Sprint, leap, and clean towards victory. Dustforce celebrates precision platforming, and embraces its 2D roots by spritzing the whole experience with colorful characters and a grooving anime twist. In Dustforce, players gun for the best time and most complete run through more than 50 stages.

Originally developed by a small indie team for the PC crowd, Capcom is bringing Dustforce to PS3 and PS Vita. All the charm and addictive play of the PC version returns, along with online multiplayer (ranked and private), shiny Trophies, and cross save support. Now the PlayStation community can train to become the greatest of ninja janitors the world has ever known.

The Capcom crew brought Dustforce by for Justin and me to play. Listen to our interview with them below, then read on for our full impressions.

Ryan Clements Dustforce gives players room to breathe. At the start, stages are short, simple, and teach newcomers how to successfully navigate obstacles and clean up the most dust to achieve high scores. Jumps are cozy, and the levels themselves are designed to pull the player into a flow. One run through a stage reveals the layout and enemy placement, as well as where players need to sweep up dust. Sometimes, one run is all it takes to complete the level. But in subsequent runs, experimentation and happy accidents coalesce into tangible knowledge of how to shave seconds off your completion time, and maximize dust cleaned up. This ups end-level ranks, and opens even harder stages to tackle. There are four characters to chose from at the onset of a stage. Though each character shares a basic set of controls, the four differ in their jump and dash distance, as well as their attack range. This allows players to find the perfect fit for each level, as well as select a style that works best for them. The differences of the four are subtle, but those subtleties have tremendous impact as players advance deeper and deeper into the thick challenge of later courses. Fortunately, death and failure don’t sting in Dustforce like they do in other games. Stages are short enough to work through in less than a minute, which means pushing faster times and improving player ability is a more natural, well-paced commitment. And you look cool when you play well! One of the best rewards in gaming comes from that sense of style and skill rooted in a mastery of play. Dustforce enables this with painless lessons and clear goals. It’s the kind of game to get lost in, even if it means messing up a few times just to get the feel of it. Sooner than later, you’ll be climbing the leaderboards like the best of them.