With what seems to be the entire internet playing Super Mario Sunshine for its 15th anniversary this week, to wildly varying levels of success, I was in the mood for a good Indie 3D platformer. The only one I had waiting in the wings was Bound, which both is and isn't a fine game of that genre. "Is" in the sense that it's doing something novel and interesting with the format, "isn't" in the sense that it's not actually all that fun as a pure platforming experience.

Bound tells the tale, through disconnected vignettes, of a young Princess who is bullied by her overbearing Queen mother to defeat a Monster who is busy wrecking the kingdom by eliciting the help of a Savior that sleeps beneath the castle. Concurrently, we're also getting diorama snapshots of what the above symbolizes: the slow, inevitable disintegration of a dysfunctional family, the daughter of which is now an adult walking along the beach reminiscing about her troubled childhood and the rich inner fantasy life she retreated into. Each of the game's five chief "stages" can be played in any order, and each represents a specific trauma from the heroine's childhood that lead to a mild phobia: trees, shouting, steam, paper planes, and necklace pearls. In each world, these five elements are repurposed as hazards that the player has to either avoid or shield themselves from, though completing each phobia's stage and overcoming it will prevent that particular "fear" from ever affecting the heroine again - so in a sense, while you can play the five stages in any order, each one made slightly easier than the last due to the increased amount of neutralized hazards.

Bound trafficks heavily in its symbolism. Some of these symbols are made overt at the end of each stage - you'll understand why the sound of steam or the sight of trees might represent a sour moment in the protagonist's childhood - while others are a little more subtle. For instance, the way the heroine protects herself - and indeed, gracefully moves through each level - is by falling back to her ballet dancing: while holding the dance button, the player creates a temporary shield around them that blocks all nearby hazards. This would seem to suggest that the young girl took to her ballet lessons as a refuge from an unstable home life, focusing on her dancing as a distraction from her troubles. There's many other subtle inferences also, each of which highlight the nature of her familial relationships as a child. The game's too short to get too in-depth however, so these bookends mostly work as a framing device for the themes of each level.

Much has been written and said already of Bound's balletic movement and its focus on classical dance, and it is truly remarkable how accurately traditional ballet is reflected in every one of the character's movements from basic video game maneuvers like running and jumping to sidling along walls, lifting up from a ledge, or recovering from damage. Holding the L2 button (I was playing the PS4 version) speeds up the character, which in turn changes some of these balletic motions into more expedient variants. The character models in the game are relatively simple, with much of the level geometry made out of basic Platonic solids and flat colors, but the animations of its moving parts are truly top-notch in creating a tumultuous and chaotic world forever in flux as it shapes itself around the player. It recalled to me the more dreamlike sequences of Gravity Rush or Tearaway, where everything seemed to fall away into a white void besides the platforms in the player's immediate proximity.

Yet, we need to address the tutu-wearing elephant in the room: as a platformer game it's merely just OK. Each level has a mostly linear route, though there are various concealed shortcuts intended for the game's "speedrun" mode, and the player collects memory shards along the way to create a mosaic image at the end of the level that leads to the "what all this symbolism really means" family snapshot diorama. These memory shards are frequently just as carefully hidden as the shortcuts, giving players plenty of reasons to poke around every nook and cranny for possible alternative routes and items. The speedrun mode not only allows the player to tackle single courses in one-off sessions, but lets them change variables such as preventing falls when running along precarious areas (you can still leap off ledges to your death, I believe) and eliminating the various hazard "fears" as if the level you are playing was the last in the sequence. These options allow for some optimal time trial tweaking if that's your deal. However, the player still has to contend with the game's occasionally embellished animations - turns out making all the character's motions these elaborate ballons and pirouettes can drag things down at times - and some floaty jumping that all too often has platforms seemingly vanish underneath your feet. It's far too easy to overshoot some platforms, while others - though only optional ones, thankfully - require a long jump technique that the game never teaches you. Also, getting hit by hazards or passing through tall grass slows the game's velocity down to molasses, which not only irritates those clamoring for the speedrun trophies but just saps the momentum in general. In a way, it kind of suffers from the Sonic The Hedgehog dichotomy: the game wants you to go fast and get into a euphoric flow, but keeps putting things in the way that forces you to slow down whether they're physical barriers in the form of irritating obstacles and easy fall deaths or psychological barriers by way of remote collectibles and thoroughly checking the corners of open areas "just in case".

You could argue that Bound isn't trying to be a pureblooded platforming experience, but a beautiful and occasionally haunting Indie action-adventure game with a yarn to spin and some striking visuals to gawk at. The game's occasional bouts into vertiginous gravity switching and stark color design definitely leave an impression. However, it wants the cake Peach baked for Mario and to eat it too with the speedrun mode betraying its aspirations to be run alongside the likes of Super Meat Boy and I Wanna Be The Guy the next time a GDQ event rolls around. It almost feels like a Gone Home that includes a new game plus mode that fills the Greenbriar estate with zombies to shoot: I think if Bound was just trying to stick to being a casual, picturesque game with a bit of familial drama to impart I might respect its focus more.

Rating: 3 out of 5.