Extreme Exorcism

I keep coming back to one detail about Extreme Exorcism's origin: the ghost mechanic started as placeholder AI. A quick fix by a two-person New York studio that accidentally became the whole point. That kind of happy accident has a particular energy to it, and the finished game carries it. You feel it in the first few rounds, when the screen is still manageable and you think you have everything under control. You do not. The setup is a single-screen haunted house arena. You play as Mae Barrons, a paranormal exterminator whose toolkit runs from boomerangs and harpoon guns to rocket launchers and magical staffs. Each round, you dispatch a crowned ghost using up to three simultaneously-firing weapons. The moment that ghost dies, a recording of your exact movements and shots from the previous round spawns as a new ghost. Then you face that ghost plus a recording of the round before it. Then the round before that. The screen gradually fills with echo-versions of your own decisions, every rocket you fired carelessly, every panicked double-jump, every time you grabbed a weapon you probably shouldn't have. It is, as one critic aptly described it, less a shooter and more an arcade puzzler where each new layer of the puzzle is built from solving the one before. The slow dawning horror of watching your own bad choices converge on you is genuinely funny and genuinely stressful in equal measure. The pixel art leans into a NES-era haunted house aesthetic that feels deliberate rather than nostalgic-by-default. Dusty libraries, kitchens with open flames, balconies with wind hazards, cobwebbed wine cellars, each of the ten rooms has its own environmental wrinkle that changes how your ghosts move and where weapons spawn. The spooky chip-tune soundtrack sits quietly underneath the chaos rather than fighting it, which is the right call. Where the audio side earns mild criticism is that it never quite reaches eerie, settling instead for competent. That is a small thing, but for a game whose entire atmosphere depends on a creeping sense of dread, a stronger soundscape would have landed harder. The weapon balance is the most legitimate crack in the design. With 20 weapons in the pool (not counting the Exorcism angel-wings pickup that lets you permanently banish nearby ghosts), some weapons are useless enough that grabbing them actively sabotages your future rounds. You learn fast which ones to avoid, and that avoidance starts to pull focus away from the frenetic rhythm the game is otherwise great at sustaining. The four playable characters have no mechanical differences and little personality, which matters less in a game this systems-focused but still leaves a blank space where a little flavor could have lived. Arcade mode is the meat of the solo experience: unlock rooms by hitting score thresholds, work toward the Altar for a boss fight against a large flying ghost that can only be hurt by the Exorcism weapon. Challenge mode adds 50 single-player scenarios with specific objectives, and while completionists will find real bite there, the rewards for finishing them are thin. The full achievement run clocks out around six to eight hours. Local multiplayer is where the concept scales into something electric. Up to four players in co-op Arcade or Deathmatch means every ghost on screen is a recording of someone sitting next to you, and the resulting chaos is the kind that generates stories. The absence of online multiplayer is a real limitation in 2025 and will strand anyone without local couch access in a solo loop that, honest to goodness, can exhaust its novelty faster than the mechanic deserves. Play it in 20-minute bursts. Play it with someone beside you. Those two conditions matter a lot.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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