Picture this. You’re in the depths of an arcane fortress. You’re surrounded by lava. Fiends hover over its boiling surface, blocking your path. Vortices to the unknown swirl, waiting to swallow you whole. Fleshy maws jut from the stone, waiting to chew you up. Also, there’s no floor. You hurl yourself off the ledge, float over the teeth and flames, bulldozing hovering monstrosities all the way, and midair, you leap, landing on the other side of the gauntlet.

Is this the kind of thrill you’re looking for? If so, Wings of Vi’s got it (what I just described is an actual room in the game). It’s got intense, high-speed, high-stakes platforming, larger-than-life bosses, and a colorful world and cast.

You are Vi, an angel living a peaceful life in a floating citadel… right up to the point the citadel’s most dangerous prisoner, the demon Jeh’Oul, escapes, leaving Vi to track him to his lair in the Underworld and set everything right.

What exactly can Vi do? At first, she can jump once at any point after being grounded and use a short-range slicing attack. This makes for dynamic platforming where you must use these skills in the right combinations to get from one place to another. Later upgrades will give Vi a flutter, slide, double jump, dash, and a ranged attack, and each new ability brings new challenges. There are plenty of antepieces to give you some idea how to tackle them; one early example involves Vi racing her friend Rubi through an obstacle course that requires you to drop off a ledge and jump mid-air to clear a gap, and Rubi will do the jump first so you can see how you’re meant to proceed. This doesn’t mean the solutions to puzzles will be handed to you, though; once you’ve got the basic idea, levels leave it up to you to find the safest, quickest routes through the world.

Combat starts out a little more limited, but it’s still fun. Since Vi just has the one short-range attack at first, it’s more about reading enemies’ attack patterns and avoiding damage to Vi, looking for safe openings to fight back. This is definitely tough, and there’ll be a lot of close calls and heightened heart rates during boss fights. Later enemies mix it up a little; Vi gains the ability to shoot, and some bosses have puzzle elements, one constantly drains your health, and one even has spikes you can impale him with and then shatter to do extra damage. My favorite boss in the game is Kratarac, a giant tunneling behemoth that chases you over a pit of flame, periodically changing direction so that by the time the fight’s over, you’ve battled him not just horizontally, but vertically and backwards. It’s fun to play and looks fantastic, too.

This is also one of the few games to get difficulty settings right. It’s not just a “higher difficulty setting = boss has more hp and you fire nerf balls;” they are legitimately different experiences, with rearranged platforms, alternate obstacles, and new attacks for both enemies and bosses. You can also use modifiers to make the experience either easier or harder, by say, giving yourself all the weapons from the start or making everything OHK you. As other reviews have said, this means none of the settings are easy, they just prioritize different things.

That said, as much as I love this game, it’s not perfect. The Eaters, those aforementioned fleshy maws, have infamously obnoxious hitboxes; graze the corner of one with your little toe and the game acts like you jammed your head directly down its gullet. There are also a few glitches that can add an unintended layer of extra difficulty; for example, a bone snake Vi is supposed to land on has a bad habit of lodging itself in her kneecap instead, freezing her in place. The in-game respawn button means none of this will cost more than a few seconds, but it’s still temporarily irritating.

However, to me, nothing was more than temporarily irritating. They certainly weren’t dealbreakers. Overall, Wings of Vi has been a blast start to finish. It’s easily one of my favorite games.