No one was more disappointed than I was when the official PS4 FAQ on the PlayStation Blog was updated last week to omit Tiny Brains, from developer Spearhead Montreal, from the launch day lineup in North America. Back at PAX, I fell in love with the cute, curious co-op puzzle game from a team of former-AAA game designers, and it was one of my most anticipated games to download come November 15. Sadly, we’ll have to wait just a bit longer: Tiny Brains will be coming out November 26. Only 11 days separate your brand new consoles from a game I enjoyed so much, I wanted to go back for more.

So I did, when Spearhead and TriplePoint Games invited press to a preview event in San Francisco just a few weeks back. One of the reasons for the delay of Tiny Brains is that Spearhead is nailing down the online portion of the game, according to Polygon’s conversation with the team’s co-founder Atul Nath Mehra. While we didn’t test the online functionality at our preview event, co-founder and game director Malik Boukhira did lead us through an updated version of the playable PAX demo, along with a few other neat standouts that hadn’t been shown just yet.

In Seattle, the team from Spearhead had only a limited time to show a group of two or three media members what their game was about; during my demo there, I only had the opportunity to play as one character and use one power set. In San Francisco, Malik and the TriplePoint team provided far more time to go hands on with the game–and, to that point, the most extensive time I’d had one-on-one with a Dualshock 4 controller. The game, running on a PlayStation 4 devkit, had received a significant coat of paint and polish in just the two months since I’d last laid eyes on it, with new cinematics for the introductory levels that served as a credit sequence at the open of a film.

Besides the basic couch co-op mode, Malik demonstrated Tiny Brains‘ single and two-player modes as well. In single player, rather than having three AI companions along for the ride, you have the ability to switch powers on a whim, flicking between the available ‘brains’ to accomplish the tasks that would normally require more participants. Because certain puzzles require one person to be in one place and another across the room, inanimate objects like boxes are often available to hold down switches or move parts of the level, which isn’t the case in full four-player co-op. Similarly, if you have just two people playing, each player can switch back and forth between available powers, though neither one can possess the same power simultaneously.

With further time with Tiny Brains came more exploration of levels I hadn’t yet experienced, and new and more elaborate death traps devised by the Spearhead team. And chickens. Lots and lots of chickens, as you can see in the new artwork and screens. In the hour or more spent with the game, we progressed through just two chapters of the game, more Tiny Soccer, a few of the challenge modes–including a new challenge one a rotating platform that was quite difficult–and the menu screen showed a lot more progress to go. Malik also showed off two game modes that we can’t talk about just yet, but they raise the competitive stakes a bit while also still emphasizing the fun of cooperative play. When the game launches on November 26, we’ll be sure to fill you in on ‘Tiny Trolls’ mode–one of the standouts from my time.

Tiny Brains launches for the PS4, PS3 and PC on 11/26 in North America, with an Xbox 360 release in the works as well.

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