Bit.Trip game Runner3 gets May release date

The next installment in the Bit.Trip Runner series, Runner3, will sprint onto PC on May 22, developer Choice Provisions has announced. As a long-time fan of the pacey platform games, it's one I'm looking forward to: once again, you control the auto-running Commander Video, guiding him through levels by leaping, sliding and kicking.

However, Runner3 looks like it has quite a few new ideas. Its art style is even more over-the-top than previous entries, and it occasionally abandons the usual side-on view, giving its levels far more depth. The camera will even fly behind Commander Video at certain times, and you'll dodge left and right as he runs forward.

The levels branch in a different way to previous games, too. In the excellent Bit.Trip Runner2, levels branched up and down depending on which platforms you jumped onto or slid under. Here, the levels branch side-to-side, facilitated by the moving camera. It's an interesting shift, and one that—on my first glance alone—looks like it'll work well.

Runner 3 will also feature rideable vehicles, side quests with NPCs to talk to, and a double jump. The trailer, above, will give you a good idea what to expect. It only mentions the game's Nintendo Switch release, but it'll arrive on PC on the same day. It was initially due out last year, but was delayed.

Thanks, Eurogamer.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.