Vanquish: The Adventures of Lady Exton

My first impression of Lady Exton was genuine warmth. A parasol-wielding Victorian protagonist cutting through mechanoids in a steampunk world is exactly the kind of handcrafted premise I root for, and the color palette here is honestly pretty bright and inviting. This is a debut title from Mumbai-based Runestone Studios, and that context matters when you sit down with it. You can feel the enthusiasm in the art direction even when the execution falls short. The core loop sends you through a series of side-scrolling levels where Lady Exton runs, jumps, glides, and fires charged shots at mechanoid enemies. There is a dash move that players have praised for feeling snappy, and the game does introduce new abilities as you progress rather than keeping the toolkit flat throughout. Boss encounters appear scattered across the level structure, with a multi-stage fight around level ten that some players found genuinely satisfying. The level count is substantial enough that you get variety in the backgrounds and obstacle arrangements, which keeps early stages from feeling repetitive. Where the game loses me is in its relationship with fairness. Platforms that disappear on contact offer no visual warning before they vanish, producing deaths that feel more like a trap than a test. Animation is stiff in a way that makes reading enemy behavior harder than it needs to be, and there are patches of the level design that reward memorization of invisible rules rather than platformer instinct. Post-launch patches fixed some bugs, including a crash involving a boss on level 28, and added keyboard support for AZERTY layouts, which at least signals the developer was paying attention after release. But the underlying feel of the platforming did not dramatically shift with those fixes. The story is threadbare in the way you forgive from a first-time studio on a tight scope: Lady Exton escapes captivity and works to restore peace to human strongholds, and that is essentially the whole of it. For a game operating at this budget and ambition level, a thin narrative is forgivable. What is harder to overlook is when the gameplay itself cannot carry the weight the story leaves behind. The art has charm, the soundscape hints at a mood the game never fully inhabits, and the steampunk setting has real potential sitting underused inside it. I advocate hard for small teams taking swings, and Runestone Studios clearly had a vision here. But honest advocacy means saying when a game's rough edges undercut its goodwill. Lady Exton is a curio for completionists of the steampunk genre and very forgiving fans of early-era indie platformers. Everyone else should temper expectations significantly before jumping in.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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