Kaze and the Wild Masks

Kaze and the Wild Masks lifts the silhouette of the SNES-era platformers — Donkey Kong Country chief among them — and rebuilds it with crisp hand-drawn frame animation. The Crystal Islands are under a curse that turned the local produce hostile, and Kaze sets out to save her friend Hogo by collecting the four masks of the islands' guardians.

Each mask flips the verb set: the tiger pounces and mauls, the eagle takes flight, the lizard sprints, the shark dominates the water levels. Layouts route you through combinations of the four, so the late game asks you to chain transitions without dropping the rhythm.

PixelHive packed in more than thirty main stages and over fifty bonus rooms, with the kind of secret-rewarding level design that the SNES era refined into its own genre. Difficulty is real but the checkpointing is fair, which is the line the original Rare games walked at their best.