Screenbound is the Summer Game Fest standout that blends 2D and 3D into one

Screenbound, a new platformer from Crescent Moon Games, was one of the most striking things on the floor at Summer Game Fest 2026 — not on Geoff Keighley's main stage, but over at Day of the Devs. It calls itself a "5D" platformer, and the pitch is genuinely hard to explain in words: it combines a first-person 3D space with a 2D sidescrolling view, and you have to navigate both at the same time to make progress.

The way it works in practice is that your character carries a Game Boy-style handheld device that shows the world from a 2D perspective while you move through it in 3D. Some objects and paths only appear in one of the two views. In the demo, a balloon floated above a chasm — visible only on the 2D screen — and crossing the gap meant jumping in the 3D world and trusting that what the handheld showed was actually there. That constant back-and-forth between dimensions is the core gameplay loop, and it's as disorienting as it sounds until it clicks.

Game director Josh Presseisen told Kotaku that Screenbound grew out of a run of prototypes mixing 2D and 3D elements — including a sidescrolling 2.5D platformer with a Star Fox-style third-person flight section. The actual concept crystallized when he randomly saw a photo of someone playing a handheld device. "I posted the concept and it got a lot of interest right away," Presseisen says. Because every level has to be designed to work visually in both dimensions simultaneously, the discovery moments come from players figuring out how a single action translates across both views at once.

Clips of Screenbound have racked up millions of views on TikTok and X since the game was first revealed in 2024, pulling in people who haven't even played it yet. That kind of organic traction before a release is rare, and the demo suggests the actual game can back up the visual hook.