There’s a natural order to the universe when it comes to cuteness. Kittens are cute, puppies are adorable, baby hippos are far more charming than they’ve any right to be, and pandas of every age dominate the entire category. All the way at the other end of the scale come undersea nightmares like crabs, lobsters, and the barreleye, while on land we’ve got scorpions, centipedes, and the many hundreds of different types of spiders whose sole reason for existence is to creep out anyone they meet. Spiders aren’t and will never be cute, except for the ones in the demo for A Webbing Journey who somehow manage to pull it off.
A Webbing Journey is a 3D platformer set on a series of islands featuring a spider who wants to collect the best bouquet of flowers ever seen for its date. Along the way it meets a number of island residents who need help, and being a kind and friendly spider there’s no way it can say no. While the demo doesn’t feature any of the main plot or flower-collecting that will be the primary goal, it does have a small collection of spiders and chatty flies on its two islands who could use a favor apiece. Dropping acorns from trees or using webbing to pull them from the water, collecting pollen from the flowers around the island, or rescuing some spider-kids from a small temple, none of the quests require any level of violence but do put the spider’s skills to good use.
The spider has basically all the abilities you’d expect, from a decent jump to being able to stick to surfaces, and of course webbing to attach one thing to another. Every surface in the game is the spider’s playground, and where there isn’t a surface it can create one by stringing a web from one point to the next. The web is also used for swinging around the levels, although it does need to attach to a surface in order to do any good. Spider-Man can get away with the “out of sight, out of mind” attach point but a platforming spider can’t just handwave that requirement away. While the webs you swing on disappear after use, web strands attached at two points stay where they’re put unless you manually remove them, and there doesn’t appear to be much in the way of a practical limit to the number you may run.
The demo for A Webbing Journey came out earlier this week and, while short, it’s incredibly likeable and charming. The colors are technically a bit too garish and the voices of the baby spiders you rescue a bit too cutesy and yet somehow it all works, helped in no small part by the excellent game mechanics. It’s honestly fun just to tool around the level as the spider, jumping and swinging or creating web bridges between points, and while both areas are fairly small they feel bigger thanks to the variety of NPC requests. It’s a great little bite-sized demo of all-ages platform-adventuring, and absolutely worth a quick evening’s play-through if only to see how much of its levels you can web together.
A Webbing Journey’s demo isavailable on Steamand itch.io, with the full game not being due until the middle of next year. It’s only got the one trailer from several months back, when the cel-shading was more heavy-handed, but while the art style has been polished up since then it still gives a good look at what a spider can do.
