I see a lot of games on gaming Twitter and I made a note of a majority of the ones that I have seen so, this week I decided to take a dive into this list with Pompom.

Pompom is a puzzle platformer in development by TOMO Camp and will be published under PID Games. It going to be available for Steam and it currently has the tag “coming soon.”

The player takes the role of a hamster named Pompom who is innocently working out when his owner Hoshi is abducted by space cat pirates, I think. It is up to Pompom to save his owner and defeat Captain Cat.

Pompom moves on his won without the player and the player takes the role of “bridge-builder” so that Pompom can achieve their goal. As Pompom walks to the right there are bubbles with various building materials that the player can utilize so that Pompom can get to their objective. Long and small horizontal blocks, right triangle blocks, balloons umbrellas, and springs that look like they were ripped right from a Sonic game are at your disposal within the demo. It all may seem simple but it really does work out really well, because you have essentially an infinite play area, you can force Pompom to take any route that you want. You can also use Pompom offensively or defensively, it really is all up to the player, which is a nice freedom to have.

Level design is surprisingly good. Early levels give the player a good grip on how far Pompom can jump and his overall pacing, so when you are introduced to the right triangle block during the last few levels, you will know how to maneuver them properly to get to the goal.

Music is good, I was humming to it a majority of the time.

Like I said before, any homage to retro and 16-bit era games always looks nice and Pompom aims high. It is a cute-looking game. I really like the cat pirates, honestly.

Overall, I took a chance on gaming Twitter and was not disappointed. Pompom, I thought, was going to be a boring experience because movement is such a key mechanic for players to utilize but after I played a few levels, I was hooked. I experimented with all the ways that Pompom can move and how the levels can be completed. I spent around an hour playing the demo twice. It is good fun, I would recommend it to anyone who likes platformers.