minute faster than what speedrun.com claims is the world record, but refuses to submit it to the leaderboard because she believes it's not a competition.

You wouldn't think that I'd be brain-poisoned by video game speedrunning jargon, given that I didn't get into speedrunning until I was in my 30s, and surely that's too old for anything to have a formative influence upon one's vocabulary, but you'd be wrong: I am now cursed with the inescapable knowledge of how much the names of many 1990s indie rock groups and albums sound like the the names of obtuse precision platformer speed tech. You could tell me that "Neutral Milk Hotel" is the name of a trick in the current Celeste any%, and if I didn't already know that's a band I wouldn't question it.

Precision platformer where the central movement gimmick is a sci-fi ray gun whose secondary fire mode materialises a rope connecting the point it's fired from with the point it's aimed at. Every NPC has a unique reaction to being told what the gun is called, and the player character can't figure out why.

Today's aesthetic: when a new precision platformer drops and you can tell just from watching the trailer that its aerial physics suck ass.

I'm the last person to demand realism in video game character design, but it does kind of bug me that when people try to make a puzzle-platformer character sexy they almost invariably go straight for the boobs. Like, the ass is right there. We are talking about a character whose standing high jump is six times her own height – all that gluteal power's gotta come from somewhere!