It’s almost as if we planned it. In the week where we look back at Yves Grolet’s previous work on Outcast (Which remains perhaps the finest game ever starring a man in an orange sweater), his new game gets announced from 10tacle. It’s called Totem and it’s a third-person superhero platform game with fisticuffs. Yes.

Meet a chap its filename calls “Monkey Avatar”. Say Hello, Monkey Avatar.

Superhero platform game. Not a bad idea at all. Totem is riffing off Le Parkour, which remains one of my favourite things in the world, and as anyone who’s ever played City of Heroes knows, how superheroes move is one of the best things about them. While CoH-veterans tend to obsess over the joys of the high level travel powers – leaping from tall building to tall building, soaring between skyscrapers, whining that they bought the teleport power – at low level, patrolling around the city, just clearing a fence and moving onwards ever onwards is a fluid tribute to the modern world. The Press release is low on detail but includes a fine piece of tech-gibberish in describing its self-proclaimed innovative “Semantic Environment Sensing System (SESS)” which allows you to use the environment in a fancy way. This may be posh for “you can climb and jump and swing and shit”.

Anyway – sounds interesting and if we can get a plugin working on this blog, we can have some kind of Totem Poll later.

(Waitasec… “a fluid tribute to the modern world”. What? – Ed)