Project Parallel: erase the wall, walk into the world next door

A demo of about thirty minutes left the people who played it split between wanting more and dismissing the whole thing as an advertisement.

Wipe out a wall and the world next door opens

Nohla points a hand at the wall ahead of her and the wall stops existing: in the world next door there is no wall there, there is the opening she needed. That is how Project Parallel settles its obstacles — by swapping the scenery around the player to open routes the other world keeps hidden.

The vigilante lost her parents to a totalitarian death cult, and years later she is still crossing the multiverse trying to stop that same group from destroying other worlds. A mission goes wrong and leaves her stranded between two worlds on the edge of collapse. Along the way, fragments of her own parents' research start to surface — clues she might rather not find.

What reaches the player is a playable demo: the studio's own text calls the package a showcase of what is still to come. Basking Bee Games is behind this third-person action-adventure, released on December 30, 2023 and available for Windows only, while Nohla dodges the drones the Collective sends after anyone who crosses its path. Among those who have played it, the store itself sums up the reception as mixed.

The convention that rewrote the tutorial

The studio took the demo to DreamHack Dallas and to the Southeast Game Exchange, and came back from both with the same complaint on repeat: the world-swapping was hard to follow. The answer arrived in an update — a clearer tutorial for the switching mechanic, plus visual landmarks to make navigation easier. The creative director went live to talk about those changes and about where the project goes next.

In the preceding weeks the board had logged smaller fixes too: the climbing animation, the audio, and a wall that could only be crossed from one side — enough to stop anyone trying to collect every research log scattered across the game. After July 14, 2024, the studio posted nothing more there.

The ones who listened to the voice instead of reaching for a ruler

The player who turned up with two hours in is a self-declared platformer fan, and calls the world-swapping the smartest part of the idea: changing the scenery does not just open a path, it also throws enemies off the scent. Dated January 18, 2024, the write-up also notes those enemies could grow in later versions — a reminder that this is a showcase, not the finished product — and signs off praising the voice work.

Someone who came back to it after an hour, on December 6, 2025, puts the atmosphere at the top: murky settings, a sense of threat round every corner, puzzles that demand thinking outside the obvious. Another one-hour verdict, from February 8, 2024, backs that up: the difficulty curve felt well spread out, enough to swing between frustration and satisfaction, and the result impressed, coming from a small team.

Nohla's story also wins over players who normally skip the plot. One posted on April 6, 2024 admits to hunting down the research chips left behind by the heroine's parents purely for the quality of the narration. Another, an hour in and written on March 5, 2024, calls the story sincere and well performed, with only one regret: the demo hands out few abilities — another reminder that the full game has yet to arrive. And on March 3, 2024, someone sums it all up in a couple of minutes: about thirty minutes of game, plain graphics, and still worth the time.

The more they played, the less they recommended it

At launch, on December 31, 2023, a verdict written without even an hour on the clock already had the problem pinned down: the voice acting lands, the world-switching idea lands too, but the music volume menu does not work and the controls are slow to answer. For that player, the result was pure frustration.

The accounts that follow put names to what jams the game up. One written on January 7, 2024, again short of the first hour, describes the alternate-dimension view as confusing and the movement system as stiff: climbing only works from a standstill, facing one particular wall, and jumping at it gets you nowhere. An hour in, another one from January 10, 2024 goes further: the wall run is too fast to react to, able to pin the character back onto the surface right up to her death, and the voice recordings hold the story but cannot be skipped, freezing the scene for more than a minute. A French-language entry from February 9, 2024 calls the character's movement and collisions unpredictable and asks for more life in the cities, which sit far too empty.

The same drones that chase Nohla for the Collective in the first section turn up here as the other side of the coin. That same text from January 10, 2024 says you can ignore them almost entirely: the enemies put up no resistance at all. And the harshest charge does not come from someone who barely played. It comes from a player who reached four hours, and it runs longer than anything else on the negative side. It was filed on November 30, 2025: that person decided this is not a game — it is an advertisement for a product that has yet to exist, measured against a classic of the genre and treated as a botched copy of it.

Who the wall is worth erasing for

Project Parallel is for anyone who wants to see what a small studio can pull off: the demo delivers a story of loss and cult that grips even players who barely care about plot, and voice work that both camps praise without reservation. It is not for anyone expecting precise controls — climbing and wall running fail the same way in English and in French, which rules out the bad-translation theory and points straight at the movement system itself.

Worth remembering: in this sample, the players who stayed longest came away least convinced, the opposite of what a good showcase would do. Even so, one of the sharpest verdicts ends up hoping the full version turns out perfect. What Project Parallel asks in return is not precision in the controls: it is half an hour of patience to decide whether you want to see the rest.