Joe Danger’s grinning, but you know he’s seen better days. There’s a little bit of a paunch. Faded posters showing him advertising breakfast cereal peel from his caravan walls. To top it all, the doctors said he’d never walk again. But this is his comeback – and it’s going to be sensational.

We’ve spoken to Hello Games before, four guys that left solid jobs at Kuju, Sumo and Zoe Mode, having previously led such Brit-classics as Black and Burnout, to go it alone. But this is our first chance to show off the fruits of their toil.

You can read a lot more about Joe Danger in the feature appearing in our new issue, which is available in UK newsagents tomorrow, but here's an exclusive first look at a game made by four men in a cramped Guildford office for PS3, 360 and PC.

Joe Danger’s roots lie in inspiration from an Evel Knievel stunt toy and the team’s love of Micro Machines and Super Monkey Ball. “You got the feeling these were games being produced by very small teams,” says Hello head Sean Murray. “I think a lot of the early id Software stuff gave that impression of the personalities of the people that made it.”

Joe Danger certainly achieves that. It’s a 2D stunt racer-cum-platformer that has its eye both on the past with a focus on brightly traced carefree fun and on the future with the addition of in-game level editing tools.

You might immediately equate it to Trials HD, with which it shares the basic aim of directing a rider through a complex 2D assault course, but it quickly burns off on its own tangent. Its controls are a lot more forgiving for a start, and its attitude a lot breezier, with springs, waterbutts, the letters D, A, N, G, E, and R ripe for collecting and speed boosts spicing each level for silly entertainment.

And it’s not as if the edit mode has just been carelessly thrown into the mix. Levels are purpose-designed to require you to tweak them. Challenges include being given a ramp, 20 buses and the command to jump over them. How? It’s up to you to work it out and then perform it.

With a raft of minigames that include a six-player Road Rash-style combat jamboree, exacting time challenges and an after-crash mode that allows you to aftertouch Joe to cause as much damage as possible, it’s quickly evident that there’s a lot more to Joe Danger than meets the eye.

With the team still unable to confirm which platform or platforms the game will be released on and when – we play it on a PC with a 360 pad and see PS3 on-screen prompts – the only real question that remains is: how did four people do all this on their own?

And we can answer that. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be featuring on Edge Online a new column by Hello Games. In Hello World, the team will relate the trials and the triumphs of making games by and for themselves.

Read the first column right here, and don’t forget that a full, more in-depth look at Joe Danger is in E207, out now.