Paperbound

My honest first instinct when I loaded Paperbound was to compare it to TowerFall Ascension and then quietly close the tab. I'm glad I didn't. What Dissident Logic built is something genuinely strange and specific: a four-player arena brawler where each character operates under their own personal gravity, flippable at any moment with a single button press. Walk to a wall and you keep walking, right up it, across the ceiling, down the other side. Redirect mid-flight toward an unsuspecting opponent below, pencil raised. That core mechanic elevates what would otherwise be a serviceable party brawler into something with real spatial wit. The combat toolkit is deliberately minimal. You get a melee strike with whatever blunt or bladed implement your chosen character carries, a pair of throwable scissors as your ranged option, and an ink bomb for crowd control. Three tools. That's it. The stripped-back design means the depth comes almost entirely from using gravity to create angles, set traps, and survive the chaotic scramble of four bodies bouncing off eighteen arenas drawn from real literary sources: Dante's Inferno, A Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Book of the Dead, A Book of Five Rings, and the invented Skull Kingdom. The hand-drawn visual style is genuinely lovely, and the arenas each carry a distinct silhouette, even if some backgrounds are more atmospheric than they are tactically interesting. You pick characters from a roster of eleven originals plus cameo appearances from indie icons like Juan from Guacamelee and Captain Viridian from VVVVVV. They're purely cosmetic choices. Every fighter plays identically, which disappointed reviewers at launch and still feels like a missed opportunity given how eclectic the cast looks on the selection screen. The mode list covers Classic Versus, Capture the Quill, Last Man Standing, and Long Live the King, which is effectively a king-of-the-hill variant where killing the current leader crowns you as the new target. Classic Versus has a twist worth calling out: once you hit the kill threshold, a page tear opens somewhere on the map and you have to reach it to actually win. That second-phase scramble, where enemies who were just fighting each other suddenly converge on the leader, is the game at its purest. It generates the kind of screaming, panic-flipping momentum that defines a great couch multiplayer moment. The problem is the mode count is modest, and once you've absorbed the gravity mechanic, the experience doesn't expand much further. Critics were consistent at launch: fun arrives fast, depth plateaus faster. The bigger caveat, and it genuinely cannot be overstated, is that Paperbound has no online multiplayer at all. It was built for local play, the AI bots were added late in development almost as an afterthought, and solo sessions against bots expose how hollow the game feels without human opponents trading trash talk across a couch. The bots can challenge you, but they can't surprise you the way a friend who just discovered the scissors-deflect parry will. If you are a solo-primary player, Paperbound will collect digital dust after an hour. If you have a regular local crew and a pile of controllers, it earns every minute.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on Paperbound.