Zineth: a free homage to Jet Grind Radio

Jump, glide, grind: Zineth is a skating game in the spirit of Jet Grind Radio - and it’s not hard to spot the Sega influence. Smilebit’s sweet-natured classic is there in the rails that are strung across the expansive non-linear environments, for example, and in the fabulously lurid cel-shading that delivers a futuristic 3D wonderland for you to race through until you get dizzy. A little of JGR’s also visible in the fact that, for all Zineth’s eagerness to drop you into a mission structure and give you a timely sort of narrative to uncover, it’s far too easy to find yourself drawn outwards again, away from the quest chains and the checkpoint races and back to the simple pleasures of picking a spot on the horizon and then seeing what happens when you head for it.

When traversal becomes this enjoyable, in other words, it also becomes deliriously overpowering - even if you’re offered a decent campaign and a funny little monster-battler mini-game to run alongside it. Getting about in Zineth isn’t necessarily easy – you’ll need to master a surprisingly diverse range of skills that cover wall-grinding, mid-air steering, and a weird gravity tweak that sees you bringing yourself down to earth with a bump to pick up speed – but it’s all so breathlessly realised that it quickly becomes the only objective that really matters most of the time, whether you’re rolling around huge, complex spaces and exploring every nook and cranny of the environments, or rewinding through mess-ups to create the perfect unbroken racing line.

That rewind button is a canny addition, incidentally, given the frustration that can often descend in a world where one tiny mistake might see you losing huge chunks of progress, and its inclusion is enough to make you suspect that ArcaneKids, the team behind Zineth, is largely composed of industry veterans. In truth, however, this is a project made by a group of students, and they refer to the game itself as having grown out of a humble proof of concept.

Concept proved, I’d say, and although Zineth’s rather generous range of challenges make it a fairly busy experience at times, the pure, unmatched delights of its skating will leave you with an enviable sense of focus, elegance, and glorious empty space. ArcaneKids’ debut is fascinating stuff, then, and you shouldn’t let it pass you by.