PROJECT XINATRA

I have a soft spot for the kind of game that could have been photocopied onto a floppy disk and sold at a market stall in 1993, and Project Xinatra sits squarely in that lineage. DemonVideogames, a small Spanish indie outfit, built this entirely from a place of genuine affection for the coin-op era, and that sincerity is detectable even through the rough edges. The premise is paper-thin in the best way: a nameless bounty hunter, hired by the resistance, punches through five stages to locate and destroy a doomsday weapon called Xinatra, built by the villainous YUK Empire. Nobody is here for the plot. They are here to shoot things until the screen stops moving. As a 2D run-and-gun platformer, the structure is classic and unadorned. You move through side-scrolling stages, collect weapons and items, manage incoming enemy hordes, and work toward a boss encounter at the end of each level. The five stages offer some variety in setting, including an opening stretch under radioactive rain, a descent through enemy facilities, and a section where you ride a combat motorbike to reach a secret base. That motorbike segment in particular has the feel of a Konami or Taito B-side, which is exactly the company this game is hoping you think of. Bosses are, by design, the real difficulty spikes. The game markets itself as calibrated for hardcore players, and that is not empty posturing. If you grew up feeding quarters into Metal Slug cabinets and still have the reflexes for it, the difficulty curve will feel familiar rather than punishing. The honest assessment is that Project Xinatra is a game made with heart and limited resources, and those two things show equally. The NLKEngine keeping it running is not a powerhouse, and the production values reflect a passion project built in spare hours rather than a funded studio effort. There are no Steam achievements, and the key-rebinding system has a documented quirk where reassigning controls mid-menu can lock players out of the menu itself entirely, a frustrating edge case worth knowing before you touch the options screen. The online leaderboard is a small but welcome touch, giving score-chasers a reason to replay stages and push their rank, though the community around this game is extremely small. Who is this actually for? Genuinely, it is for the player who feels nostalgic not for a specific game but for the feeling of a specific era, the tight looping of shoot, dodge, advance, repeat, scored against a propulsive chiptune-adjacent soundtrack. It is not for anyone expecting modern conveniences like checkpoints between boss phases, controller remapping without risk, or post-launch content patches. If you go in knowing it is a compact, lovingly assembled artifact from a tiny team with a clear vision and a finite scope, the brevity stops feeling like a flaw and starts feeling intentional. Some games know exactly what they are. This one does.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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