A Duel Hand Disaster: Trackher

My first hour with Trackher felt like someone handed me two steering wheels and told me to drive two different cars simultaneously. That is, almost literally, what Ask An Enemy Studios built here. The screen is split down the middle: on the left, an invulnerable ship shoots waves of descending enemies in a Galaga-style lane, but its LINK resource drains with every shot and every movement. On the right, a fully mortal ship roams a low-poly open field collecting MATERIAL to restore that LINK and multiply the score you are building on the left side. Neither half makes complete sense until you see how tightly they are wired together. Let enemies through on the left and the right side gets harder. Collect MATERIAL on the right and your multiplier swells on the left. Die on the right and your score resets to zero. The loop is genuinely novel, and the resource tension between both screens is the kind of decision-making I rarely find outside strategy games. The risk mechanics go deeper than the setup suggests. You can play until death if you want, but the game punishes that philosophy hard: dying wipes your current run score and can erase your leaderboard position entirely. The smart play is to extract before you lose it all, banking 12 PARTS on the right side to lock in your score. That extraction decision, the mental calculus of "do I push for one more multiplier cycle or bank what I have," is where the real strategic meat lives. Low health even offers a score bonus, so aggressive play is rewarded right up until it is not. Then there are three difficulty tiers (spelled "Tears" by the developer, deliberately), with Tear 3 throwing named modifier challenges at you mid-run: Himversion inverts left-ship controls, InHersion inverts the right, Death Sentence forces your right ship into a critical fragile state for a timed window. That top tier is a full-brain scramble. Here is the catch that every review of this game circles back to, and it is a real one: the tutorial is a set of videos tucked in the menu rather than a playable onboarding sequence. Jump in without watching them and the game reads as intentionally hostile. Watch them and the mechanics start to make sense within a session or two. The developer is transparent about this being a gamepad-only experience, which is the right call given the dual-analog control scheme, but it also means keyboard-and-mouse players are out entirely. The menu structure itself is unconventional enough to confuse people before a single ship is fired. None of this is insurmountable, but it is friction that will filter casual buyers fast. Audiovisually the game commits to its arcade identity. The low-poly voxel aesthetic on the right side and the classic sprite lane on the left look intentionally mismatched, which somehow works as a visual signal that you are managing two separate realities at once. The techno and rock soundtrack adapts dynamically to on-screen intensity, which is a small touch that genuinely helps pace anxiety during a tense extraction. The Steam version carries a small but positive user review pool, so the audience that finds it tends to stick with it. Community leaderboard competition is the main endgame, and a small Discord scene keeps that alive with occasional tournaments. For score-attack players and arcade purists who treat leaderboard ranks as a lifestyle, this is a legitimate curiosity with more systemic depth than its tiny footprint suggests. For anyone expecting a campaign, progression unlocks, or a gentle difficulty ramp, this is the wrong room entirely. Go in with a gamepad, watch every tutorial video before you touch the game proper, and give it at least three full runs before forming an opinion. Diego, Scout Team

Valve rates this game Steam Deck Verified.

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