Bob and Prickle is a blaster with real pace

Who are Bob and Prickle? Honestly I have no idea, but in the early days of Steam's summer Game Festival, when the store is filled with hundreds of new demos, it's Bob and Prickle I have been spending time with.

This is a side-scrolling shooter with the emphasis on shooting. Oh yes, and another emphasis on jetpacks. You scoot around a mazey underground environment blasting at baddies and turrets and all sorts of other things, stopping only to do the occasional rescue or to swap a weapon with a downed enemy. It's percussive! Gunfire crackles and bangs and the beat drives you onwards.

I am terrible at Bob and Prickle so I can't tell you what comes next, but I can tell you that it's largely the work of Sedat Güç, a 20-year-old designer from Istanbul who's been making games since he was 14. Bob and Prickle has been in development for two years and is being made entirely without a game engine. Oh yes, and Bob is an amateur hero who acts without thinking and Prickle is a chatty cactus who sadly doesn't make it into the demo, so I guess I do have something of an idea of who these two are after all.

Güç describes his game as a "furious" platform shooter, and that's such a wonderful way of putting it I'm going to leave it there. Play this demo though. It is an awful lot of fun.