A pigeon-powered parkour playground that lets you flip, vault, and fail stylishly across urban rooftops—with friends, bugs, and the occasional identity crisis.
I’ve always liked parkour in games, but it’s never been the main thing. From Mirror’s Edge’s wall-running to Dying Light’s rooftop tricks, games have tried parkour but never really committed. Rooftops & Alleys, made by a small independent team called MLMEDIA, Rooftops & Alleys: The Parkour Game that really shows off parkour.
It’s already getting a lot of attention thanks to its tight movement, regular updates, and lively community. Even though there are some bugs in early access, it gives freerunning fans what they’ve been waiting for: a core experience.
Rooftops & Alleys: The Parkour Game doesn’t have a story. There is no story, dialogue, world-building. The world in Rooftops & Alleys: The Parkour Game is made to be moved through, not to have meaning. After the next vault or flip, you don’t need any more motivation. The lack of a story isn’t a flaw; it was meant to be that way. No one is being saved. You’re not getting away from danger. The whole point is that you’re just moving.
Rooftops & Alleys: The Parkour Game is basically a sandbox where you can do anything you want. You can pick from six maps, including a steelyard, a school district, a construction site, a container ship, a skyscraper, and a few others. Each one provides verticality, chances to trick, and unrestricted freedom. You can play by yourself or with up to three friends.
Moving is what this is all about. You do more than just jump and run. You’re flipping, rolling, running up walls, vaulting, grabbing zip lines, and doing tricks in the air. Fluidity and momentum are at the heart of the whole system. It feels like everything responds, and the flow is addictive once you learn how to link moves together. A lot of the time, you’ll skip goals just to see how stylishly you can move around the map.
Then there’s the pigeon mechanic. You really can change into a pigeon. You can move to any spot on the map with this feature. This is helpful when you want to check out or try again a trick from a higher angle. It doesn’t make sense, but in this game, ease of use can be more important than logic.
There is no fighting. No bad guys. No weapons. Rooftops & Alleys: The Parkour Game is hard because of two main types of activities: Score Attacks that do tricks in a small area, and based on your points, you’ll get medals.
Time trials are where you try to get through a set of checkpoints as quickly as possible by mastering parkour. Neither is required. You can stick to these challenges if you want plain, simple gameplay, or you can forget about them and just explore. Both ways are fine with the game.
Attacks in Rooftops & Alleys: The Parkour Game feels limited. The game is all about long, smooth moves, trying to do cool tricks in a small space doesn’t work well. When you try to do skateboard tricks in a broom closet, it feels like you’re stuck. Long lines work much better with the trick system than short bursts.
Rooftops & Alleys: The Parkour Game‘s real gem, though, is the time trials. They start out easy. Just follow the signs and don’t make any mistakes, and you’ll get a bronze or silver medal at the very least. But gold medals need perfect work.
To cut down on airtime, you’ll need to time your jumps perfectly, drop instead of jumping, and start your sprint at just the right moment. It turns into a game of mastery and small changes, and when you get it right, it’s very satisfying.
Still, some checkpoints feel broken. Some are buried in the ground, which makes it hard to see where to go or hit while staying fast. While not game-ending, it’s annoying when you’re only milliseconds away from a gold medal, and something goes wrong with the technology.
An XP or skill tree is not present. Instead, the rewards are cosmetics, which are clothes and other items that you can unlock for your character. To get these, you have to do things like time trials and score attacks. It’s a simple system that’s not meant to take over the game. Style, not stat-boosting, is what this is all about.
The graphics of the game are pretty simple. There are enough environmental cues in maps to help you figure out where to go and what to do. The architecture is clean and stylized. Your character is a dark figure in black with a spiked head. Their silhouette stands out just enough against the urban color scheme.
The maps aren’t very big, but they’re well-designed. You can explore a lot of vertical space, and sometimes, getting to the top feels like its own little challenge. The layout lets you try new things and be precise at the same time, whether you’re running across rooftops, weaving through a construction site, or zip-lining across containers.
This is where things go wrong. A great soundtrack is needed for Rooftops & Alleys: The Parkour Game to match the game’s pacing. To match the thrill of freerunning, play something fast, rhythmic, and catchy. The background beats on Rooftops & Alleys, on the other hand, are quiet.
It works, but you won’t remember it. The sound design doesn’t take away from the experience, but it also doesn’t add anything to it. You’ll probably turn off the music and play your own Spotify playlist of parkour tracks instead.
That’s not what Rooftops & Alleys: The Parkour Game tries to be. It’s not an epic story game or a sports shooter. And it does a great job of what it sets out to do: it’s a parkour sandbox. The movement feels smooth and satisfying, the maps are full of places to explore and try new things, and the game’s mechanics provide a unique kind of happiness that’s hard to describe but easy to feel.
You can be excited about Rooftops & Alleys: The Parkour Game, even though it’s not quite done. This game is perfect for people who spend hours perfecting a line in Skate 3. Heck, Rooftops & Alleys is a nice reminder that games don’t always need a lot of features. Sometimes, all they need is room to move and a pigeon button.
