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Group 5 - PILE OF SHAME - You can finish it in one day - Refunct
Forget a day, with its massive potential for speedrun optimisation, this can be over in a standard thirty or as little as two minutes! Two minutes of red floor-button pressing to activate dormant underwater platforms and compulsively converting every platform you land on from a flat grey to a lifeful green.
And… it feels better to play than it has any right to. In part, because the presentation is this simple but gorgeous all the same Unity affair with complementary music to put you in repose, but also because we’re so starved for Mirror’s Edge-esque first-person platformers that it helps fill the void in a mostly satisfying way.
As far as parkour’s influence goes, we’re only talking simple vaulting, sliding and ‘Tic Tac’ moves (or as I would say, bouncing off a wall.). Then you have pipes, spring platforms, etc, to keep things interesting. This, particularly the wall-bouncing, is enough to form this vast skill gap chasm, wherein the ultimate goal is to hit the under four-minute mark. In this way, you have the initial exploratory experience of converting every platform and finding every optional collectible, and then the speedrunning effort.
I was perhaps hoping for a more spectacular finale! The collectables and their associated achievements are a big fourth wall breaking red herring. In its own way, however, it’s rather sweet.