Remnants of Naezith starts strong, offering terse but tense challenges with a skeletal straightforwardness straight from the pages of Super Meat Boy. It performs a careful balancing act with its difficulty curve, providing obstacles that will stump new players but be wholly surmountable to experienced ones.

Unfortunately, it seems to lose its balance by the end, presenting levels that are entirely possible to beat, but never feel as fine-tuned as your typical Meat Boy level. It produces more and more moments where the difference between success and failure no longer feel like a miscalculation, but sheer bad luck outside the tolerances of human precision and timing.

That's not to say that everyone will feel that way, but by the time I conquered the last world, my experience felt soured by obstacles where I died and died again, and then succeeded, not feeling that I had consciously done anything differently or even become any more consistent at the level.

Remnants of Naezith is challenging, and by and large, I think this works in its favor, but it's not the challenge that makes this game sing. The game is at its best in moments where you perform feats of swinging that would make Spider-Man blush or use momentum to make a near-impossible leap look effortless. The game's later worlds escalate the precision and complexity, but rarely if ever do they surpass the feeling of ecstasy the earlier ones create by just letting you swing unfettered.