Hyper Luminal’s serene and wholesome new explore-em-up, Cloud Jumper had it’s official E3 reveal a few weeks back.
It came complete with a brand new trailer, which reveal a whole lot of details about the game, from some of the featured characters, to collectables and deeply delightful pastimes, such as flying through giant wind chimes, solving puzzles and zooming joyfully through a delightful cloudscape.
Characters are introduced too. The Old Pilgrim and Rollo are charming and cute, but there’s a seriously cool white Chinese dragon in there, which is thankfully far more Spirited Away than Never Ending Story.
From our recent interview with the game’s designer Rob Madden, we learned more about the overall goal of the game:
In Cloud Jumper, players are tasked with reuniting a community of sky islands that have become separated by a storm. They’ll do so by completing tasks, crafting materials, discovering secrets and upgrading their ship so they can climb to the Roof of the World.
The whole point is that you’re meant to try and reach the top of this ancient lighthouse that used to light the sky. It’s gone out and you need to re-light it. So you kind of jump across areas of the sky and meet other characters and they let you upgrade your ship. That lets you kind of bounce your way up to the top of this lighthouse to push back a storm that’s separated all the islands.
The nod to Spirited Away is no accident. According to Madden:
That was kind of the whole impetus for it, to make something that was really pretty and felt really nice to be in. I love Studio Ghibli and classic pixel art of pink clouds and floating islands and infinite waterfalls, and all this sort of subgenere of powerful pixel art, so the whole point of the game was really just to build a world that felt like that. And then naturally, exploration just kind of came from that. It’s like, now you’re in this world, all you want to do is explore it. You want to see where the island is off in the distance and you want to go down into that floating cave and figure out what’s in there. The mechanics and story just sort of tumbled out of that initial idea.
You can read the whole interview with Madden here. There’s no word on a release date yet, but rest assured the SGN will keep you up to date.
We’d also like to remind Hyper Luminal that entries for the UK Game of the Show are now open…
You can (and should) wishlist Cloud Jumper on Steam, follow Hyper Luminal on Twitter and join the company’s Discord channel (includes cool freebies).
Here’s the trailer…
