Bad Girl

My first instinct when something this stripped-down lands on my desk is to give it a fair run before writing it off. Bad Girl kept testing that instinct. GoodMood built a 2D side-scrolling shooter-platformer around a single, blunt idea: a protagonist on a revenge quest through hordes of mutated, weaponized creatures, nothing between you and them except your aim and your ability to stay on the platforms. Over thirty levels plus a final boss, that loop is the whole deal. No story cutscenes, no upgrade trees, no dialogue. If you came up on Contra, early Metal Slug, or the bottom shelf of a 2000s Flash game portal, you will recognize this DNA immediately. The variable difficulty setting is the only real concession to different skill levels, and on higher settings the volume of enemies that floods each stage does push back hard enough to be genuinely tense. Coins scattered across levels feed a bonus system, which adds a thin layer of resource awareness to what is otherwise pure reaction-based play. The retro pixel art is functional rather than remarkable, though in full-screen the pixelation goes quite coarse, something worth knowing before you commit to that display mode. The dynamic music has ambition behind it, but players have flagged that multiple tracks can bleed into each other mid-session, creating an unintended audio layering that breaks the mood rather than building it. That brings me to the rough edges, and there are several that matter. Coins have been reported as unresponsive to pickup. There is no in-game option to reset progress or start fresh from the main menu, which is an odd omission in a score-driven platformer where you might want a clean run. Remapping keys is not possible, so left-handed players or anyone who has settled into a non-standard control layout will have friction from minute one. The exit button is absent once you are inside a session, requiring an Alt-Tab or task manager workaround to close the game. These are not quirks. They are quality-of-life gaps that a small patch could have addressed, and the evidence suggests no such patch has arrived. Who is this actually for? The honest answer is a narrow slice of player: someone who misses when arcade-style action on PC meant pure, unadorned shooting and jumping, someone comfortable with jank as a texture rather than a dealbreaker, and someone whose session length expectations are modest. As a short completionist run with six Steam achievements to chase, it exists. As a serious hardcore platformer recommendation, the unresolved bugs and the lack of any control customization make it hard to advocate for over the dozens of more polished retro-platform alternatives that exist at similar price points. The premise and the pace have a scrappy honesty to them. The execution just did not catch up.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on Bad Girl.