Rise of the Funkys

I have a soft spot for the kind of game that arrives on Steam with no review count and a page held together by love rather than marketing budget. Rise of the Funkys is exactly that kind of project, and I think it deserves more eyeballs than the silence around it suggests. At its core this is a side-scrolling brawler built around a roster of four bounty hunters, each with meaningfully distinct combat mechanics. The signature trick is mid-combat character switching: you can cycle through the squad on the fly, which opens up small but satisfying combo chains and lets you cover different range profiles in a single wave of enemies. One character, Echinacea, can heal herself and nearby allies, which becomes genuinely important in the later stages and in local co-op where a knocked-out partner can be revived by a teammate nearby. That kind of intentional role differentiation in a micro-budget brawler is worth noting. The six stages run a linear left-to-right structure, which is the genre's honest contract with the player. What keeps it from feeling flat are the random events threaded through combat encounters, essentially surprise modifiers that break up the rhythm when you'd otherwise be on autopilot. There are four bosses across the run, including one secret boss, and the overall length sits comfortably in the two-to-three hour range for a solo playthrough - shorter with friends, longer if you're learning the character rotations properly. The game knows its scope and doesn't overstay it, which is a discipline a lot of bigger projects fail at. The place where Rise of the Funkys struggles most is visibility and context. There are no Steam user reviews to triangulate against, no Metacritic score, and almost no community content beyond a couple of developer livestreams. That silence makes it genuinely hard to assess long-term stability, whether the random events have enough variance to justify repeat runs, or how the four characters hold up in depth over time. The pixel art has a hand-assembled quality that suits the tone, and the soundtrack carries that low-key funky energy the title promises, though without broader community reaction it's difficult to say how it lands across different tastes. Controllers are required for the local multiplayer component, which is a sensible constraint for a four-player shared-screen experience but worth flagging if your setup is keyboard-only. Who is this for? Couch co-op fans who want something low-stakes to hand a controller to a friend for an evening. Solo players who like their brawlers compact, with a bit of random seasoning to keep things honest. Anyone who roots for the small Steam page that nobody covers - because occasionally those pages are hiding something worth finding.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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