Long read: The beauty and drama of video games and their clouds

"It's a little bit hard to work out without knowing the altitude of that dragon..."

If you click on a link and make a purchase we may receive a small commission. Read our editorial policy.

Apple Arcade paper plane adventure Lifeslide is swooping onto Steam in August

Folding at home.

A buried treat in the Apple Arcade launch line-up, the paper plane "metaphorical journey" Lifeslide is headed to Steam on the 6th of August.

Lifeslide's a game about controlling a paper plane as you rush over beautiful, ever-shifting low-poly landscapes. It's a game about life, but it's also just a delight to play, riding the currents, managing speed and height, and making sure you don't park yourself in a metaphorical tree.

This sentence is here because the ad on desktops messes things up otherwise.

Cover image for YouTube videoLifeslide Steam Announcement Trailer

The Apple Arcade version had a bunch of updates over the last two years, including a Zen mode to go alongside the story campaign. All of that stuff is coming over to the PC version along with stages remade from scratch, a new UI, and a better user experience.

I've been playing the new version for the last week or so and it's completely drawn me in. The sense of speed and exploration is just wonderful - it's the closest you'll get to playing a Mike Oldfield album, I reckon, which is either very good news or very bad news. (Amarok is a banger.) There's a constant sense of challenge as you choose between collecting little beads of light that give you more speed or little beads of light that allow you to upgrade your plane. And you can get new planes! New paper planes.

It's a heady wonder, a genuine piece of skymindedness. It's the work of Dreamteck, a small indie team in Bulgaria, and it's lovely to know that this lovely game is headed to a wider audience.