Gotta Go At A Moderate Speed

Tembo is a better Sonic, but not by enough.

See, unlike Hell Yeah!, which landed somewhere between "reference" and "parody" -- Tembo actually channels the spirit of a Sonic game, in that it allows you to turn into a destructive ball and charge through obstacles at high speed. And it doesn't destroy you when you take damage, instead stealing just a portion of your health meter. And there are checkpoints!

Tembo makes meaningful strides toward letting you go fast, without punishing you for going "too" fast. But... it doesn't go far enough.

It's not so much the short walls, requiring a jump; or the resilient barriers, requiring multiple hits; but the surprise hazards, enemies with machetes or flame cannons or ... flame tanks? Even when Tembo forgives you for a momentum-defeating mistake, it still doesn't feel fair, because it's not your fault that the game suddenly decided that you need to stop and reverse direction.

It's also an unfortunate example of user-unfriendly PC porting, between the obviously unhelpful tutorial prompts for my Xbox gamepad:

... and some surprising crash diagnostics when I alt-tabbed away:

It's not like Tembo is bad - I mean, the PC port ain't great - it's just, well, it recognizes that "fast sidescrolling" can be improved upon but doesn't execute on many of those improvements.

Progress: Got to the first Phantom Dome before getting lost in what was apparently a ping-pong battle.