Let's Play: Dimension Parkour

As someone who regularly runs towards buffet tables at breakneck speeds, I’ve always been fascinated by parkour. It’s the fine art of using fancy footwork to get from A to B as fast as humanly possible. Why, you could parkour your way through this very article right now by simply skipping to the final line! If you’re OK with sprinting all over my heart.

Anyway, this week we’re playing Dimension Parkour by Hielke maps!

This is part of our new series Marketplace Mondays, wherein we take Minecraft to market and try to swap it for three magic beans. I mean, our new series where we showcase a Minecraft Marketplace map the first Monday of every month! Yes, that makes more sense.

Dimension Parkour is a massive parkour course that will have you leaping and sprinting like a pro if you put the time in to master it. Seriously, before I played this, I didn’t even know you could move in Minecraft.

And like all great Minecraft maps, this one starts by tantalizing you towards a mysterious portal:

Why, I’d be stupid NOT to jump into it.

Hop in and you’re instantly warped to a parkour course. And the timer is already ticking!

I hate to whine, even though I’m so ridiculously talented at it, but I’d recommend a few practice jumps before starting the course proper. Jumping in Minecraft isn’t always easy. There’s a reason we didn’t call it Jumpcraft, Minejump, or The Jumpy Adventures of Jumpy McJumpington, although we are still considering renaming it that last one if sales go down.

So let’s first have a quick hop through this little guide to jumping in Minecraft:

Often the real challenge in Dimension Parkour isn’t jumping through the course as fast as possible, but figuring out where you’re supposed to jump next. I’d recommend at least one run-through where you take things slowly and learn the course, before a second run where you go for a best time (that’s my bulletproof excuse for how appalling my first time was, and I’m sticking to it).

Having to use my head as much as my legs to navigate this par-course was great fun, bringing back fond memories of trying to navigate dungeons in 3D Zelda games. I love a good how-the-heck-do-I-get-up-there-flavored challenge. Dimension Parkour has tons of them!

It’s also quite fond of chucking me into an early grave.

Other obstacles this map throws at you are less deadly, but still worth being on your guard for. Slime blocks are sticky and slow you down when you walk over them (boo!) but are bouncy when you land on them from a great height (hooray!). The higher up you are when you land on them, the higher they’ll bounce you back up.

Learning just how high slime blocks will bounce you and how to pull off the precise landings required is essential if you ever want to see the end of this map. Did I rage quit, start a new game in Creative Mode, spawn nine slimes and use a nametag to call them all ‘STUPID JERK’? Perhaps, but I fail to see how that’s relevant to this article.

My nickname in school was ‘Slime’, because I was so popular and beloved. Yes.

There’s some real heart-in-mouth platforming on display here. Standing on a tiny platform in the sky, knowing that if you mess up the next jump, you’ll have to reattempt this tricky section from scratch… it’s enough to make you wish you’d never heard of Minecraft and were currently reading an article on Ihatevideogamesandfun.net

But stick with it! The disappointments of falling to your doom for the 10,000,000,000,003rd time are more than made up for by the dizzying highs of pulling off a string of perfect jumps. Be patient, persevere, and you shall be rewarded!

You’ll see floating previews of later parts of the course as you run through it. Our legs got all wobbly just looking at this one.

All these words in and I’ve still barely scratched the surface. There are swimming sections, a cute nod to Mario 64, a leap of faith into a tiny pool of water surrounded by danger, and lilypads that made me feel like a frog, loudly ribbiting as I played. Just me? Suit yourself, killjoy. Ribbit!

Dimension Parkour by Hielke maps is available now in the Minecraft Marketplace. Click this lovely line of green text to check it out.

See you next month for another great Minecraft Marketplace map! Assuming my legs have healed by then.