Bartlow's Dread Machine

My first impression was pure curiosity: levels that mechanically assemble themselves in front of you, gears spinning in the background, your tin-plated secret service agent scraping along pre-defined rails while waves of mechanical zombies bear down. That visual hook is genuine and it never really fades. Beep Games built something with a look so committed to its antique-parlor-game concept that even the damage model feels thematic - your paper-craft character fills up with bullet holes as health drains, and enemies explode into satisfying scrap rather than the usual pixel-blood splatter. The Edwardian steampunk aesthetic pairs with carnival-style piano music that is, admirably, tuneable in the options menu. As a twin-stick shooter, Bartlow's Dread Machine earns its place on the genre shelf by twisting the core formula. You do not roam freely. Your agent and the enemies both move on a rail system, which turns dodging and positioning into a lightweight puzzle - get cornered and you are done, full stop. It takes about a level to click, and once it does, the moment-to-moment shooting feels sharp. There are multiple unlockable characters, each with a distinct starting weapon and stat profile, plus clothing upgrades (hats, coats, trousers) that trade off stats like ammo capacity, health, and enemy drop rates. Defeated enemies drop cash, accuracy and kill-chain bonuses stack up at level end, and the occasional puzzle section - shooting switches, ricocheting bullets off deflectable surfaces, hitting tentacles to expose a boss - keeps things fresher than a pure wave-blaster would. That said, this is where the friendly honesty has to kick in. The difficulty curve is uneven. Normal mode cruises along fine for most of the runtime and then spikes hard toward the back half without much warning. Worse, you cannot switch characters or difficulty mid-run; you restart entirely if you want a different agent or a different challenge setting. Solo players are also more likely to hit the wall - the rail system means enemy clusters can genuinely trap you when the screen fills up. A second player flips that equation: co-op makes the same difficulty feel noticeably easier, which splits the audience a bit depending on who you are bringing to the couch. On the co-op question specifically, which is the one I always care about: two-player local co-op is supported through the whole campaign, and Remote Play Together means you can do it over the internet with one copy of the game. Accessibility-wise, controls are fully remappable, the learning curve is gentle enough that a non-gamer can follow along, and the E10 rating reflects what is actually on screen. What this is NOT is a four-player party blaster - the cap is two, and the game never scales difficulty upward to compensate for having two guns on the field. Think of it as a date-night co-op game or a sibling-on-the-couch situation rather than a full squad affair. For a focused two-hour session with a friend it lands; as a long-haul solo project it is more streaky. One player in the Steam community flagged it as currently unsupported on Steam Deck out of the box, though playable with a manual Proton version switch. Overall this is a short, weird, charming game that does one genuinely original thing with the rail-movement concept and wraps it in presentation that punches well above its budget. It is not a deep game, replayability is limited to character unlocks and a harder difficulty pass, and the co-op balance tuning is clearly an afterthought. But as a two-to-three-hour co-op hang or a palette-cleanser solo run between bigger releases, the price of entry is low enough that the fun-per-dollar math works out.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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