Sonic-Inspired Panic Porcupine Goes 3D in Panic 64 With Sonic Adventure References

Panic Porcupine is going 3D, and apparently his developer has been playing quite a bit of Sonic Adventure.

Spicy Gyro Games has revealed Panic 64, a new high-speed 3D platformer bringing the hero of 2022’s Panic Porcupine into the third dimension for the first time. The game is currently planned for 2027, with its Steam page now open for wishlisting, and is described as a mixture of classic run-and-jump platforming and racing mechanics wrapped up as a “next-gen platformer straight out of ’98.” The original Panic Porcupine already wore its Sonic influence pretty proudly, so taking Panic into polygonal 3D feels like a wonderfully appropriate next step.

Two dimensions are out. Polygonal anxiety is in.

And Spicy Gyro is not being particularly coy about the Hedge-like side of things either. The developer has actually been promoting Panic 64 with the hashtag #hedgelike, and the trailer contains one reference in particular that should immediately set off several alarms in the brain of anyone who grew up with Sonic’s Dreamcast adventures.

One sequence sends Panic running across a bridge with a huge truck directly behind him, immediately recalling the famous GUN truck chase from City Escape in Sonic Adventure 2. But Panic 64 does not stop there. After the chase reaches the water, the truck comes bursting back out in pursuit, effectively combining Sonic Adventure 2’s homicidal truck with the Orca setpiece from Emerald Coast in the original Sonic Adventure.

It is basically two generations of Sonic Adventure trauma condensed into one extremely determined truck.

The birds may be an even more interesting Sonic parallel. Dr. Proventriculus has once again set his sights on the Chickabirbs, with Panic rescuing the little creatures throughout the game’s polygonal stages. The trailer shows them appearing in multiple colors, immediately bringing to mind the Flickies and other small animals Sonic has spent decades liberating from Eggman’s machinery.

Then there is that counter.

Official Panic 64 imagery shows a Chickabirb icon in the HUD accompanied by 1/5, meaning five birds appear to form a complete set. That is particularly interesting when compared with Sonic 3D: Flickies’ Island, where each normal section requires Sonic to recover five Flickies before he can progress through the Dimension Ring. The Flickies themselves are also color-coded, with blue, pink, red and green varieties behaving differently from one another. Sonic City’s own documentation even breaks down the scoring chain from the first Flicky through the fifth.

To be clear, Spicy Gyro has not identified the five-Chickabirb setup as a deliberate Sonic 3D reference, so that connection remains our observation rather than something confirmed by the developer. But when a deliberately Sonic-inspired porcupine is rescuing multicolored birds five at a time, the comparison is not exactly hiding behind a palm tree.

There are plenty of smaller familiar ideas scattered around too. Panic 64 lets players smash CRT televisions to obtain power-ups, including the Egg Magnet and Boost Soda, putting its own chunky late-’90s spin on the sort of monitor-based power-up language that has been part of Sonic since the Mega Drive days. The game itself is also structured around eight linear stages with two missions each, four boss fights and a grading and scoring system designed to encourage both speedrunning and completionist play. None of that individually makes Panic 64 a direct copy of any particular Sonic title, but linear action stages, alternate objectives, score chasing and end-of-stage grades should all feel very comfortable to Sonic Adventure 2 veterans.

Panic’s movement is getting a substantial overhaul for the transition as well. A new drift ability lets him slide around corners before boosting back out of them, explicitly bringing racing mechanics into the platforming, while the Quill Qrush is intended for tighter precision sequences. The result looks like a game trying to balance wide spaces built around maintaining momentum with more technical stretches filled with platforms, spikes, moving hazards and all the other things that made Panic’s first adventure rather bad for his blood pressure.

Visually, Panic 64 is committing just as hard to the bit. Screenshots range from tropical coastlines and lava-filled caverns to a strangely ordinary carpeted interior full of fluorescent lights, while the whole thing is built from chunky polygonal geometry and deliberately low-resolution textures. Spicy Gyro’s own Steam feature list even reassures players that, no, they do not need glasses. The textures really are supposed to be that blurry.

That is what makes the sequel more interesting than simply converting a Sonic-inspired indie platformer into modern 3D. Panic 64 appears interested in recreating the specific moment when mascot platformers were stumbling, sprinting and occasionally exploding their way into three dimensions during the late 1990s. There are hints of Crash Bandicoot, Super Mario 64 and Sonic R among the obvious influences, but Sonic fans have a particularly large amount to chew on here.

There is the Adventure-style truck and Orca mash-up, the multicolored Chickabirbs and suspiciously familiar five-bird counter, the CRT power-ups, the linear stages and grades, the emphasis on speed and momentum, and, of course, one anxious porcupine making essentially the same 2D-to-3D leap Sonic himself made at the end of the ’90s.

Panic 64 is being developed by Spicy Gyro Games and published by Shiny Dolphin Games LLC, with its Steam release currently planned for 2027. The official listing promises eight stages, four bosses and enough deliberately low-resolution geometry to make the whole thing look like it fell through a portal from 1998.

If the first trailer is anything to go by, Panic might want to start checking whether that truck can climb stairs too.

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