Let me slash the tendons of that strutting headline with some immediate caveats. Most obviously, you will not like Cicamadata” if you have an overpowering hatred of feisty punctuation in game titles. You will not like it if you’re averse to abstract and ostentatiously computerised, ‘product design’ art direction that is somehow both bright and foggy, crisp and distorted.

You won’t like it if you really dislike artisanal glitches and general HUD palaver – cockroach text scuttling across the view; boxy white velocity lines; an oversized Doomguy-style character model to indicate health; damage and state changes that cause the screen to blink and reset, as though you’d jolted a cable.

You may be especially unkeen on Cicamadata” if you try to play the Steam demo on a Latitude 5320 Dell i5-1145G7 with 16 GB of RAM and integrated graphics, like my work laptop. The demo crashed my laptop three times before I grudgingly shuffled over to my review PC, though it ran comfortably enough during the tutorials.

Now that the rhetorical ankle-slicing is over, let us bask in the glow of what is not only my favourite FPS demo of recent times but also, one of the few demos I’ve played that conjures the same urge to replay and squeeze out every last drop of blood that I once felt for magazine cover disc demos in the 1990s.

Inasmuch as the writing spells anything out for sure, Cicamadata” casts you as a wayward soul stuffed into the carapace of a super-mobile bunny bot, equipped with what may be either a three-pellet, flip-to-reload shotgun or some kind of grieving, triumphant demigod – as the Steam page puts it, “i am joyeuse. i am not the weapon that failed. i have given everything to masters who forgot my name.”

You’re dropshipped into a bunch of maps that look like enormous, ethereal circuit boards, some floating in the sky, others half-underwater, some encased in ice, others covered in plastic vegetation. Your job is to gather a bunch of CORES and get to the EXIT. Red things are bad things that need to be shot, jumped on, or slammed into. You’ve got a triple-jump and a forward dash you can perform in the air – a dash that will carry you clean past the platform you’re aiming at, until you develop your rhythm.

Save for one corridor affair that teaches you to attack certain foes in certain ways, the demo levels are airy, open-ended creations with secrets above and below. But when you are in full flight, picking off enemy crabs and gun turrets in a jumble of cybernetic squeals and chirping cooldowns, even the largest of these volumes shrinks to a snowglobe, yours to roll about as you please.

It’s good to be fast: Cicamadata” is a speedrunner’s game with omnipresent leaderboards, though you’re free to bounce and roar around the demo levels for as long as you wish. I had great fun discovering each demo map’s terrain conditions – the ice level is slippy, as you’d expect, and the underwater areas slow your shotgun blasts to shoals, obliging you to lead targets.

When I first covered Cicamadata” I compared it to the PS1’s Jumping Flash!, another game with exasperating title punctuation that represents a road not entirely taken for first-person platformers, made up of stratospheric playgrounds navigated by means of a big-footed robot shadow. I’m shocked to discover how much Cicamadata” pays homage to that game, even more so than Forza Polpo (which I also love).

There’s the same basic language of waypoints, the same sense that each level is a compact paradise of things to find and jump on and burst into flecks. But Cicamadata” blends the PS1 game’s rabbity whimsy with a queer and insectile savagery. “Obligations no longer bind you,” promises your handler. “Tear flesh from bone.”

The demo is live on Steam from now until March 5th. Go on, hop in. See if you can beat my seventh place leaderboard finish in the ice level. The full game is out later this year.