After a year in open beta, Hot Lava is almost ready for release. With Oxygen Not Included appearing in July, along with the Early Access launch of Griftlands, I confess I'd forgotten all about Klei's first-person parkour game, despite its abundance of personality. To mark the impending launch, you can watch another brief episode of Global Action Heroes, Klei's homage to cartoons like G.I. Joe. 

In Hot Lava, you'll be playing as toys based on the fictional cartoon. Thankfully, they're all poseable action figures with the necessary agility to navigate an obstacle course that's bathed in lava. The game's worlds are all mundane rooms, from a high school gym to a hideous '80s living room, but they've all been turned into deadly molten swimming pools. 

Navigating these treacherous museums of nostalgia requires a lot of jumping, swinging and, apparently, surfing. You can play with up to eight friends, too, competing with them for a coveted spot on the leaderboard. Once you've mastered the courses, you might want to check out what other players have created. Hot Lava comes with a Unity level construction kit and already has Steam Workshop support.

The launch update will introduce a basement level, a new progression system that replaces randomised drops, improvements to controls and performance, and more. There are no patch notes yet, however, so we'll have to wait to see the full extent of the jump to 1.0.  

Hot Lava is due out on September 19, and Klei says it will continue to update the game with new stuff, tweaks and bug fixes after launch. 

In some respects you've already played Klei Entertainment's new first-person parkour platformer. As a kid you pretended the floor was lava, maybe in your bedroom or living room, and tried to get from one side of the room to the other without touching the carpet until a parent yelled at you. "Knock it off! Don't stand on that! Go play outside!"

As a kid in Hot Lava, which is now in open beta (it'll enter Early Access later) you're inspired by a superhero cartoon you see on TV. It's quite a good one, complete with the hero whose swimming powers don't come in handy due to the lack of an ocean (plus she can't even understand her own dolphin). Watching the heroes battle a dastardly lava boss captures your imagination, and that makes just getting upstairs and into bed a daring adventure. The carpet turns to lava and you parkour off furniture and walls and swing from the chandelier.

At school, the fantasy continues with your classmates—in this case, other players—as you bounce around the hallways, classrooms, gym, and cafeteria, being sure to never touch the floor.

There are a number of parkour moves beyond simply jumping. Keep an eye out for items outlined in green, like ropes and platforms, since they can be grabbed with a mouse-click and swung from, or sometimes even clambered onto. Green smears on vertical surfaces indicate wall running is possible by sticking to the glop and propelling yourself forward. You can boost your speed, and thus the length of your jumps by strafing and rotating in the same direction while jumping, and surf along certain objects as though railsliding without a skateboard.

As you're bouncing around you can collect cards that unlock new cosmetic customization options for your character. Plus, you can see how you fared against your Steam friends in timed challenges with a leaderboard. I also saw a player bouncing around with a pogo stick that I now desperately want.

One big issue I've been having in the beta is with unstable frame rates. The first time I played on Wednesday I would abruptly drop from around 60 fps to single digits—which isn't great when you're trying to time jumps or grab ropes. I played again this morning and it was considerably smoother, but there are still occasional drops in fps that threw off my timing.

First-person parkour is tricky to pull off in a game, especially on keyboard and mouse, and really needs a natural fluidity as you speed through jumps and activate movement skills. In that respect, Hot Lava isn't really there yet. Again, it's in beta, but at this early stage it's lacking a certain smoothness to its movement. It's still good fun to play, and the art, character animation, and environments are wonderful, too. But there's plenty more work to be done before it really makes me feels like a kid imagining himself being a parkour superhero, instead of an adult trying to imagine himself being a kid.

The trailer for Hot Lava is something else. It's a five-minute homage to Saturday morning cartoons complete with theme song and an ad break for "the Mount Vile Gauntlet Trial playset". The actual game it's a trailer for is, like that playset, an elaborate obstacle course where—just like we pretended as kids—the floor is lava.

Hot Lava is what Klei have been working on alongside Oxygen is Not Included and new DLC for Don't Starve. In the middle of E3 fever during the week, they quietly launched it into open beta on Steam, meaning that you can play it right now.

They've clarified that this is not part of Steam's Early Access program, however. When games go into Early Access they get a chance to be featured on the front page, go into the recommendations algorithm, become eligible for user review, and generally become a part of the greater Steam ecosystem. Klei don't want this version of Hot Lava to go through all of that. They've had open betas available through their website before, and did something similarly stealthy for Oxygen Not Included. It means Hot Lava will be available on Steam without being visible to people who aren't specifically looking for it.

Apparently the plan is for an Early Access release to follow when Hot Lava's ready for it, but if you want to get in earlier than Early, here's the Steam page.

Klei Interactive, the maker of Mark of the Ninja, Don't Starve, and Invisible Inc., is working on a new game, which also happens to be its first-ever 3D game, called Hot Lava. The idea behind it actually comes from a very old game that you may have played as a child: The floor is made of molten lava, and if you step on it, you die!

The floor is literally made of lava in hot lava, although it doesn't appear to melt the laundry basket or set fire to the teacher's desk. There's also a lot more Mirror's Edge to it than the couch-to-coffee-table clambering of childhood, and sliding on frictionless surfaces will allow you to to reach incredible speeds and perform impossible jumps. The adventure will unfold across distinct worlds, from school hallways to the memories of your darkest fears, and it will also, according to the Steam page, support some form of multiplayer.

The system requirements are listed too, but they're so low as to be almost irrelevant: Windows 7, 2GB RAM, DirectX 9.0, and 5GB of drive space. A launch date hasn't been announced, but Klei is now taking signups for a closed beta at playhotlava.com.

Thanks, GamesRadar.