Vengeance of Mr. Peppermint

My first thought loading this up was that someone finally made the Oldboy corridor scene into a full game, and for about thirty minutes, that instinct felt completely justified. The pixel art is striking, the opening sets a genuinely oppressive mood, and the chapter-based structure - split like a grindhouse film reel - signals that Hack The Publisher understands the cinematic DNA they are pulling from. Kill Bill homages, a villain literally named Mr. Pink, an enemy called Medusa with an eyepatch pulled straight from Tarantino's playbook. The references land because they are worn openly, not smuggled in. The combat toolkit is deliberately compact: light punches, heavy punches, a dodge roll, a parry, environmental weapon pickups - hooks, meat processors, ovens - and a grab once enemies are sufficiently dazed, which opens up finisher animations that range from viscerally satisfying to genuinely uncomfortable to watch. A Vengeance Meter fills as you pile up kills; when full, it restores health, creating a loop that demands aggression rather than defensive play. There is also the Intermission mechanic, a wonderfully weird idea where you can call a mid-fight pause, as if shouting "Cut!" on a film set, which refills health and gives you options like stunning enemies, scattering them, or summoning a hammer for instant kills. On paper, that is inventive game design with real personality. In practice, the seams show fast. The character moves with a heaviness that tips from cinematic weight into genuine sluggishness - the dash is your best friend and you will lean on it hard. Enemy variety dries up quickly, and because the light-heavy-light combo reliably stuns most grunts, the game accidentally hands you a cheese strat that trivialises the first two-thirds of its runtime. Boss fights are the wildest swing in quality: Mr. Pink spams minions while staying out of reach, a frustrating pattern the game makes you repeat, while the final boss can allegedly be stunlocked with a single attack chain. The level backgrounds, despite the promise of the art style, feel sparse and recycled in ways that blunt the atmosphere the soundtrack works hard to sustain. That soundtrack, for what it is worth, earns its keep - upbeat, with Asian-inflected percussion and a gong that signals each brawl like a genuinely theatrical flourish. What you are buying here is a roughly three-hour experience structured in six chapters, with a narrative that gestures toward psychological disintegration - the detective's sanity fraying, the line between justice and monstrosity blurring - but never commits to exploring it with enough weight to make you care about the plot beats between fights. There is a non-lethal path that unlocks a better ending, which is a legitimately interesting design choice, but the game communicates it so poorly that most players will miss it entirely. Steam user sentiment sits at roughly 71% positive across a small review pool, which feels honest: a game that its audience finds worthwhile, but that stops well short of the cult classic it clearly wants to become.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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