City of Brass

My first thought after clearing the tutorial was that nobody else is doing quite this in first-person roguelites: the whip is the whole soul of City of Brass, and it earns that distinction. Developed by a small Australian studio whose members cut their teeth on BioShock and BioShock 2, the game plants you inside a cursed Arabian Nights city as a thief with a scimitar in the right hand and a versatile whip in the left. That whip is not a gimmick. You can trip skeleton soldiers by aiming low, disarm archers by targeting their weapon hand, crack enemies in the face to stun them open for a sword follow-up, drag distant treasure toward you, pull foes into spike pits, or latch onto grapple hooks to vault over obstacles. The rhythm of reading a room, identifying the traps, then weaponizing the whole environment against the enemies crowding it is genuinely satisfying in a way that very few games in this genre reach. The structure is a procedurally generated run across twelve levels divided into four visual districts: a desert city, overgrown ruins, an opulent palace quarter, and underground catacombs. Each run takes roughly forty minutes to an hour if things go well. Boss encounters punctuate the mid-game and closing act, and scattered genie merchants let you spend collected treasure on upgrades like fire-enchanted whips, alternate melee weapons, health bonuses, and a ghostly companion that fights alongside you. A Blessings system (the game's modifier suite) lets you dial difficulty up or down before each run, disabling the countdown timer, reducing enemy count, or expanding your health pool if the punishing default difficulty is too steep. Using Blessings gates you off some leaderboard categories but not others, which is a reasonable compromise. There is also a cross-run progression layer: each failed run earns XP that unlocks new items and playable characters, including the Revenant, a crossbow-wielding alternative to the default thief. Where City of Brass stumbles is in content variety, and that friction is real enough to matter. The enemy roster is dominated by skeleton soldiers in varying states of armor, with only a handful of distinctly different types appearing in the back half. The four visual districts look genuinely handsome on first encounter, but the modular procedural generation means that textures and set-piece props begin blurring together well before you reach the end of a run. The Arabian Nights audio design, all oud strings and flute motifs, fits the aesthetic with care, but the tracks loop and repeat in ways that undermine the atmosphere they are trying to build. The item shop interface is clunky, and weapon comparisons offer no numerical values, which makes upgrade decisions feel murkier than they should. These are real complaints, and they explain why critical reception landed in that mid-60s-to-70s range across outlets. For the audience this is actually aimed at, the issues soften considerably. If you are the sort of player who pulls five or ten runs out of a roguelite before deciding whether it has legs, City of Brass will give you a tightly crafted window of genuine pleasure. The whip combat alone is inventive enough to carry the early hours, and the Blessings accessibility options mean the difficulty wall is negotiable rather than a hard stop. It is not a long-haul obsession like Hades or Dead Cells, and it would be dishonest to frame it as one. But for a few evenings of creative first-person trap-manipulation in a setting that almost no other game has thought to explore, it pays off more than its average review scores imply.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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