Inching Along makes both ends of your body the controls

You play a floppy little inchworm working its way through a large and uncaring world. There is no jump button and no run speed. What you have is a body with a grip at either end: stick one end to a surface, arch, reach with the other, stick that, release the first. Grab, swing, inch, pull — that is the entire verb set, and everything else in the game is built out of it.

The unusual part is that the anchor is a choice you keep making. In most climbing games the character holds the wall and you steer them; the grip is assumed and the stick points where you want to go. Here the two ends are separate inputs, so you are not moving a character across a surface so much as deciding, several times a second, which half of yourself is load-bearing and which half is free. Get that wrong and you are hanging from the wrong end with your momentum pointing somewhere you did not want it.

Because the movement is physics-driven rather than animated, the worm has weight and slack. Swing accumulates if you time a release well and fights you if you do not, so a ledge that looks like a single step up is really a pendulum problem: anchor, build the arc, judge the top of it, let go. The failures are specific in the way physics failures always are — you can usually name the exact moment you let go too early.

There are no upgrades and no powerups, and that is stated as a design position rather than a gap in the feature list. Progress comes from mastering the movement plus a pinch of persistence. Nothing in an inventory improves, so the only thing that is different between your first hour and your third is you.

How Snake Pass Became a Platformer Without Jumping is the closest argument to what this game is doing. Snake Pass wears the costume of a 3D platformer and then deletes the genre’s most familiar verb, and the deletion is exactly what makes it new: once you cannot clear a gap by pressing a button, the gap has to be solved with the body you were handed. An inchworm is that same trade in a different animal, and the reason both games can hold attention is that the player is negotiating with a shape rather than executing a jump arc they already know.

How Jusant Makes Rock-Climbing More Immersive covers the other half of it. Jusant earns its climbing by tying the controller to a pair of hands on the wall, so grip becomes something the player is actively holding instead of something the animation implies. Inching Along runs the same wiring through a worm — two ends instead of two hands — which is why the traversal reads as effort. When each grip is a button you are responsible for, hanging on is a thing you are doing, not a state the character is in.

The risk in this lineage is the one What’s The Point Of Hard Games, Anyway? takes apart: difficulty is not a single dial but a set of separate tools, and each one decides whether failure produces mastery, meaning, or the urge to quit. Games inspired by the difficult climbers usually spend everything on one of those tools — losing an hour of height to one slip — and then treat the lost hour as the point. Inching Along keeps the demanding movement and puts checkpoints underneath it, which is a deliberate call about which kind of hard it wants to be. The mastery still has to come from the movement; the punishment is not doing the work of making it feel earned.

Inching Along is made and self-published by Tebi Byte, listed on Steam as an Adventure game, coming soon on Windows. It is single-player, with full controller support, Steam Cloud saves and Steam achievements.

The store page also lists a run of accessibility options that are worth noting on a game built around difficult movement: camera comfort settings, colour alternatives, custom volume controls, a keyboard-only option, and a note that it is playable without timed input. That last one is a real claim for a physics game, and a studio that has already worked out what its inputs demand of a player tends to have thought carefully about the inputs generally.

If the appeal here is a movement system asked to carry an entire game by itself, the untitled werewolf game is the sibling — no title, no release window, just a solo developer betting that how the thing moves is enough of a reason to play. Inching Along is making the same bet with a worm, and it has already got far enough to have a store page behind it.