Perhaps I'd be more inclined to troubleshoot my PC's woes if it signaled distress through adorable window-to-window platforming and chiptunes instead of blue screens and erroneous droning. That's not the reality for my rig, fine, but thanks to MainFrames—a bright and charming platformer featured in today's PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted—digital problem solving will get exponentially cuter when it launches on March 6, 2025.
Developer Assoupi and publisher The Arcade Crew harken back to the good ole days of AOL discs and dial-up (but way cuter, mind you) with a litany of beeps and boops from MainFrame's pixelated world and darling little diskette hero, Floppy. Just like the rest of us, Floppy is trying to find their place in the world, or in this case, function in the OS. Judging by my own phrasing, the analog worked here.
Assoupi's pitch promises it aims for all the 2D platformer hallmarks with hidden secrets and puzzles, carefully juggling challenge with reward, but in a way that's novel to computer nostalgia. Instead of simple jumps from point A to point B, you'll rearrange windows to create new paths forward and hop between frames. MainFrames looks to play like how I imagined computers worked when I was ten. I mean that in the best way.
- I felt goodwill and hope for the future seeing Cybrlich and the Death Cult of Labor, an FPS that's 60% HUD and looks like an Adult Swim cartoon where you smoke 'deepweed' to restore your health and blow clouds that spell out 'doink' and 'loud'
- Mindwave is the story-driven spiritual successor to WarioWare that is so good I don't care that I keep messing up on the supposedly simple final boss
Visually, MainFrames is the sort of thing I totally lose my calm too-cool-for-school facade over to "ooo" and "aah" with delight. I'm not particularly good at the frantic pace so many 2D platformers seem best enjoyed at, but even amidst all of Floppy's zipping and bouncing, I could appreciate those digital artifacts of yore. Using desktop icons with a distinctly pixelated font face as bouncy platforms is a rather clever touch, I'll admit.
If it's not obvious by now, you can carrot-and-stick me all the way through a game with the right art style, even if I'm just getting by on a prayer. But for those who need an executable for convincing, there's a demo available now on Steam.
MainFrames is among the dozens of games debuting new features and reveals at this year's PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted. You can wishlist MainFrames on Steam now and check out the demo before next March
