This was my Sonic as a kid. And honestly, playing it today, the comparison feels rather akin to my impression of what the 2D Sonic games are like. You control a cable car, tasked with driving it through the level, avoiding the obstacles along the way, and what’s most important is your momentum: you can go fast, of course, but that’ll often just lead you to crash directly into something, or lose control and flip over. You can take it slow… but oftentimes you’ll need to hit something at a certain speed to get past it. It becomes a matter of knowing what’s coming ahead and knowing what speed you want to hit it at, and, as you begin to get more familiar with the level, refining your movement over and over again until you can attain the most optimal path through the level. It’s a fun loop, and levels are generally short enough that it’s loosely addicting to try, try again at each death until you eventually get the winning run. And once again Nitrome does an excellent job at mixing and matching all their different elements to make each level feel distinct from the other: even something as simple as moving left through the entire level brings so many things you have to learn and consider. I’m maybe not as into how little you get to see ahead of yourself — sometimes you won’t be able to do a section first try because you straight up won’t see it coming until you’re past the point where you can reorient/change your speed. The last level, too, is also… a rather lame way to finish the game off, supplanting what was a pretty inventive and challenging and fun climax with something much lamer, demanding a kind of ridiculous precision and not even having the courtesy to end right after the level’s most difficult point, forcing you to have to do it over and over again just to have a chance at doing the rest of the level. It… kinda sucks, and maybe eclipsed the rest of the game enough to derail my feelings about the experience as a whole but barring that this is a recommendation. It’s cute, it’s got a neat core mechanic, and it bends and tests your mastery of it in a way that really scratches that difficult game itch. Maybe not Nitrome firing on all cylinders... but it sure gets pretty close.