Populus Run initially released on Apple Arcade four years ago. Now in 2026, the game makes its PC debut with some ground-up rebuilding. It’s a crowd runner title, meaning you’ll control a crowd of people running through 20 hand-crafted levels with a physics-based randomness to it. This allows players to learn the level design, but still need to be prepared for a curveball. All this happens whilst you bop along to one of the best soundtracks I’ve heard in 2026.
Firstly, that soundtrack. Everything you do in the game is sung at you. Level titles are chants when you enter a level. As your crowd runs forward, each of the three biomes in the game has its own track that often sings about running, jumping, and dodging things. It doesn’t react to you, but the playground-like explosion of fun elevates the game experience hugely. A shout-out to the second boss track, where a doughnut gives a rap to rival a Katamari-meets-Parappa track.
It’s a shame that the gameplay doesn’t quite live up to the audio design, but it isn’t bad by any means. Running has a uniquely fuzzy quality to it. Moving left and right slows your crowd down, as your people have momentum. That takes a while to get used to if you’ve played cheap mobile runners where the speed is constant. You’ll collect new people for your crowd across each level, including a bonus fruit character to combat the evil junk food objects and bosses you need to avoid. Your crowd can move left, right, and jump. Jumping can become a glide of sorts by holding the jump button, and that can be handy to clear large gaps and multiple objects. Running itself isn’t the problem, its the crowd itself.
Players have no control over the crowd, which spreads out and contracts slightly as you move throughout levels. This means random members of your crowd will fall down holes, get stuck on walls in tubes, and get knocked into oblivion by exploding cupcakes and bags of chips. There is little you can do to avoid it, nor protect your special bonus fruit character who you can save and unlock achievements with if they reach the end. I felt like the game needed a time-limited contract crowd button, but nothing exists. As a result, the fuzzy movement that comes with a very minor delay isn’t as satisfying as it could be. As objects can bounce around a bit, their physics will play out slightly differently even if the level is triggered and designed to run the same each time. I like this in principle, but in very busy levels I found the road was completely blocked on a few rare occasions, meaning my entire crowd would run into an impassable wall of fast food. It’s rare, but perhaps with a contract button, something could be more survivable.
I enjoyed playing Populus Run, but it comes with a general mobile-first woolly control system that I find most of these kinds of ports or rebuilds never quite design out. Populus Run is on the better side of this well-travelled road, but the dev team say they’re working on tightening things up a little more. That’d be welcome. There are a few hours of lighthearted, well-designed entertainment here for fans of runner games. It’s not hardcore, but there is a hardcore mode that ramps up the on-screen chaos to avoid for genre experts to sink another 3 hours into. Check out the soundtrack though. It is fab.
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