Everyone has gaps in their gaming knowledge. Like, for instance, you’ve never heard of Lungo – the seminal C64 platformer that defined how double jumping would work forever. Me, I’d not heard of The Great Giana Sisters. Contain your horror. In case you’re in the same camp as me (woo, camp buddies!) this was a quite astonishingly blatant rip-off of Super Mario Bros released in 1987. Nintendo, who as ever stubbornly refused to release their games on anything but their own console, were jolly cross about this, and had it pulped. And thus it entered legend. Except, apparently not any legends ever shared with me.

The point being, they behind this are returning with a new Kickstarted version, Project Giana, and it bears almost nothing in common with the game it previously so liberally stole from. Which is a bit confusing. Fortunately, there’s now a demo.

It’s not quite the original team, as sadly the man behind the original – Armin Gessert – died in 2009. Appositely, his last game was a version of the original Giana released on the Nintendo DS! This new game seems to genuinely share little but the name and elements of the concept, but the results look absolutely beautiful. It’s a puzzle platformer in which you can control not only the main character, but also the mood of the world you’re in. Giana can switch between “cutie” and “punky”, which changes how a level is approached. Take a look at the video for a better idea of how this works:



To experience this #content, you will need to enable targeting cookies. Yes, we know. Sorry.

Manage cookie settings



You can play the demo to get an even better idea.

This is currently being Kickstarted, and is agonisingly close to reaching its goal. But with only 3 days to go, it still needs another $16k. It would seem mean for them to miss it now.