a 2023 highlight.

A one-take parkour platformer, Beton Brutal naturally lets its tension simmer and makes room for simple yet captivating discoveries. Ascending an overgrown tower, retries abound as you inevitably stumble and have to retread your missteps. It's Sisyphean—or, for sickos.

Some impressive (and unforgiving) level design sensibilities crop up throughout, imploring double-takes, double-backs, and nervous size-ups at the ends of ledges. Across section repeats, a meditative sense of progression reveals itself: overcoming a feat in seconds that used to stop you in your tracks feels momentous. A shrill riser sound plays as you fall, and it's most satisfying to hear split-seconds at a time, bookended by scrapes of concrete on more confident trounces. Most times, that heart-dropping feel remains, but you use the momentum to leap, and leap again, to another path-you-don't-recognize-as-a-path-yet. Ah, these are the shapes I was looking up at earlier, between vertigo-inducing glances at the glistening pool below.

I haven't reached the top yet (I'm ~270m up in ~5 in-game hours)—unsurprising, as one ostensibly minute-long section took me a real life week. It became common for me to take one treacherous jump, close the game, and open it up a few hours or days later to try the next one. Also common to frustratingly call it for a while after a humbling fall.
Definitely not everyone's jam, I was thrilled by the tension in its balance: adrenaline begets faster failure begets improvement, and taking time to survey your jumps might earn you an occasional shortcut. In some ways the no-checkpoint system is more absence of design than design choice, but I like how it makes communicating the stakes as simple as looking down.

I still intend to reach the top, so my stop-and-start phases of caution and courage haven't bitten me yet. If they do though, and some momentary indecision sends me down another 150m plunge, I’ll be back at it to scale back up (in several sittings, a month from then.)