We haven't done a preview of a game in such a long time on SuperPhillip Central. Do I even remember what a preview is?! Well, let's find out that answer together, as well as look into a game from my favorite genre, the platformer, with Kalanoro.
Kalanoro comes from Red Raketa Studio, an indie developer based in Madagascar. The entire game centers around Madagascan culture and Malagasy folklore. If you're completely ignorant on what any of that entails like I was when I was introduced to the game and demo, here's some quick background.
The name "Kalanoro" refers to the human-like cryptids, beings believed to be spirits watching over Madagascar itself, said to bring good luck. Appearance-wise, they're small, short, bare fangs, and have unkempt hair that covers up their bodies.
Red Raketa Studio's Kalanoro begins with Kalakely, a Kalanoro creature, keeping to herself and enjoying life when suddenly a caravan of trailers fly by. They're all flying to start up a massive concert for a witch named Raneny, a self-celebration, as it were. Kalakely sets off on a bus to travel the island far and wide, rescuing and assembling a collection of lemur musicians that were captured by Raneny's troops, with the main goal of crashing Raneny's giant musical to-do.
Kalanoro is a top-down 3D platformer with nothing in the way of manual camera movement. It's somewhat similar to Super Mario 3D World with its perspective and level design, where Kalakely moves from point A to point B, bashing foes with her fists, hair, and weapons, as she performs various platforming feats through obstacle-filled levels.
The demo currently available to play offers four levels. The first level is a brief tutorial that sees Kalakely set off on her adventure and take to the bus. It teaches some basic moves, like being able to quickly dash around, either on the ground or in midair, phasing past objects like gates and fences in the process.
This first level also introduces some of Kalakely's attack options, chiefly the ability to pick up weapons and use them on enemies. These come in the form of footwear like sandals, vegetables like carrots, and heavy tools like sledgehammers. Each weapon type has its own strength as well as its own durability. After a set amount of hits, it'll break on you, but there is an immense number of weapons strewn and sprinkled about stages that losing a weapon is never a bother. It just forces you to improvise further mid-battle and pick up another makeshift weapon, for instance.
The second level is the first real platforming challenge without safety nets and with things that can actually harm Kalakely. It brings forth collectibles in the form of scrolls and blue gems. Each level has a specific number of these to optionally collect, which can in turn be used to purchase helpful one-time or multiple use items in various shops throughout the game. The demo just had one shop available.
The Kalanoro demo's third level brings Kalakely to a tropical beach and cove. The main mechanic introduced here was using Kalakely's hair to channel and transfer electricity from a working generator to a non-working one. Transferring power means opening locked doors and gates that would otherwise be impossible to pass. The earliest locked generator door revealed not only a treasure chest but also a little lost koala kid. Through picking the child up and taking them further into the level to their home, Kalakely earned her first five "fans".
As Kalanoro deals with music and building an ensemble of musicians to combat Raneny's concert, it's important to not only build a band but also a following, too. This is where the "fans" mechanic comes in. The fourth level, a trek in and out of mines, is all about vandalizing posters featuring Raneny and putting Kalakely's crew's posters on top of them instead. Each poster placed in a level rewards new fans. These fans are not only used to build a following, of course, but they also act as ways of unlockable new areas/levels in the game.
That's how the final area in the demo unlocks, after all. This final area is less of a level and more of a glorified rhythm game followed by a preview of a boss before the demo ends. It's as simple as hitting the correct button with proper timing when the prompt presents itself, all the while knocking away Raneny's goons who wish to disrupt the Kalakely and friends' mini performance. It's not much to look at--the performance, that is--from the beginning, but all bands have to start somewhere. I'm eager to see in the final version how large of a band and massive of an audience the end-game performances get in Kalanoro.
Intermissions between levels put players back on the bus with Kalakely as she plays host to her lemur musician guests. It's not just as simple as saving or rescuing a musician and calling it a day for them. No, they're pretty high-maintenance, usually requiring food made from found ingredients in the platforming levels. Ignore a guest's desires at your peril, because as the game notes, ignored requests can make a musician become captured all over again.
I'm hoping in the final version of the game that we won't have to babysit the characters too much, or that the timer for when a character will get captured again isn't too strict. I can imagine it getting tedious to repeatedly rescue characters that were already saved. That said, you're given a bounty of ingredients in levels just by simple exploring and playing the levels, so at least in the demo, running out of or not having a given ingredient was not an issue.
Speaking of issues, playing on my Steam Deck saw little in the way of performance problems. This was both in docked and handheld forms. Pausing mid-cutscene or mid-dialogue sequence, however, did cause the HUD to show up during these scenes, which I imagine is an unintended oversight. Otherwise, the game looks great, colorful, vibrant, and I really dug the music as well.
Kalanoro is shaping up to an enjoyable 3D platformer with lots of heart and better still, it's one that showcases the demonstrably rich culture and folklore of part of the world that doesn't get much representation in and even out of gaming. We'll find out how it all turns out when Kalanoro steps onto the stage for some platforming action on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch in Summer 2026.
A code was given to me by the developer for the purpose of this preview.
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