Telmari's toilet plunger arrows are one of my new favourite platforming tricks

Who'd have thought toilet plungers would make for such good jumping assistants when it comes to propelling yourself over big, thorny brambles and angry animals? Well, clearly the trio of developers at Phoenix Blasters did, as their upcoming platformer Telmari puts them front and centre as its main form of traversal. Your titular tiny heroine can't jump very far on her own, you see, so to save her beloved sunflowers from the spiky thorns of an ominous-looking tree, she'll need to fire them around the environment to help hoist her over obstacles to get to the, err, root of the problem. I've been playing its Steam demo this morning, and while it's a little rough around the edges, there's definitely something here for those trained in the Super Meat Boy school of pixel perfect platforming.

Telmari: Forest Game Play Video

The developers describe it as a speedrunning platformer on their Steam page, and I can see why. Each of its early levels are only a handful of seconds long if you manage to do it all in one go, and maintaining Telmari's momentum is often key to getting her over the increasingly large and thorny pits you'll encounter. Her toilet plunger arrows can be fired straight ahead or up and down at an angle, and you'll need to place them at appropriate intervals to launch her through each level's tight twists and turns like a red-haired Sonic The Hedgehog.

It's harder than it looks, though, and there are a couple of important twists that the screenshots and GIFs don't quite capture at a first glance. Each arrow will only stay in place for a short amount of time before it crumbles to nothing, you see, and you also can't lodge one into a wall when you're already flat against it. Telmari needs a bit of distance to land one on her intended target, so there's a lot of quick-thinking involved when it comes to navigating each level. You not only need to shoot them in the right place, but you also need to then jump on them all correctly before your hard work falls apart in front of you. It's a tricky mix, and demands quite a lot from its players even early on.

It makes me both excited and slightly apprehensive to see what challenges lie further on in its 100 levels when it comes to Steam on February 16th (if I'm ever able to get there, that is), but I do have a few other nitpicks from the demo that prevent it from feeling as smooth and friendly as it perhaps could be. For instance, if you die, you have to manually select Restart from the menu screen each time rather than instantly respawning, and Telmari herself could sometimes feel a little slippery under the thumbs when I was trying to navigate small ledges, leading to some (aka: several) untimely and accidental deaths.

Here's hoping the final game manages to iron out some of those minor bumps in the road, but fair warning: I can see this being one of those platformers that might elicit more howls of frustration than jumps for joy depending on your personal preferences. Still, I'd recommend dipping your toes into the demo all the same. The premise is an interesting one, and its visuals have an touch of Braid about them, too. And besides, what other platformer will let you bounce around mountains with nothing but a humble toilet plunger in hand?