Rolled Out! is a Super Monkey Ball clone featuring other trapped animals
Face your spheres.
Somewhere within Sonic's bowels, I hope someone is still working on Super Monkey Ball. Sega's spherical puzzle series was brought back to life in 2019 for Banana Blitz HD - a re-release of the series' average Wii U entry - before everything went silent again.
In the meantime, over the last 12 months, an incredibly similar-looking spherical puzzle game has been put together by a small team after raising £43k via Indiegogo.
The result is Rolled Out! and it er, rolled out onto Steam Early Access last night.
A number of animals are featured in the game, with Morris the Rat shown in the footage above. Otherwise, the similarities to Sega's simians are more than apparent. Super Monkey Ball didn't originate the marble puzzle genre, of course, though Rolled Out's levels, visual design, music, sound effects, and pretty much everything else about the game does not trouble to hide its inspiration.
Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD launched for consoles back in October 2019, and eventually turned up on Steam also. Sega seemed to be having fun with it for a short time - a later patch let you rumble around inside a cube, instead - but we haven't heard any more from the franchise in over a year.