Stylish, fast-paced platformer Standby is out now

Joe rightly picked out Standby as being worthy of your attention back in September of last year. It's a fast-paced, speedrunning platformer where you have to run, jump, dash, slam and shoot your way through a series of minimalist, abstract stages, and it's from the developer behind the similarly brisk Barrier X. (As a side note, Barrier X is currently free on Steam.)

I'm really here to talk about the fact that Standby is out now; you can grab it here on Steam for a nominal sum, and with 15% off for the next week or so. There's a demo link there if you'd like to try before you buy, while the full game features 54 levels of extraordinarily pretty sidescrolling.

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.