JUMP KING QUEST Climb, fight, fall, repeat

The Heights is one huge vertical world of chasms, false peaks and ledges that exist to betray you. Jumping is charged: hold longer to go higher, release early and you land short, sometimes several screens below where you were. There is no game over screen. Get knocked out, get back up, start climbing again. That loop of losing ground and clawing it back is the core of the game, and it is tense in a way few platformers manage. Compared to the original Jump King, falls cost you less time, so a bad landing stings without erasing an evening. The world is interconnected and built for exploration, with secrets tucked into its nooks and crannies, and a score by the musicians of the original Jump King underneath it all.

Every ledge is a battlefield, and the combat backs that up. Weapons have their own moves, stats and special inputs, some of them motion or directional commands straight out of fighting games, so learning a weapon means learning its moveset. There are no invincibility frames to lean on: fights are about positioning, spacing and knowing when to jump, which makes them feel deliberate rather than reflex-mad. Bosses and enemy-filled levels take real attempts, and getting knocked down usually costs you only a couple of minutes of climbing to return. With 90+ unique weapons to choose from, you can build a style that suits how you fight, then take it into the toughest encounters the world throws at you.

Character growth here runs on the classical humours. Four double-sided attributes, things like Refined or Crude, Mettlesome or Guileful, level up according to how you play, and balancing them well rewards you with more health. Combine that with 200+ equipment items and your pick of weapons, plus a customizable character with a distinct claymation-like look, and your mudman ends up genuinely yours. Fair warning: the RPG mechanics are deliberately obtuse, and figuring out what the stats actually do is part of the fun for some and a headache for others. Once you finish the game, 25 combinable curses open up to seriously change how a replay plays.

This is a Soulslike where movement is part of the skill check. Bosses take many attempts, enemies patrol the levels between checkpoints, and death knocks you down rather than ending the run, so the runback is a climb, not a loading screen. The dark fantasy setting of The Heights, a world of dark prophecy ruled by tyrants chasing the coveted Babe Powers, gives the punishment a story to hang on: you are a mudman of the Redfin generation, awake in the era of ARMABOGGIN, defying an order that would rather you did not exist.

Online play is seamless: strangers who are close by simply appear in your world to fight, jump and explore alongside you, and the game makes no distinction between friend and foe. Most encounters turn cooperative, since there is no chat, just emotes, and it turns out dancing says a lot. Prefer to duel? Challenge other players with the dueling system, which restores spent resources after each match so you can go all out. You can also switch multiplayer off entirely and climb alone.