Backpack Boy is my favourite 2D puzzle platformer of 2026 so far. It has a simple premise, a few clever gimmicks, and some phenomenal level design. Everything feels perfectly in place, making it an incredibly satisfying game to play. Don’t sleep on this one. It’s a banger.
Backpack Boy starts out with you taking control of the titular character, exploring a laboratory set inside a mountain. Gameplay flips between traversing the lab and the mountain with your flashlight, but your flashlight doesn’t just illuminate light… what it lights up is transformed back in time into an altered state. Whilst there are lots of light-activated switches that open doors, move trolleys, and set off moving platforms, that’s only half the fun. When your flashlight shines on a platform, it may disappear, or a wall may reappear, depending on the state of time. Traversal is simple. Walls can be scaled by just climbing straight up them without a stamina bar. The whole key to the game is working out how to use your flashlight.
Beyond this, Backpack Boy can run through portal doors to switch the entire screen between the two time states. These areas are like platforming logic loops to run through to find the right way out the other side. Lanterns emit light and change the state of time, and these can be thrown into voids to illuminate platforms that can be jumped onto. There are also spinning emergency lights that illuminate sections of a level screen. Rotate these around to keep yourself in the light, or to light up your next steps. All of these things sound simple, but they combine together to require illuminating hops, steps, and jumps. Whilst levels are usually self-contained single screens, this changes whenever you encounter a laboratory beast. This beast chases you across large sequences that require pixel-perfect platforming and use of all of these mechanics to escape it. They are visceral and difficult, but very rewarding to get right. In many games, this would be a skill check to prevent players from limping onwards, but Backpack Boy has a different approach.
If you get stuck in Backpack Boy, there is an option to skip the level you are currently working. I wasn’t convinced with this initially, but I ran into issues a couple of times during my playthrough where I’d spawn a lantern, throw it, and then accidentally switch time states. The lantern would get stuck behind a wall, preventing my progress. Skipping the puzzle let me continue on regardless and was a good way to not break my progression or reload from an earlier save. This is my own negative point for the game.
Graphically, it’s stylised with messy pixel art, but the artwork conveys a sense of grand scale at times that feels very 1980s sci-fi. The soundtrack has some catchy chiptune melodies, too. The control scheme manages to cope with running in one way, shining a light another way, and doing a third action at the same time. Mapping up on the analogue stick or D-pad to jump took a few minutes to get used to, but when you are triple-tasking, it suddenly makes a lot of sense.
I thoroughly enjoyed playing Backpack Boy. I feel like there are quite a lot of secrets I missed that warrant repeated playthroughs to discover absolutely everything, and I intend to dive back in again soon. This is one of my favourite games of 2026, and I recommend it to all puzzle platformer fans.
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