Since this is something that I only got to play on a perpetually open arcade cabinet at Magfest 2024, I'm going to hold off on scoring this until the console release comes out in a few months and I can really dig into the mechanics, but from what I've played this is a really fun arcade platformer with a pretty high skill ceiling for high scores and speedrunning. The pixel art was bright and charming and the style was very reminiscent of GBA/DS era platformers like Starfy, although a friend of mine said that it was anti-aliased to hell and back so maybe it's not as good visually as I thought it was (apparently the game was originally a 2001 mobile game before it got an arcade port, so that kind of makes sense).I also can't really speak about the soundtrack since I could only hear a bit of it over the other cabinets. The levels themselves were fairly short, but that pick up and play nature makes it more suited for an arcade environment than having longer stages would. The game is split into several "worlds" of three or four stages and a boss, and there are a few branching paths placed throughout the world map so you can only play about 1/3 of the stages in the game on a single playthrough. The level design is just okay and has the same kind of abstract platform placement as an Umihara Kawase game, but where the game really shines is in the gameplay.

You control a girl named Nico who has a bright yellow umbrella. She can use this umbrella for everything from melee attacks (a basic 3-4 hit combo) and floating through the air to reflecting projectiles and flinging herself through the environment. The mechanic that makes the game particularly fun is her ability to stick her umbrella into any surface, either through a melee attack or the umbrella throw that goes about halfway across the screen. Once her umbrella is stuck into a surface, Nico can fling herself in either direction perpendicular to her umbrella. She'll fly in a straight line for a while before the player regains control. You can chain this together with other actions like the umbrella throw or the float to breeze through stages, or you can use it to get to out of the way places to gather collectibles and increase your score. There were multiple times throughout my three playthroughs that I thought about ways I could chain Nico's abilities together to get through a stage faster or how I could reasonably do something stupid like beat a whole stage without touching the ground by bouncing off of all the enemies and flinging myself around to fill in the gaps. I doubt that the game can be pushed as far as something like Umihara Kawase or other physics-based platformers, but I always felt like I was playing way below the skill ceiling, which was pretty great. I kept figuring out new techniques and ways to get through stages and still barely felt like I was scratching the surface of what I could actually do. Because of that, the rerelease went from something I didn't even know existed to one of my most anticipated 2024 releases in a matter of hours. I'm super excited to see just how far I can push the mechanics of the game and to actually give it the time it deserves instead of a few hours over the course of a weekend.