Ayo the Clown Demo

Ayo The Clown is a very nicely crafted 2.5D side-scrolling platformer that has the potential of becoming really successful.

The developers from the Cloud M1 studio have released a demo for Ayo The Clown. When you read that it’s built on Unity and that it’s inspired by Mario, you don’t usually get your hopes up, but the production value is really good, and it might surprise you when you play it.

They say that’s inspired by Mario, but they must refer to the newer ones because this is much, much better than the older versions. It’s also a project on Square Enix Collective, and they are trying to raise money through a crowdfunding campaign. It won’t be easy, but their game is good enough to happen.

There isn’t much of a story just yet, but we do know that the name of the clown is Ayo and that he’s looking for this dog Bo that vanished during the night. Players will find comic book pages that show what happened with the dog, and it might not be a happy ending.

In any case, Ayo The Clown plays pretty much like a regular side scroller, but you will need to have some skill. Many of the jumps and moves are tricky and you can only get hit a couple of time before you are returned to a previous checkpoint.

The game is hard, but not all that punishing. Once you start to pick up various skill upgrades and extra hearts you might find it a little bit easier. Most of the stuff in the environment is trying to hurt you, so you need to make sure that you pay attention, even to the background stuff.

Even if this is marked as work in progress, the animations are already spot on, and the levels are well made. It’s a game developed in Unity, and this goes to show that you can really make beautiful things with this engine, but it takes a lot of work.

There is no launch date for Ayo The Clown, but you can get this demo and decide if you want to help them reach their crowdfunding goal.