Indie developer Ruben Pecellin has a new platforming game in the works for mobile called Mountain Climber: Frozen Dream, and it caught my attention for a couple of reasons when it was posted to our forums earlier this month. For one, it’s advertised as a one-handed platformer, and I am all about those. I love regular platformers of course and am even a fan of virtual buttons, but it’s nice to have a game like Leap Day or Super Mario Run that you can whip out and play with one hand when you have a few free moments. Mountain Climber hopes to join that particular club and I’m all for it. The other thing that caught my attention when I saw this game was just how much it resembled indie darling Celeste, which I’m currently enjoying on my Nintendo Switch. From the pixel art and animation style to the general theme and tone of the game, Mountain Climber sure does look an awful lot like a mobile take on Celeste. Check out the trailer for yourself.

This comes at kind of an interesting time because our Game of the Week last week Wonder Blade has drawn some criticism from a handful of folks for looking a little too much like The Behemoth’s 2008 game Castle Crashers. I absolutely see what people are saying as there are lots of similarities, but it’s also completely evident that Wonder Blade is an original work. I feel similarly about Mountain Climber. You wouldn’t think someone ripped the code from Celeste and uploaded it for mobile or anything, but it’s very hard to not think “CELESTE!" every time you look at it. I figure that a person’s comfort level with this sort of thing comes down to that individual, and considering neither Castle Crashers or Celeste are on mobile I say bring it on, even in these cases where the inspiration from those existing titles is particularly heavy. Plus, in each scenario the mobile developers are adding their own spin on things and really optimizing the games for mobile play. It’s an interesting situation for sure!

At any rate, if you’re liking the look of Mountain Climber you can follow along with its progress in our forums and a beta testing period should be kicking off in the near future with a full release tentatively planned for next month.