Tumbling is more than just something your nan does. It’s an art form. A way of life. Nan puts a lot into her tumbling. She’s up bright and early, downing her oatmeal and grapefruit to keep her heart healthy. She’s always packing Life Alert, just in case.

But sometimes, a tumble down the stairs doesn’t cut it anymore. Human life is all about evolution. Growing, changing, becoming stronger. We can’t tumble down stairs forever. We need to set our sights higher. Like tumbling up a fucking mountain.

Get fucked, Nan. The future is now.

This isn’t your nan’s tumbling anymore. The game has changed. This is TumbleSeed. Your nan thinks breaking hips is intense? Prepare to break your everything. Your will to live? Broken. TumbleSeed doesn’t play around. You’re gonna have to do 100 tumbles in less than a minute if you want to keep up with TumbleSeed.

TumbleSeed is the latest in tumbling games for PS4, PC, and Nintendo Switch. Like Dark Souls with tumbling. You’re gonna be fucking pissed at how much you need to tumble just to get shit done in this game. But that’s what makes it good. To some people. Definitely not all though. It’s a rogue-like tumbler, so in other words, every time you die you need to start all over again. And it’s really fucking hard. That alone is a deal breaker for a lot of people.

It’s incredibly easy to overlook how much depth there is to TumbleSeed, and that’s simply because my first impression was “fuck this game and everything it stands for”. There’s an incredibly steep difficulty curve to TumbleSeed, and it doesn’t make things easy when you’re just trying to get a grip on how to play the game. The controls are slightly awkward; it kinda reminds me of one of those Chuck E. Cheese games where you need to balance those huge-ass unbalanceable blocks on that little tilt thing, and if you can actually do it, you win a bunch of tickets. Except instead of blocks you’re balancing your nan. You don’t control her directly, just the little tilt thing she rests on. And she just won’t sit the fuck still.

The game’s initial premise is deceptively simple. You tumble your nan up the mountain, and avoid the enemies and holes. Except there’s too many fucking holes and too many fucking enemies. So you kind of die. A lot. But the game slowly introduces new abilities for you to use to even the playing field, only about four of which are permanent. After that, you’ll be able to acquire a slew of power-ups and abilities to make tumbling easier, though they’ll be lost with every new playthrough.

It’s almost like a crude RPG in a sense. You’ll need to carefully manage your resources, which are required to use your powers. Defeating enemies will earn you more resources, though it takes a considerable amount of skill and maneuvering to accomplish in certain cases. There are towns you’ll make stops at, with shops and banks. There’s a lot more to it besides tumbling and dying. But that’s all most will ever see in it, thanks to the ridiculous difficulty.

There are no breaks. None. You don’t ever get to relax. Even the weakest enemy could easily fuck you up, and there’s a lot more that aren’t easy that’ll fuck you up even faster. Sometimes the holes you’re tumbling around will have bombs in them, so even going near them is potentially fatal. Quite a few different enemies will continuously follow you, meaning that you can’t even sit still sometimes without getting it up the ass from something. It’s a stressful game, one that forces you to be vigilant at all times of everything on screen. And the holes. The fucking holes.

Fuck these holes, man. Fuck ’em. They’re everywhere. And it’s so hard to navigate around them. And that’s without enemies constantly on your back. Tumbling already requires a saintly level of patience, sometimes these holes are like a fucking tightrope act. And then on top of that there’s enemies that follow you, bombs, and resources for you to manage and shit. Even the little favors it throws your way are cursed.

You can get a rare power-up that follows you around the screen, dealing damage to enemies it bumps into. When I got it, I felt absolutely blessed. Finally, I could tumble in peace. But no, if I touch it, I get hurt. That’s the kind of game this is. You can’t even trust the damn power-ups. You can’t trust anyone in the tumbling game. Not even your nan.

Deriving pleasure from this game is like deriving pleasure from playing Dark Souls. There is none, unless you’re some kind of fucking degenerate. And this game is even worse. In Dark Souls you’re only being gangraped by skeletons and shit. Who the fuck would want to see their nan get gangraped by insects? That’s beyond fucked, man. Dark Souls might be fucked, but this shit is super fucked. This should be illegal.

I don’t think the target audience for a game about your nan getting destroyed by worms and shit is a particularly big one, even with the appealing aesthetic design that went into TumbleSeed. If you’re not into brutal games, I’d say you should probably keep away. This is some graphic shit here. Banned in Australia, actually.

But if you’re weird on the inside because your uncle touched you or whatever and now you get off to pain and working tirelessly to please a video game, TumbleSeed is definitely up your alley. It doesn’t have the kind of precision controls that Dark Souls or any platformer-hell would, but given getting used to the controls, it’s entirely possible to be more than satisfactory at the game. There is skill involved, don’t get the wrong idea.

It’ll take work. Determination. Blood, sweat, and tears. All the things your nan put into her tumbling, back when it was just her and the stairs. They started at the bottom. But now we’re here. And the future of tumbling is on your shoulders. Will you grab it? Or just let it slip? Nan will keep tumbling, don’t disappoint her. She’ll tumble like she always has. Always tumbling. Always, tumbling.

Tumble on, Nan. Tumble on.