Rebounder is another new platformer in a genre full of games that are well worth your money and your time, yet it stood out as one of the best demos I played at PAX West earlier this month. It was one of the last games I played that weekend, and it immediately became a contender for game of the show, in my eyes.
After playing the demo, I spoke to Logan Gilmour, co-founder of developer ThirtyThree Games. He’s a graphics programmer and level designer, among other roles. The team is small – just four people – so every member wears multiple hats, so to speak.
We discussed the team’s influences in the platformer space, the origins of Rebounder’s comic book art style, the nuance of gameplay difficulty, and more.
Standing Out in a Saturated Genre
Good platformers have been available since Donkey Kong and Mario Bros. dropped in the ‘80s. How do you stand out in that space in 2026 without feeling outdated or too familiar? Rebounder’s colorful, shifting art style is the first thing that popped out to me, even before I got my hands on the controller. I needed to know more about it.
“We knew when we decided we wanted to make a platformer, it was gonna have to really stand out, or we’re gonna sell 12 copies,” Gilmour said. “The artists I work with and I have wanted to make a sort of printed comic booky game for like 10 years, and we’ve been just brewing on the ideas of how to do that.”
Judging by the near 20-minute demo I played, it feels like the team succeeded in that aspect. Each screen in a level feels like a new comic panel with different color palettes or visual effects. The story segments are also presented in comic book fashion, with comic text bubbles and paneling.
ThirtyThree Games has been working on the game’s visual style for quite some time, finding ideas from different forms of real print.
“Our artist, Matt [Satchwill] – his wife runs a boutique letterpress, so you know he’s around the ink and the printing and stuff,” Gilmour explained. “He went through graphic design school when people still printed stuff on big printers. So it’s something we’ve been excited about for a while, and we’re like, ‘okay, we’re making a platformer [and] we’re gonna make it stand out. And hopefully, if we just grind on this art style for two years, it’ll pop.’ And, thank goodness, it seems to have.”
It’s not just the comic style that sets Rebounder apart visually. The specific type of art used in-game lends itself well to the paneling, storytelling, and animation. The team looked at French comic artists when implementing the Moebius style used here. It’s a style that is also seen in other games like Sable.
“[We were] generally inspired by some of the ‘70s French comic artists like Philippe Druillet or Enki Bilal… but there’s other inspirations too,” Gilmour said. “Our inking is more like that style. We actually sort of emulate printing under the hood. We do a whole CMYK (printing color model) ink style emulation of how you would actually print it in the render pipeline that we’ve based off of Silver Age comic books.”
The colors and stylistic effects change each time you complete a platforming challenge and move to the next screen in a stage. Sometimes, the visual changes are so drastic that it feels like you’re in a brand new level after a screen shift. The stylistic shifts are amazing to look at without ever detracting from the platforming experience, which feels like a feat in and of itself.
And it turns out that these color and style shifts have the potential to look even more mind-bending than they already do. The devs are holding back on what is actually possible, aiming for a sweet spot that looks great without becoming a distraction.
“It takes a couple [of] minutes for us to do one of these [color swaps], so we actually held back a little bit,” Gilmous said. “We could be changing it more, and we would be able to afford that from a production standpoint. But we kind of want the players to build and have a sense of some continuity as they’re playing the game.”
The Origins of Rebounding
Rebounder’s main gameplay mechanic involves rebounding off of walls and animals to get past stage hazards or obstacles. If you hit a hazard, you return to the point where you entered the current screen. You often need to pick up a throwable ball and use it as a makeshift surface to rebound off of. You can throw these balls in any direction, using your creativity and reflexes to create temporary rebound surfaces to enhance your platforming.
The throwable object mechanic is similar to how Mario can throw Koopa shells to then jump on, allowing him to reach new platforms. In fact, that was one of the main inspirations for the gameplay here.
“The main mechanic actually comes from Kaizo Mario. Our gameplay programmer, Jeremy [Burns], got super into these super hard Mario hacks where you just do absolutely ridiculous stuff, and they’re impossible to play,” Gilmour said. “Nintendo did not plan for you to use the [Koopa] shells in that way – the shell just kills you if you do it wrong, and the timing is super tight.”
Kaizo Mario World is a Super Mario World ROM hack that replaces the existing levels with extremely difficult platforming challenges that often require you to use Koopa shells to conquer the tricky level layouts. For Rebounder, ThirtyThree Games morphed that shell-throwing mechanic into a more lenient gameplay system that an average player could use accurately.
Based on my hands-on experience, it feels as though the rebounding could become much more difficult in future levels, too. Most platformers tend to gradually ramp up in difficulty as the player progresses, and Gilmour mentioned one specific game when I brought up the idea of difficulty and how to balance it.
“We’re really inspired by Celeste,” Gilmour said. “That’s probably our north star for overall game structure, difficulty, affordances, and game feel.”
Gilmour likened Rebounder’s toughest levels to Celeste’s B-Sides – challenge stages that are significantly harder to complete than those along the story path. “We just accidentally make B-Sides levels all the time – levels that can’t go in the main game,” Gilmour joked. “We’re hoping that if you can play through Celeste’s story, you can play through our story. But the [skill] ceiling with the bonus levels, extra levels, and hidden levels is going to get totally disgusting.”
With that said, Gilmour does take the balance of enjoyment and difficulty seriously, citing it as the most challenging part of the development process. “It’s so critical that we onboard players super smoothly,” he said. “We would like for a lot of people to be able to play this game – it’s not only for platformer sickos.”
What’s Left Before Launch
Rebounder is aiming for a 2027 release, so there’s more work to be done before the game is ready for launch. Demos are just a vertical slice, but the one from PAX West felt so polished that I was curious about what the dev team was still working on.
As a Rebounder, you go on jobs throughout the story, and the team is planning to create seven jobs as the game’s seven main stages. “We’ve got a lot of content to finish, [but] this is the first demo where I think this is kind of releasable,” Gilmous said. “We have two-sevenths of the world at that state. I’d be really surprised if it didn’t come out in 2027, and I would expect it to come out somewhere in summer 2027.”
I can’t wait to get my hands on the full version of Rebounder next year. And if the line at the PAX West booth was any indication of player interest, I’m sure plenty of other players feel the same way.
