AFTERGRINDER

I have a soft spot for small games that commit completely to one idea and refuse to apologise for it, and AFTERGRINDER is exactly that kind of game. Grave Danger Games built their debut release around a single, almost brutalist premise: you ride a hoverboard left to right at constant speed, you cannot stop, and the only inputs you get are up (ride the ceiling), down (return to the floor), and a depletable turbo boost that also breaks certain barriers. Three buttons. Ninety levels. Somewhere between VVVVVV and Super Meat Boy if both games had been raised on raw arcade cabinet electricity. The structure is lean and purposeful. Three worlds, thirty levels each, all unlocked from the start so you can bounce between them freely. World one is the clean tutorial arc: coloured pits, barriers you must boost through, simple switches. World two escalates with lasers and homing drones, plus a genuinely satisfying sequence of colour-coded portals that fling you across the screen at speed. The controls are responsive enough that deaths almost never feel cheap - you know exactly why you failed, and the reset is near-instant, which keeps the retry loop punchy rather than punishing. Character selection adds a light difficulty layer: The Lady is the default medium-speed run, The Dude unlocks after enough deaths and slows things down to something approaching manageable, and The Shark sits on the level select screen like a dare you probably should not take. Each star you collect on a level and every time entry feeds into online leaderboards, which gives the completionist crowd genuine replay incentive. World three is where the game earns its most legitimate criticism. Green reverse-control gates flip your inputs for entire stretches, and what starts as a clever curveball becomes the defining characteristic of the final thirty levels. Reversed controls are a well-worn frustration mechanic and critics at launch were fairly united on this point: a handful of levels would have been provocative, a full world of it is wearing. On top of that, the visual environments never really evolve across all ninety stages. The three worlds are differentiated mostly by background colour palette rather than distinct scenery, and the same urban geometry blurs together faster than you would like across a session. The soundtrack is punchy techno that fits the arcade energy well, though because levels are only ten to sixteen seconds long on a clean run (and you will not have many clean runs early), the same opening bars loop relentlessly until you clear a stage. For a certain kind of player - the one who ran VVVVVV on no-death mode for fun, who kept retrying I Wanna Be the Guy past midnight, who genuinely enjoys memorising obstacle sequences like a short musical phrase - AFTERGRINDER delivers a tight, honest package at a very low price. For everyone else, the surface-level minimalism may start to feel thin before the halfway mark. It is a debut that lands most of its ideas cleanly, stumbles on world three, and knows exactly what it is and is not trying to be. There is something quietly admirable about that clarity.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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