Glitchrunners

I want to like Glitchrunners more than the numbers let me. The concept is genuinely inventive: four players scramble through a side-scrolling 3D gauntlet while a fifth, the Architect, observes from a second screen on a separate PC or Mac and uses that god-view to sabotage everything. Slow Time, Reverse Gravity, Reverse Controls, collapsing bridges, hurled jeeps - the Architect has a toolkit that feels almost unfairly stacked, and that asymmetry is exactly the point. In the right room, with the right five people, it probably produces the kind of chaotic laughter that gets clipped and shared. The problem is getting to that room. The structural ask is significant. The Glitch Run mode, which is the heart of the game, requires two separate machines connected on the same local network - one for the runners, one for the Architect. When you buy the game you receive a second giftable Steam code specifically for this purpose, which is a generous and practical gesture from Torque Studios, but it also underlines how much setup friction the concept carries. Arena mode - which covers Deathmatch, King of the Hill, and Powercube on a single screen - sidesteps that requirement, but it also strips out the second-screen gimmick that makes Glitchrunners distinct from any other local brawler. Without that asymmetry, you're left with a competent but unremarkable party brawler. When the Architect role works, it really works. The four item categories (red for single-press activation, yellow for collapse-on-impact, green requiring a held input, blue momentum-driven) give the controlling player something to think about beyond button-mashing. Runners can collect small containers to temporarily knock the Architect into a mini-game and steal a window of relative safety. That push-pull, the runners buying seconds while the Architect recovers, is where the game finds its rhythm. A single-player mode with an AI Architect exists and offers adjustable difficulty, which is a quieter lifeline than it might seem - it means you can actually learn the levels before inviting friends over. The platforming itself has a floatiness that can work against you on fast-moving platform sections, and foreground objects sometimes obscure your footing at the worst moments, which is a friction point worth knowing about going in. Torque Studios came out of Dare to Be Digital 2014 and earned a BAFTA nomination on the strength of this idea. That pedigree shows in the ambition of the design. What it cannot entirely paper over is the reality that local multiplayer games from 2016 now live or die on whether they have a dedicated audience keeping them warm, and Glitchrunners largely does not. Steam reviews sit mostly negative on a very thin sample, which signals an audience that bounced off the setup requirements rather than the game itself. If you have a standing couch-gaming group and two machines in the same room, this is a curiosity worth the low asking price. If you are hoping to boot it up solo or with one other person, the structural design will leave you in a half-game.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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