A circus built to kill you
Penarium is a fast 2D arena game set inside a sinister circus. You play as Willy, an unlucky contestant forced to run and jump through a gauntlet of killer death-traps while a sadistic crowd cheers for blood. The stages are compact arenas rather than long scrolling levels, so the action stays tight and the danger is always close. Clear the traps and Willy can become the Champion of Penarium; fail and the crowd gets exactly what it came for. The tone is dark comedy, with comical dialogue and cutscenes between the mayhem.
Playing with friends
The game supports 2 player local play in both COOP and VS modes, so two people on one machine can either team up or go head to head. If your group is spread across different places, Remote Play Together lets a friend join in from their own machine while playing along with you. The feature list also includes online leaderboards for chasing high scores when you are not playing together.
What is waiting for you
There are 3 arenas and 4 game modes to work through. Campaign mode contains 30 challenges, while Arcade mode has over a dozen unlockable power-ups to find. The difficulty is pitched as a precision platformer, so expect to die often and learn the trap patterns through repetition. It is a singleplayer game at heart that opens up with a friend, and the pixel art keeps the whole thing colorful even when things go badly for Willy.