Albert Camus famously told us to imagine Sisyphus happy. What gets forgotten is that Camus was always more interested in the walk back down than the pushing, and that's the bit Sisyphus - The Walk Down is named after.

It's an illustrated narrative piece from Play It Faster Games, written and narrated by Christopher Blumzon, and it's heading to iPhone and iPad next month.

You push the stone uphill, let go to catch your breath, then follow it back to the bottom while Blumzon tells a story across ten loops. After that, the story ends, but the walk doesn't. You can keep going for as long as you like, which the developer sums up as “20 minutes to infinity”.

Building a whole release around repetition sounds a bit odd. Then again, anyone who's carried the weekly shop up a few flights of stairs knows the trip back down for the next bag is where your mind wanders off. That seems to be the idea here, give or take a boulder.

The Walk Down is made for headphones and a quiet sit-down, and it plays in landscape. You get recorded narration with subtitles, plus separate volume settings for the voice and the music. 

Controls are simple touch, and there's an optional tap-to-start, tap-to-stop mode if holding your thumb down gets tiring, which feels only fair for something about pushing a rock forever. The soundtrack uses two tracks by Scott Buckley, with footsteps and the sound of the stone itself mixed in.

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