Ash & Adam's GOBSMACKED

I have a soft spot for the kind of game two people build in a bedroom and somehow make feel more kinetic than a triple-A production. GOBSMACKED is exactly that. It drops you into procedurally generated gladiator arenas as a goblin with entirely too much momentum and not nearly enough self-preservation instinct, and asks you to entertain a crowd of fans while dismantling waves of junkbots by any physical means available. The whole design philosophy, per the developers themselves, was built around "ride 60 seconds of chaos", and honestly, that pitch delivers. The movement system is the heart of it. You can grapple, double-jump, wall-climb, glide, and stomp your way through each arena, and the physics simulation means almost every object in the environment can be snatched, kicked, or thrown at an enemy. A flamethrower that can be upgraded to bounce its fire off walls, melee that explodes on impact, saw blades that get a bit unruly, the upgrade tree splits between permanent gear you unlock before a run and in-run arena boosts you buy with the gold that rains down from defeated bots. It is a small loop, but it is a well-considered one. The crowd-performance layer adds a secondary pressure: put on a good enough show and you earn more, which accelerates the gear spiral nicely. Where the game is honest with itself is in scope. This is a micro-experience, labelled "mini-FPS" for a reason, and player sentiment confirms the thing most likely to bounce you off it: content depth. Community voices consistently note the core combat is genuinely fun, but once you have seen the arena roster a few times the roguelite variety wears thin. There are reported bugs too, a mouse sensitivity glitch tied to keybind menus, and enemy groups occasionally clipping into geometry, small things that a two-person studio may or may not patch. The game carries a strong positive rating among the players who have reviewed it, which suggests the audience it finds tends to love it; just go in knowing you are buying a sugar rush, not a marathon. The art style prioritises readability at speed, which is the right call for something this frantic. There is a scrappy, hand-crafted energy to the whole package that I find hard to dislike. It has the charm of a band's first EP: not everything lands, the production has rough edges, but the core idea has genuine personality. If you regularly bounce off roguelites because sessions drag on too long, this is structurally the opposite problem, runs are short, stakes feel immediate, and the physical chaos lands every single time you boot it up.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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