Super Amazing Wagon Adventure

I have a soft spot for games built by one person with something to prove, and sparsevector's debut is about as concentrated a statement as you can make: strip out every slow, educational beat from Oregon Trail, replace it with flying buffalo, giant squids, unicorns, and machine-gun bandits, and then dare the player to survive. That is the whole pitch, and it lands almost every time. The moment-to-moment structure alternates between a side-scrolling shooter and a twin-stick shooter depending on what calamity is currently descending on your party of three. In the scrolling sections you dodge flaming wolves and bullet swarms while managing your wagon's hitbox, which is the entire wagon. In the twin-stick segments you hop off on foot and handle things like berry picking, which will absolutely end with a bear and then a mob of squirrels. Scenes flip every three to thirty seconds, so the pace is relentless; the game is designed to disorient you and reward the players who adapt fast. Random weapon pickups, a standard pistol as your fallback, and no checkpoints or saves mean every death genuinely stings. When a party member goes down, they stay down for the rest of the run. The unlockable wagon roster is where the game earns its replay hours. Over a dozen wagons, each with distinct weapons and handling, get awarded for completing specific challenges or surviving rare events. The Diseased wagon fires a gun that turns corpses into land mines. The Glitch wagon is unlocked by triggering a particular glitch-themed sequence. Wagons handle at different speeds and shoot in different directions, so cycling through them fundamentally changes how you approach the same scenes. On top of the main adventure mode, Survival mode pits you against endless enemy hordes from specific game sections, while Shuffle mode, unlocked after beating the journey to Oregon once, chains random events together indefinitely. The honest caveat: the semi-random structure does have a skeleton. There is a rough sequence of event types that repeats across runs, and sharp-eyed players will notice the scaffolding after several attempts. The variation sits inside that structure rather than replacing it. For some people that kills replayability faster than advertised. The developer designed this intentionally as a ten-minute arcade loop with unlockables as the retention hook, not as a deep roguelike with emergent builds. If you come in expecting the latter you will be disappointed. The soundtrack is punchy and fits the absurdist tone well, each phase of the journey carrying its own musical energy that makes the whole run feel paced even when the chaos is at its loudest. This is sparsevector's first game, made by a PhD student who wanted to know what it felt like to ship something. That origin story shows in the best way: it is precise about what it wants to be, knows exactly when to end, and doesn't overstay its welcome. The handcraft in each small pixel death animation, the economy of the controls, the way the game briefly pretends to corrupt itself mid-run as a deliberate event - these are the details I notice and remember. Not every run will surprise you, but the ones that do are genuinely delightful.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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