The Most Delightful Game Of The Year

Runner2 will give you that super-happy old time feeling.

Remember the feeling that the old Nintendo games produced in you? It wasn't just adrenaline, or just aesthetic pleasure, or just the thrill of discovery. It was some combination of the three, and it felt like, well, delight.

A lot of the independent games of the past five years have made delight their goal, and I'm happy to report that the most delightful game I've played this year is now playable on basically every modern platform (PC, Mac, Wii U, PS3, Xbox 360). It's called Bit.Trip Presents...Runner2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien, but for our purposes let's just call it Runner2, yes?

Here is what happens in Runner2: against a preposterously delightful background, while listening to preposterously delightful music, you direct your ever-running, preposterously delightful little alien avatar (who appears to be a pickle wearing a welder's mask) through a series of jumps, slides, trampolines and sundry other obstacles. That's it. It's a rhythm game, so the better you match your moves to the beat of that soundtrack, the more precise and successful you'll be.

It's on sale this weekend on Steam. If you like music, cute things, games, cartoons, challenges, or fun, you should play it.

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