By the heads of tha polarizing group Arcane Kids (idk, you all can make an opinion on them) comes a Fetus of a would-be game: An alpha, locked inside the internet archives while Arcane Kids fizzled out of existence to make big commerical games like... Donut County... and Neon White... :(.
Stumbled upon it after watching the postmortem/making-of of Ballistic Zen, Perfect Stride is a love-letter to the "weird shmooving" sub-genre, offsprung by the lovely engine quirks from Quake, CS and tha classics, blessing us with cool stuff like bunny-hopping and surfing. You surf (literally on a board) around, horizontally ungulate the mouse to gain more speed to be more, well, rad. Cruising through the kaleidoscopic-esque landscape, smokin a cig, just vibe. For what the game is (unfinished), it's remarkable, it's admirable. Yet, it always feels like it's about to burst from it seams. It's an alpha so i guess it's expected for the game to feel fragile. Just dont stare at it for too long, or else it's evaporate :).
Also I gotta preference this since it's nowhere really said, but
MAJOR EPILEPSY WARNING
The game starts by throwing you at a triangle of RGB pixels before barraging you with a swarm of quotes and flashing colors and the game just doesn't say like "hey yeah this might not be cool for you"

Reviewed on Jan 14, 2024


Comments