Kalimba is a little-remembered 2D puzzle platformer that originally came out in the dark days of the early Xbox One, ten years ago now. I hadn't heard of it until it was mentioned as one of Matthew's choices on the Back Page Pod's Games of 2014 episode, after which I added it to my wishlist.

You play as two animated totem heads traversing 20-odd levels from left to right, the gimmick being that you control both of them simultaneously - if one moves, so does the other - and pressing X magically swaps their positions. Increasingly fiendish obstacles are then placed in your path to overcome. These start with things like different-coloured lava flows - harmless for one head but deadly for the other - but before long all sorts of tricks from the platforming playbook are added to the mix: insta-kill enemies that chase you, disappearing platforms, bounce pads, gliding, inverted gravity, and so on - all things you've seen before, but which feel novel by virtue of the fact that you have to get past them while controlling both of your avatars at the same time. Imagine a game based around the cherry power-up from Mario 3D World that duplicates Mario, but flattened into two dimensions and with some very demanding platforming thrown in, and you'll be on the right track.

I liked Kalimba a lot for three of the four hours it took me to finish it: the puzzles and platforming felt challenging but doable, and the creativity on show often made me smile. It also does that thing lots of good puzzle games do where it presents you with something that seems, at first, to be entirely insurmountable, but then you slowly rub away at it and your route becomes clear. It looked sharp and colourful on the OLED Deck, too - you wouldn't know it was a decade old.

As the game went on, however, the stages became increasingly exacting and death came very, very easily. Any sense of flow and momentum suffered as a result when I spent so much of the later levels trying and failing the same puzzles over and over again until I eventually squeaked through. Checkpointing is, thankfully, very generous, allowing you to incrementally progress towards the goal, but it was here that the game became a bit too precise for me. In fact, restarting the same sections over and over reminded me of the more technical challenges in some of the Trails motocross games, the ones where you have to perfectly enter a particular string of commands to get up a ramp or jump across a gap, and then try, try and try again when you inevitably cock it up. I wouldn't put it in the same masocore bracket as something like Super Meat Boy or Celeste, but it's not a million miles away.

I got to the credits, at least. You're encouraged to re-play levels in order to reduce your total number of deaths in each one, being rewarded with what are essentially different medals for doing so, and there are some challenge modes included, but I felt like I'd seen enough by the end. It was interesting to play a largely forgotten gem, even one that was published by Microsoft themselves, so I am, as ever, indebted to the Back Page boys for bringing it to my attention. If you like your platformers and you've got the patience for it, check it out. It doesn't go on sale that often, however (on Steam, anyway), so may be one to go on the wishlist.