I See Red

My first impression of I See Red landed somewhere between admiration and mild suspicion. An Argentine indie debut from a studio that started as a university project, it wears its ambitions loudly: a dichromatic world where everything bleeds to gray except the red-glowing targets you have come to destroy. That visual hook is genuinely arresting, and it earned the game real awards before release - including Best Visual Art at Game Connection x ChinaJoy 2022. The question critics kept asking, and that you should ask before buying, is whether any substance lives underneath that striking coat of monochrome paint. The core loop has Matthew Taurus - a disgraced cop turned outlaw somewhere in the year 2621 - boarding enemy spaceships and clearing rooms with whatever hardware he can scavenge. Your pistol has infinite ammo but tickles enemies; the real rhythm comes from grabbing secondary weapons off the floor as their limited ammo runs dry, cycling through assault rifles, shotguns, lasers, and more unusual tools while your grappling hook does heavy lifting in between. The hook is the genuinely clever piece: it pulls weapons and grenades across the room, yanks you toward enemies, and once charged with enough kills it can trigger an instant Brutal Murder finisher on anyone below boss tier. A separate Rage meter fills as you both deal and absorb damage, and when it maxes out you enter a short berserk window - faster movement, boosted melee damage, a permanently charged hook. The cloning machine between runs acts as your meta-progression hub, letting you spend Printing Matter currency on passive upgrades and skills that carry forward. It is a workable loop, and in the moments when everything fires at once - grenades sailing across a blazing corridor, hook snapping to a distant shotgunner, rage meter screaming red - it genuinely sings. The problems surface around the time the novelty wears off. Critics and players consistently flagged that the roguelite scaffolding is shallow: encounter selection leans toward preset sequences rather than genuine procedural variety, so the surprise of a fresh run dulls faster than the genre demands. The auto-lock aiming can steal your hook onto a crate when you wanted an enemy, and the battlefield debris - explosive barrels that share the same red glow as everything else - has caused more than a few accidental self-destructs. The narrative parcels out story through mementos and a brief late-game cutscene, which is a fine instinct, but the writing itself does not reward the patience it asks of you. The soundtrack, a metal-driven score that dynamically shifts with combat intensity, is one of the more inspired creative decisions here - it is the kind of detail that tells you the developers were thinking about the whole experience, not just the bullet spreadsheet. For the price tier this lands in, the calculus changes. The aesthetic alone represents a handcrafted design sensibility that bigger studios would have committee-d into mediocrity. The grappling hook with its Brutal Murder window is a mechanic worth experiencing. The dynamic music responding to battle pace is the kind of small audio intentionality I always root for in an indie. What you are accepting is a game that peaks early, asks you to run similar-feeling corridors more than it probably should, and never fully delivers on its roguelite promises. Go in expecting a compact, stylish action game with one excellent mechanical idea and a handful of rough edges, not a deep run-based engine, and you will leave satisfied.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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