Mask Quest is a deceptively gimmicky platformer where you must press A to breathe while avoiding the cops

From increpare, creator of Stephen's Sausage Roll

Out 17th October on Steam, Mask Quest is a platform game in which you hold and release a button to refill your character's lungs while dodging police batons, bullets, gas grenades and drones. Neglect to do so, and you'll pop your clogs. It's the kind of mechanical tomfoolery you'd associate with Peter Molydeux, but in this case, it's all the fine work of Stephen's Sausage Roll developer increpare and Quadrant developer undef. The developers have somehow gotten 50 levels out of this meme-ish premise, and it looks like quite an elaborate hop-and-bopper with some less-cheerful political overtones. Here's the trailer.

So, those complexities. From what I can glean, the levels evolve beyond the initial "do what you do in most platformers + remember to inhale/exhale" conceit, with setups that make the breathing mechanic more feature than constraint. For example: you can breathe out to shunt away quadrotor drones before they knock you off ladders, and blow on sails to inflate them. There's a bit where it looks like you're expelling air to alter your mass and fall through surfaces. There's also the prospect of hyperventilation, which seemingly requires you to preserve the rhythm of your respiration, however frenzied your surroundings: breathe too rapidly and you'll empty out your carbon dioxide gauge.

As for the political overtones: 1) your objective is, as you'd guess, to find a mask, which is "sold out everywhere". It feels like an allusion to "post"-pandemic politics and the expectation that clinically vulnerable people must now see to their own protection, without state support. And 2) your character is Black, your enemies all appear to be cops, and the breath mechanic may refer to the murder of Eric Garner. I am likely reaching horribly with all this, or at best, lumpishly unearthing the subtext.

For reasons best known only to themselves, the developers have localised Mask Quest in Latin, a "dead" language, and Toki Pona, which Wikipedia calls "a philosophical artistic constructed language known for its small vocabulary, simplicity, and ease of acquisition", devised by Canadian linguist Sonja Lang around the turn of the millennium. It's all absolutely in keeping with the eccentricity of increpare's past creations, which you can read about here.