Squareboy vs Bullies: Arena Edition

I have a soft spot for the kind of game a solo developer builds as a love letter to something they grew up with, and Squareboy vs Bullies: Arena Edition is exactly that. Rohan Narang started this as a mobile title deliberately styled after Game Boy-era brawlers, and that origin story never really leaves the game. On PC, the geometry is small, the palette is tight, and the whole thing carries the quiet energy of something made in a bedroom with genuine affection rather than a studio with a roadmap. That counts for something, even when the design starts to show its seams. The setup is as stripped-down as it gets: Squareboy gets beaten up at a bus stop, a wise old man teaches him to fight, and then you spend thirteen stages across the town of Squareburg punching progressively more elaborately-hatted bullies into submission. The move set is modest but has texture if you look for it. Beyond the basic four-hit strike combo, you have a dropkick, a spin punch, a grab-and-throw, a jump kick, and a counter uppercut that triggers when you take a hit on the ground. The counter, in particular, is the move that separates players who engage with the combat from those who mash through it. Enemies include mohawked bruisers who hit harder, Tommy Gun-toting fedora types who force you to close distance, and a bandana boss with a baseball bat who actually asks something of you. Environmental pickups, including tyres and boxes, add a small layer of crowd control when you need breathing room. Here is where honesty matters. The campaign runs somewhere between one and two hours depending on how much you experiment, and the difficulty curve is gentle enough that a determined player can spam one or two moves from start to finish without much pushback. The chiptune soundtrack, fourteen tracks of it, is the consistent highlight: energetic, well-matched to each area, and the kind of thing you notice because it is doing real work rather than just filling silence. The pixel art is clean and compact, though the enemy roster does lean on hat-swaps as its primary visual language for differentiation. The Arena mode, four survival stages where you hold out against escalating waves until you are overwhelmed, adds maybe another hour of high-score chasing and unlocks stage by stage as you hit kill thresholds. It is a light extension rather than a new dimension. Who should actually play this? Younger players new to the genre will find it accessible and satisfying. Older beat-em-up fans who want a short, low-stakes session and feel warmly toward the Double Dragon and Streets of Rage lineage will find enough here to justify the time, even if the combat never reaches those heights. Genre veterans looking for deep systems, enemy AI that reads their habits, or a campaign that takes an evening will bounce off it hard. The Steam PC version carries a reported crash-on-startup issue for some multi-monitor setups, which is worth knowing before you commit. The game knows it is small. It does not pretend otherwise, and there is something quietly honest about that.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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