Kalanoro

Kalanoro's best idea shows up between levels, not in them. The platforming gets you across Lemuria, but the thing that kept the nine hours moving was the taxi-brousse, the battered tour bus where the lemur musicians you rescue live, eat and complain. Looking after them is a real system rather than a menu: a hungry or unhappy band member plays worse on stage, and a band that plays worse grows the fanbase more slowly. It gives the running and jumping a reason to stop every so often, which this kind of collectathon usually forgets to do.

Hair, frying pans and a reasonable amount of restraint

Kalakely fights with hair-based powers and whatever improvised weapons turn up, and the combat is quick, readable and not especially deep. A frying pan is funnier than it is tactical. That is mostly fine, because the game seems to know it: encounters are short, and none of the nine hours turned into a grind of repeating the same arena. The dash and the climb carry the movement, and both feel good once you stop fighting the camera.

Band members recruited

6

Stages completed

14

Falls into the same pit

11

A folklore setting that is not just a skin

The Malagasy folklore here is doing structural work: the witch Raneny, the lemur artists and the road-trip framing all come from the setting rather than being layered over a generic platformer. The studio is a Madagascar-based debut team, and the hand-drawn look and the music, which is the real centrepiece, make that specific. Several of the guest songs are good enough to leave the game running on the bus screen just to listen.

Where it slips

The launch build has rough edges. V-Sync ships off, which produced visible tearing until we turned it on ourselves, and the lighting in a couple of the forest stages looks flat and strange next to the hand-drawn art. The settings menu hung once and needed a restart. There is also only one save slot, which is a real annoyance in a game that rewards replaying stages to find what you missed. None of this broke a run, but all of it is the kind of thing a day-one patch should have caught.

The platforming itself is competent rather than inventive. If you come from the best of the genre, most stages will feel like pleasant variations on moves you already know.

The verdict

Worth it if you want something warm, funny and musical with a distinctive setting, and you are happy to play it on a controller. At nine hours it has not worn out its welcome, and the band-management layer is the reason to see it through. Wait a patch or two if technical polish matters more to you than charm.