Noitu Love 2: Devolution

I keep coming back to Noitu Love 2: Devolution the way you revisit a favourite arcade cabinet, the one tucked in a corner nobody else noticed. Joakim Sandberg built this solo, and the craft is unmistakable: every stage feels authored, every enemy placed with intent, and the whole thing runs at a pace that barely lets you breathe. The control scheme is the first thing that earns your attention, and possibly your suspicion. On PC you move with the keyboard and aim with the mouse, clicking on enemies to dash-punch into them as Xoda Rap, the Peacekeepers League's new star. Rapid left-clicks chain into melee combos; mouse gestures trigger special moves. It sounds fiddly, and for the first few minutes it is. Stick with it, because once it clicks, the whole game transforms into something almost balletic. Xoda darts across the screen with a kind of elastic momentum that very few 2D action games manage. The seven stages each introduce a new wrinkle, from auto-scrolling gauntlets packed with exploding Darn soldiers, to a clock tower stage that strings a miniboss, a guillotine corridor, and another miniboss back-to-back with barely a pause. One stage pivots into something resembling a shoot-em-up entirely. The variety is genuine, not cosmetic. The bosses are the real reason to be here. Each one is a full-screen spectacle with its own logic to decode, and the design clarity is exceptional given that Sandberg did the sprites himself. Encounters fill the screen with personality: grinning robot faces, oversized mechanical dragons, a four-piece band called The Grinning 4 that rotates members mid-fight. The sprite work carries that unmistakable mid-90s Treasure DNA, evoking Gunstar Heroes and Alien Soldier without feeling derivative. The music has been noted as less consistent than the visuals, occasionally veering into abrasive territory, but it earns its retro-arcade atmosphere often enough. Honesty demands acknowledging the short runtime. Your first clear will land somewhere around an hour. The story piles up twists that eventually outpace its own coherence, and the dialogue scenes feel a little sparse without voiced character tones. These are real limitations. What the game offers in return is a per-level grading system built around time, kill count, and damage taken; three difficulty settings that genuinely recontextualize the challenge; and two unlockable characters, including Rilo, whose gun-based playstyle and multi-target charge attack play completely differently from Xoda's melee dash rhythm. The replay hooks are slim but well-constructed. It is worth noting that rapid clicking over extended sessions can be tough on the wrist, so the short-burst design is, in that sense, intentional and considerate. This is a game that knows exactly what it is and refuses to pad itself. An undiscovered Treasure-era gem made by one person, sitting quietly on Steam with a 92% positive rating and almost no cultural footprint. That gap between quality and visibility is the exact kind of injustice the Scout Team exists to close.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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