ALTF42

My Saturday-night crowd has a name for games like this: a controller-thrower with a grin on its face. ALTF42 is a third-person precision platformer from Korean indie studio PUMPKIM, and the whole joke is baked into the title. The name is not "ALTF4 2" with a space; it is one deliberately squashed word, and that winking attitude runs through every inch of the game. You play as Don Quixote on a quest to rescue a king who has been transformed into a chicken, and the absurd premise is the warmest thing here, because the traps absolutely will not go easy on you. The core loop is simple to explain and brutal to survive. Run through trap-stuffed levels, hit the goal, do not die, repeat from the very beginning when you do because there is no saving. The permadeath system is uncompromising: every run starts at zero. What keeps it from feeling purely punishing is the rhythm of improvement that comes from repetition. You memorise where the exploding skeletons sit, you learn to anticipate the flying police cars and the airborne sharks that appear out of nowhere, and each death teaches you something specific. That loop genuinely works, and it is the main reason the game lands at Mostly Positive on Steam despite a rocky launch. A shop system lets you spend in-run currency on helpful items, which softens the hardest edges for players who would otherwise bounce off the difficulty in the first hour. There are also giant boss encounters and a Siege Mode for self-imposed challenge runs once you have seen the credits. On the technical side, be aware this one asks more of your PC than it has any right to. Recommended specs call for an RTX 2060 and a modern i7, which feels steep for a game that looks like a breezy indie. Early community reports flagged performance problems and launch bugs, including a black-screen issue on startup that some players had to chase through DirectX settings to fix. The developers addressed the worst of it through hotfixes and updates, but it is worth keeping an eye on your machine before committing. Steam Deck is officially unsupported, so desktop-only for now. Who is this actually for? Fans of Getting Over It, Jump King, and similar masochism-by-design games will recognise the rhythm immediately and probably love it. Casual players who bounce off friction fast should know upfront that the permadeath is real, patience is mandatory, and the checkpoint does not exist. The added story and dark-comedy ending give the game a personality that pure gauntlet games often skip, which is a genuine differentiator. The main story runs around six to seven hours for most players, though your mileage scales sharply with how often you restart a section. It is a lean experience rather than an epic one, and at sub-five-dollar price tier that context matters.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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