Abyss Runner Buried gem

A brutally hard, precision 2D climbing platformer in the Only Up! mold, by Asuwawagami, a Japanese doujin and indie developer, published by the Japanese indie label Tensei Games. You play Lily, the Queen of the Underworld, whose magic is immense but who is, frankly, a bit of an airhead. Spotting a vertical pit full of monsters, she hatches a prank: fling a Cursed Arm Binder onto a passing adventurer and drop him in for the monsters to feast on. Instead she trips into her own trap, the binder clamps onto her own arms, and because it seals off all of her magic she can no longer fly, plummeting straight down into the abyss completely defenseless. From there the game has a single objective, climb up: it is, in the developer's own words on the store page, a 2D platformer influenced by Only Up!, a deliberately merciless ascension where you inch up out of the pit through four areas while countless monsters get in your way, and a single slip can strip away a long stretch of hard-won height in an instant. The difficulty is punishing on purpose, its beta testers were tearing their hair out and the developer took two full days to reach the top, with hidden techniques to master and, for those who do not want the full ordeal, optional cheats offered as a mercy. Released in May 2026, it is Very Positive at 93 percent over 134 reviews (125 positive, 9 negative), a paid title, not free, fully launched and not in Early Access, with no AI-generated assets and, by Steam's own content descriptors, nothing sexual. Asuwawagami is a Japanese doujin and indie developer, and Tensei Games a Japanese indie games studio. It already supports English alongside Japanese and Simplified and Traditional Chinese, yet with only 33 of its 134 reviews in English (about 24.6 percent) and no Korean at all, the Steam English-speaking world has only begun to find it.

Only Up! The ascension origin

The origin of this taste: Only Up!, a 3D climbing platformer developed by SCKR Games and released on Steam in 2023. You climb ever upward across a towering, surreal stack of floating platforms and debris, and with no checkpoints, a single misstep can send you plummeting far back down and undo long stretches of hard-won height in an instant, so the whole game becomes the fear of falling and the pull to try the same climb again. It exploded into a viral streaming phenomenon in 2023 and crystallized the ascension climbing platformer, the lineage where the entire game is the climb and one fall can cost you everything. That core is the root Abyss Runner grows from, keeping the up-only ascension and the terror of losing height, but flattening it into a precision 2D platformer, wrapping it in a comic story of a fallen demon queen, and threading monsters through the climb across four areas. Only Up! was later delisted from Steam, so the origin is anchored here to its Wikidata entry rather than a store page.