Toolboy

My first instinct with Toolboy was curiosity. The aesthetic is immediately appealing: a 2.5D industrial world rendered in warm reds, yellows and oranges, populated by stamping machines and robotic droids clanking away in the background, all underscored by a synth-and-drum electronic soundtrack that feels genuinely tailor-made for its mechanical setting. There is real craft in how this world looks and sounds. The problem is that looking and sounding good carries Toolboy only so far. The premise is endearing in a low-key sci-fi way: a repair robot gets pulled in on his day off, stumbles into a corporate conspiracy, and has to escape by unlocking four superpowers across successive levels. Those powers are a legitimately good idea on paper. Remote Control lets you manipulate machinery in the environment. Cube form lets you disguise yourself as scenery to slip past scanning drones. SpeedRun gives you a burst dash to outrun pursuers between stages. Magnetic Walk lets you reposition large containers to build improvised platforms. Unlocking each one progressively is the backbone of the progression loop, and when it clicks even briefly, you can see the game Toolboy wanted to be. What consistently gets in the way is execution. The controls feel noticeably stiff, with jumping in particular carrying a weight and imprecision that makes wall-climbing sections into exercises in frustration rather than skill. One-hit deaths compound this: a single misjudged jump or unexpected contact with an environmental hazard sends you back to the nearest checkpoint, and the checkpoints are forgiving enough that the loop stays tolerable, but the moment-to-moment feel never stops working against you. The terminal puzzles scattered through the levels are a separate problem altogether. They arrive with almost no contextual instruction, relying heavily on trial and error to progress, and the obtuse feedback on at least a few of them means players frequently solve them accidentally rather than intentionally. Steam players who wanted something in the neighbourhood of Limbo or Inside found something far less legible and far less polished. The community reception landed at mixed, and that feels honest. What I keep returning to, though, is that the bones are not bad. The world has atmosphere. The soundtrack has personality. The superpower progression is at least structurally sound. The art direction is the work of someone who cared. Toolboy reads less like an abandoned project and more like a game that needed another production pass, somewhere between the physics and the control tuning, before it shipped. If you have patience for rough edges and a genuine affection for retro-adjacent platformers with a sci-fi corporate conspiracy backdrop, there is something here worth squinting at. But go in with measured expectations. The craft on the surface does not run all the way through.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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