Gurgamoth

I've looked at enough local-multiplayer brawlers to know the difference between a tight concept that ran out of budget and a genuinely shallow product. Gurgamoth sits uncomfortably between those two things. The core idea is clean: four cultists, no weapons, just bash each other into environmental hazards until someone racks up three round wins and "awakens" the elder god. Dash, dodge, stun - that's your entire toolkit. On a controller the movement feels responsive and the collision reads honestly, which matters in a game where a single misdirected boost into a spike wall ends your round in under two seconds. The stage hazards are the main source of variety. You've got levels built around compacting spike walls, spinning saw blades, electricity towers, laser-spitting meteors, and at least one arena where a central death-ball acts as a gravity trap. Each stage genuinely plays differently for the first hour because reading the hazards becomes part of reading your opponent. The auto-handicap system is a smart wrinkle too: if you're ahead on round wins, your successive-attack count gets throttled, forcing the leader to play cautiously while the trailer gets a slight numbers edge. That kind of built-in catch-up logic keeps individual sets from snowballing and is probably the most considered design decision in the whole package. Here's the problem: there are only seven stages, character selection is purely cosmetic, there's no online play at all, no stat tracking, and no progression of any kind. The game does not save anything. You exhaust the content in a single sitting, and the community has been pointing that out since launch in 2016. Steam sits at a "Very Positive" rating but on a tiny sample size - around 50 reviews - so weight that accordingly. Critics at Destructoid and elsewhere compared it unfavorably to Duck Game, Samurai Gunn, and Lethal League, all of which have more hooks. The absence of online is the real killer on PC. If you're a local-multiplayer household with controllers always plugged in, you'll squeeze a few good sessions out of it. But the moment your couch clears out, the game has nothing left for you - no AI mode worth mentioning, no unlocks, no reason to return solo. From a pure feel standpoint: controllers mandatory, keyboard is not a real option. The performance is clean with no reported lag or slowdown even in four-player chaos, which at least means the technical fundamentals are there. If you enjoy games like Starwhal or Videoball and want something in that vein for a specific game night, Gurgamoth scratches that itch for one evening. Just go in with eyes open about how quickly that itch is satisfied.

Fred · Scout Team

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