Johnny Graves—The Unchosen One

I have a soft spot for games that carry the weight of their own ambition honestly, and Johnny Graves, The Unchosen One wears that weight in plain sight. This is a semi-top-down action shooter with light platforming and minor RPG dressing, built by a very small team called Stupid Stupid Games as the opening chapter of a larger urban fantasy universe they call Agents of Armageddon. The setting, Hell's civil war bleeding into 1979 New York City, with necromancers and fire-spitting spiders lurking in graveyards and subway stations, is genuinely more interesting on paper than most budget-tier action games manage. Johnny himself is the renegade son of the old Satan, dragooned into helping the "lesser" faction, guided by a woman named Ivy through a psychic link that carries most of the game's personality in clipped, well-written back-and-forth text conversations. The worldbuilding is thin by genre standards, but it has a texture to it. The core loop is tighter than you might expect for a game this small. You move Johnny with WASD and aim independently with the mouse, effectively a twin-stick arrangement on keyboard, and the moment-to-moment shooting feels responsive. The real wrinkle is the suite of six magic bullet types, which forces you to read enemy types and swap on the fly rather than just hosing everything down with the revolver. Collectibles tucked into branching level paths can reduce ability cooldown times and push damage up, so exploration is lightly rewarded rather than purely cosmetic. A teleport ability called Blinking adds a spacing tool that matters against the more aggressive enemy varieties, agile imps in particular punish players who stand still and trade shots. Boss encounters arrive without checkpoints, meaning a late wipe sends you back to the level start, which will either sharpen your focus or test your patience depending on how you approach that kind of design. The rougher edges are real and worth naming plainly. The camera does not rotate manually, which creates blind spots below multi-level geometry, you will take hits from threats you simply cannot see. Navigation aid is absent, so level layouts that branch can feel disorienting before you develop a mental map. The controls scored low in every early review for a reason: the twin-stick feel on keyboard is workable but never quite elegant, and the lack of V-sync options caused framerate chaos on some hardware at launch, though post-launch patches addressed lighting, rebalancing, and jump feel. Player community discussion remained sparse, and the game never built the audience its setting arguably deserved. The developer did complete the full game as promised, every planned level, story beat, and achievement shipped, which is worth acknowledging in a genre littered with abandoned early-access promises. Who is this for, honestly? Players who like the atmosphere of old-school action RPGs, think arcade isometrics with a genre fiction coat of paint, and who do not need a 20-hour runtime to feel satisfied. The whole thing can be finished in a couple of hours once you know the levels. At its price point it is a micro-commitment, and the Agents of Armageddon setting has enough personality that I find myself wanting to know if Stupid Stupid Games ever returned to it with a larger scope. The audio and lighting, for what they are, land better than the budget suggests they should. It is a rough thing, but it is a finished rough thing, and those are rarer than they look.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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