For the last few years I’ve been labouring to transform my terror of spiders into guarded appreciation, even wonder. I’ve been drawing pictures of spiders, and writing stories about them. When I spy a spyder (spider) in the wild, I make a strenuous display of hunkering down to utter words like “ooh, what a beautiful False Widow, such poetry of form”. Then the spider moves a fraction, and I hoot and holler on out of there, pawing imaginary silk strands from my face. Videogames like Tumblebee are not helping with this endeavour.

I didn’t even know Tumblebee had any terrible spiders in it, before watching the trailer. Nothing about the title implies being chased through earthen labyrinths by eight-legged fiends. It sounds like a jolly platformer, doesn’t it? Or an apicultural take on Peggle. Here’s the setup: the spiders have abducted your bee chums, cocooning them in a cave. You’ve got to rescue them before the spiders wake up and eat you.

From the looks of things, you aren’t able to fly fast enough to escape the spiders, which is where the genre-resetting “tumbling bee” element comes in – you can roll, hop and bounce from mushrooms to put a few precious centimetres between yourself and those clutching forelimbs. The Steam page doesn’t indicate whether you can get stuck in a web yourself, but that seems like a possibility. All of this plays out against a clangorous, roaring electronic score that makes the blood rush to my head.

Tumblebee launches tomorrow, 17th September 2026. I’m writing it up partly because it’s from Agelvik, deviser of the excellent underwater hellshooter Death in Abyss, and partly because as noted above, I’m trying to exorcise my own arachnid demons. Spiders are marvels of nature, remember! Let’s try to identify the ones in Tumblebee. Going by the size, I think that’s some kind of Huntsman in the fourth screenshoarrgh get it off get it off get it off