When I was a kid, platformers were the de rigueur gaming genre. Mario, Sonic, and dozens of copycat characters were what people imagined when they heard the word “gaming.” At some point in the mid-90s however, the platformer fell out of fashion. While most will point to the emerging popularity of the first-person shooter as the cause here, I argue that the true reason for the fall of the platformer is that developers simply ran out of new ideas to show us.

That’s why a game like the PlayStation Network-exclusive Sideway: New York is so exciting for me. This is a title that takes inspiration from all those games I loved as a kid and says, “y’know, with the technology we have now, we can do some really awesome things with this concept.” For the most part it succeeds, and outside of a few notable flaws the overall game is simultaneously an ode to the brilliant run n’ jump gameplay of my youth and a quality showcase for what developers can do on modern hardware when they’re willing to think outside the box.

This is where I take a stab at explaining the basics of the game and in all likelihood, fail terribly. See, Sideway: New York is a game based around the concept of graffiti art. Not in the same way that Sega’s Jet Grind Radio was based around roaming around a city painting graffiti on objects, but in a, “your character and the majority of the things he interacts with all consist of graffiti art” way.

You play as Nox, a graffiti artist who in a Kafka-esque twist, is pulled into the two-dimensional world of spraycan-based wall art. To get back to his corporeal form, Nox has to survive a series of platforming stages, collect upgrades to his powers and kill a number of colorful enemies.

That word, “colorful,” should be one of the buzzwords for the game. As a result of Nox’s transformation, the entirety of Sideway: New York is granted a “living graffiti” aesthetic that is both quite unique and animates surprisingly well. This is one of those things that simple can’t be described in text, so just trust me when I say that the characters in this game move with the fluidity and grace of a quality cartoon. If nothing else, the developers certainly nailed the graffiti-inspired aesthetic they were so obviously aiming for.

Given that all of the game’s characters are 2D graffiti, they reside on the side of buildings. That just makes sense, doesn’t it? This is where the other really novel bit of the game comes into play: The “platforms” that make up Nox’s world are actually facets of the building. You might leap from a storm drain to a windowsill, to an air conditioning unit on the roof in the span of a few seconds, because to Nox’s 2D perspective each of these offers a valid foothold.

At first this sort of spatial manipulation can be confusing, but once you get the hang of imagining each building not as a simple square, but as a fully 3D, cube-shaped landscape the gameplay itself is classic platforming all the way.

Well, maybe not entirely classic. To complement his standard running and jumping skills, Nox can also find upgrades throughout the world that allow him to slide, glide and use ranged attacks, among other things, but despite these added complexities, the gameplay itself never becomes unintuitive. Even those totally new to gaming can pick up a controller and grasp how to play this game in moments.

As I stated above however, the game does have a few rough spots. While I do like the inspired hip hop soundtrack courtesy Mr. Lif, and will readily admit that it fits the aesthetic and tone of the game perfectly, it gets very repetitive, very quickly. Seemingly this is a simple case of the game just not including enough music tracks to cover the average gameplay session, which should this game see a sequel, is a very easy fix.

Less easy to fix however, is the game’s physics. I can’t exactly put my on finger on what the issue is, but somehow the jumping and the running speeds seem a bit off. Again, this is probably not something that can be easily described in text, but if you’ve played a number of platformers in the past, you develop a sense of how quickly characters should fall through the air, and Nox takes just a hair too long. It’s nothing you won’t get used to, and I became acclimated within 20 minutes of starting the game, but it is something you notice pretty quickly.

Those two issues aside though, Sideway: New York is the most novel, well-designed platformer I’ve played since Jonathan Blow’s Braid in 2008. Totally worth the $10 PlayStation Network asking price.