Chompy Chomp Chomp

I have a soft spot for games made by exactly two people with an absurd studio name, and Utopian World of Sandwiches - a Cambridge-based duo of James and Sarah Woodrow - have built something here that is genuinely hard to explain until you are actually playing it. The core of Chompy Chomp Chomp is a maze-based chase where every player simultaneously hunts one specific colour-coded opponent while themselves being hunted by someone else. A coloured target sits under your creature's feet telling you who to eat. Points go up when you chomp, points drop when you get chomped. Then the target colours randomly flip, and the hunter becomes the hunted mid-stride. It is, as one corner of the internet once put it, something like the unholy offspring of Pac-Man and Bomberman, and that description is more accurate than it has any right to be. The chaos this creates is the whole appeal. No amount of skill-grinding lets one player dominate, because the random target swaps keep every match scrambled. Power-ups scatter across the arenas - speed boosts, bubble traps, floor-slowing patches - and the PC version adds an exclusive single-player and co-op mode where you switch between yellow and purple to chomp colour-matching Blobbidees while dodging the relentless Queen Blobbidee. That mode is a thoughtful bonus, and the co-op version of it is genuinely charming when you huddle over a shared keyboard. The music is upbeat, slightly frantic, and ramps up in the final stretch of a round in a way that does real work on the room's energy level. Here is where honesty matters, though. The single-player Blobbidee mode has a short shelf life when played alone. The charm of the creature design and the escalating Queen keeps it interesting for a while, but the repetition surfaces quicker than in a full multiplayer bout. The PC port at release also capped human players at two rather than the four the original Xbox Live Indie Game supported, which blunts the peak experience the game is clearly designed for. There is no online multiplayer. The developers were transparent about that and included the Blobbidee mode as a gesture, but if you do not have physical bodies nearby with controllers in hand, you are not getting the version of this game that earned its reputation. Arena variety is present and each stage has its own layout quirks, but there are no unlockables, no stats screen, and no tournament mode to string rounds together. None of that changes what this game does when the conditions are right. Put it in front of non-gamers, young kids, people who have never touched a controller, and watch the gap close immediately. The random target system is the design insight that makes it work: it is essentially impossible to be so good that you ruin the fun for everyone else. This is a quiet, handcrafted thing from a two-person studio operating out of what their website describes as a solar-powered shed, and it has an unpretentious warmth that a lot of more polished party games never find.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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