ABRACA - Imagic Games

I usually cover shooters, so dropping into a fairy-tale party brawler is a change of pace I did not exactly ask for. What I found was something genuinely clever sitting underneath the cutesy cartoon wrapper, and I want to give it a fair shake before you scroll past it. The core loop in Race Mode is the smartest thing about ABRACA. One player runs a 2D platformer stage as their prince while the other three control monsters and traps in the same level to stop them. When that gauntlet ends, everyone switches to a Smash Bros.-adjacent arena fight as their princess, with the winner banking extra health for their prince heading into the next stage. The two halves reinforce each other in a way that reads messy on paper but clicks fast in practice. Platforming feels tight - think Mario without the nuance - and the arena combat lands somewhere between accessible brawler and frantic button session, which suits the couch format just fine. The possession mechanic for non-running players keeps everyone active during runs, which is exactly the kind of design that separates a real party game from a "wait your turn" bore. The character roster runs five prince-princess pairs: Prince Charming, Hansel and Gretel, a Big Bad Wolf paired with Red, the Snow Queen with a Yeti, and others. They look different and carry unique abilities, but reviewers consistently noted the differences are largely cosmetic in feel rather than deep mechanical splits. The five environments unlock alongside megaboss encounters, and Challenge Mode gives you solo target-breaking and survival runs broken across Prince, Princess, and Minion sub-modes ranked on a three-crown system. It is useful for learning the controls before a session, but it is not a substitute for a real opponent. Here is the hard limit and you need to hear it clearly: this game is controller-exclusive and offline-only. You need one physical controller per player, no exceptions, and there is no online matchmaking - never was, never will be based on everything Ankama has said or not said. If you cannot regularly get two to four people in the same room with controllers in hand, ABRACA will sit unplayed. Arena mode is the weakest of the three - the brawling there lacks depth, hitboxes get fuzzy on platforms, and without Race Mode feeding stakes into it the whole thing deflates. Challenge Mode is fine practice but not a game unto itself. For what it is designed to do, the reception was warm. OpenCritic landed it at a 77 average, and the general tone from the people who played it with actual humans in the room was positive, with most complaints pointing squarely at the missing online component and thin Arena offering. If you have a game night setup and a handful of controllers ready to go, ABRACA punches above its budget in fun per session. If you are a solo or online-only player, look elsewhere. Fred, Scout Team