Cloudberry Kingdom

Summer is an underrated season for games. Don’t get me wrong – I love the winter avalanche of triple-A titles as much as the next gamer, but summer is often written off as a graveyard instead of a chance for smaller games to shine.

Cloudberry Kingdom is released by a major company, but it started life as a little project and still looks like one. It's a 2D platform side-scroller in the traditional sense: you run, jump and bounce from left to right while avoiding chasms and automated blades and flames. Then you reach the next level and do something similar again in a slightly different setting, dozens of times. You get one checkpoint per level, if that, but you also have infinite lives and instant respawns, which keeps it all fast-paced no matter how often you bite the dust.

The game uses algorithms that generate new levels and – allegedly – adapt to the player’s skills. While the fundamentals and level durations are consistent throughout, there are enough tweaks as you progress to keep it varied and interesting. Sometimes our hero has a jetpack; sometimes he’s stuck in a box and can only travel in single hops; sometimes he’s in a spaceship and sometimes he’s got little angel wings so he can jump twice in mid-air. There’s an arcade mode, story mode and customisable levels. The result is a game that looks simple, even basic, but is both immensely challenging and mercilessly addictive.

It doesn't matter if you're playing Skyrim or Pong; every developer is looking to instil that sense of "five more minutes" or "one more go". Cloudberry Kingdom achieves that in spades.