Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom

The AI seems up to the job, for the most part. While permanently cast in the role of the thief you'll have no direct control of the Majin. You can issue a handful of commands - asking him to wait, follow, attack, or interact with objects. He invariably responds correctly and with a winningly gawky enthusiasm.

As it's that kind of game, you can expect the Majin's powers to expand throughout the course of the adventure: moves can be upgraded and new abilities will suddenly appear. There's plenty of scope for puzzles even with basic tools like the Majin's ability to use his breath to blow platforms around, or his knack of using his back as a stepping stone for the thief. By the time you're getting to the point where he can electrify certain items, the game will hopefully be pleasantly engaged in melting the spatial reasoning part of your brain.

And while it doesn't promise to be particularly intricate, the combat adds another element to keep in mind at all times. As the thief, you're built for a stealthy approach - sneaking up behind baddies and finishing them off before you've been spotted. But with the Majin taking on the game's bigger opponents you can still help out at crucial moments, leaping from one ledge to the next, picking off the smaller foes and weighing in on the larger guys before retreating to a safe distance for the finishers.

Game Republic's designers are clearly hoping that a genuine relationship emerges through the action as well as the story, and it's interesting how many mechanisms - healing is a very good example - rely on interaction between the two characters.

The levels revealed so far seem to have a nice blend of styles and agendas: one minute you're in a combat arena surrounded by hulking brutes, the next you're picking your way through a temple riddled with dead ends, treasure chests and Dark Scouts - the spindly, Simian nasties who can hear your movements a mile off.

Although there's little in Majin that won't be faintly familiar even the first time you encounter it, the game promises to have a lovely sense of pace: pretty vistas loom into view at unusual moments while the itinerary muddles around with different objectives like somebody jiggling loose change in their pocket.

It's a tiny glimpse of what promises to be quite a large game - one developer suggested the entire adventure might clock in at around the 20 hour mark - but it's enough to suggest that Majin might be worth keeping an eye on. While it's nowhere near as heavy metal as something like Darksiders, it promises to be a bit more sprightly - a bit more openly gamey - that The Last Guardian.

Like the pairing of the Majin and the thief, then, this all depends on a balancing act. Can Game Republic hit the sweet spot between something tender and something thrilling? Can the developers offer a simple fable that still has room for a bit of substance along the way?