Hot Lava

Hot Lava is Klei Entertainment's first 3D game, and it commits to a premise every kid with a couch and an overactive imagination already knows: the floor is lava, so climb, swing, and jump across furniture-scale playgrounds without touching the ground. The traversal holds up. Surfing across slanted surfaces, swinging pole to pole, chaining boosts into precision jumps: all of it reads clean and responds fast enough to make the movement itself the reason to keep playing.

The level design backs up the movement instead of getting in its way. Steam Workshop levels drop straight into the in-game level select, so seven years after launch there's still a steady supply of new stages to run. The routes stay open-ended: veteran players skip half the intended path with pole swings and boosts, turning story levels into makeshift speedrun courses, and eight-player co-op plus competitive time-trial modes give the traversal somewhere to go once you've mastered a level solo.

Somewhere to go is the problem. SteamCharts puts the current concurrent player count around a dozen, down from a launch peak over a thousand, and the multiplayer modes the store page sells hardest are the ones with almost nobody left to fill them. Destructoid's review flagged the co-op implementation itself as half-built, calling it "a weird sort-of-co-op-sort-of-not online scheme" that clutters the UI without adding much. Steam reviews stack a few smaller complaints on top: crashes and freezes on specific maps, inputs that misfire (a pole that won't grab, a double jump that skips), and difficulty spikes with no checkpoints to soften them.

Ninety-three percent of reviewers rate it Very Positive on Steam, a number that's barely moved since launch even as the player count has. There's no real PC critic score to weigh against that: Metacritic only tracks a 64 for the separate iOS release, and that mobile number has no bearing on the PC game reviewed here. The critic coverage that does exist on PC, like Destructoid's 7 out of 10, backs up the Steam consensus: strong movement, a co-op system that never got finished.

Buy it, especially with friends who'll load in alongside you. Solo, the movement alone is worth the price, but don't expect the multiplayer modes on the box to have much of anyone left in them.