While not everyone has the dexterity or patience for precision platformers, when they’re done properly they can be a compelling challenge. With the highly-regarded Celeste and Super Meat Boy, among some others, already out there, the difficulty for new titles in the space is to not only match the precision of their controls, but then to also simply differentiate themselves.

Thankfully, the team behind TetherGeist has managed just that, throwing together an adventure that will test your skills and patience as you make use of a small handful of different specialized skills along your way. As the name implies, the hook here is your ability to use your magical spectral companion to help you traverse the level in different ways. At the beginning you’ll have the ability to sling yourself around, including through some barriers and things like thorns. Later on you’ll gain different abilities as well though, testing your skills in other ways, and forcing you to continue to round out your skill set so that the challenges don’t get stale. If you really want to test yourself there will be red flowers tempting you to try to grab them, and pushing your sense of timing and precision even further to the limit.

What’s great is that since the nature of your skills, and the different obstacles you’ll have to face in new areas continues to evolve, the degree of difficulty tends to be sustained pretty well throughout. Of course, since different mechanics can be involved for each, you may find that you don’t love them all equally, but that’s a risk that is taken when you try to keep bringing new ideas to the table. I will say that in some cases your window of opportunity for success can feel very narrow through an entire chain of necessary moves, but much like the other precision platformers out there that’s when you’ll end up relying a bit on muscle memory to continue to attack the same segment repeatedly until you finally break through and get it. If you don’t mind the aggravation, this is a terrific addition to the precision platforming space worth giving a look.