Chop Goblins

I keep a short list of games I reach for when the backlog feels crushing and a full session is off the table. Chop Goblins has been on that list since the day I installed it. David Szymanski, the solo mind behind DUSK, coined the term "microshooter" for this one, and the pitch is bracingly honest: a handcrafted FPS campaign you can finish in a single sitting, around thirty minutes on your first run, without any of the padding that normally inflates games to justify their existence. The structure is five levels, each set in a distinct time period. You start in a contemporary city, get flung to 1800s Transylvania, wander ancient Greek marble columns, and eventually end up somewhere a fair bit further forward in time. Each stage has its own lighting identity and enemy roster that escalates as you go. Szymanski leans heavily on careful lighting to give each location a personality without the cost of high-resolution assets: blue-soaked castle corridors and hard white sun on stone pillars lodge in memory even though you move through them fast. The lo-fi Quake-engine aesthetic is the same DNA as his earlier work, but the palette here is warmer, goofier, and the enemies have big wobbling heads and pitch-shifted voices that make shooting them feel like a cartoon punchline every time. The optional VHS filter amplifies that B-movie Saturday-morning-horror feeling if you want it. The arsenal sits at five weapons and each one is purposeful. You start with a rusty knife, which stays relevant because plenty of props are destructible and often hide pickups behind them. The flintlock pistol is slow but accurate at range, the shotgun does what shotguns do, the Mk. II Impaler "Vlad" automatic stake gun has real fall-off at medium range that forces you to think about distance, and the wand from the Greek level hits a crowd like a missile launcher. The soundtrack does real work here: synth-heavy, energetic, and thematically matched to each stage, it creates an urgency that pushes you forward even though there is no actual timer. Several reviewers noted independently that the music is the first thing that grabs you on boot, and they are right. There is something about the rhythm of it that makes the gunplay feel locked in. The honest weak spots: the game saves at the start of each level but progress resets when you close it, so you need to complete the campaign in a single session or use the level-select to pick up where you left off. No checkpoints within levels either, though each stage is short enough that starting over is rarely more than a two-minute inconvenience. Some critics noted the final stretch feels slightly less inspired than the earlier levels, and anyone expecting the depth of DUSK will find Chop Goblins deliberately stripped down in movement options: no jumping, no crouching. Szymanski made that choice to keep the flow tight, and it works, but veterans used to full mobility may feel briefly constrained. Replayability comes from Chop Coins and built-in leaderboards, a score-multiplier system, remixed bonus versions of each level with different enemy spawns, a mirrored mode, a harder Goblin difficulty for FPS veterans, and an "Once Again" mode that lets you carry your arsenal into a second run from the start. For a game of this runtime and price point, the craft-to-cost ratio is genuinely unusual. Szymanski built something that knows exactly what it is, finishes before it can bore you, and sends you back in for one more run almost immediately. That is a rarer skill than it sounds.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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