Ampersat

My first instinct when I saw a warrior-mage shaped like the @ symbol fighting sentient letters of the alphabet was mild confusion, then delight, then about eight hours I hadn't planned to spend. Ampersat is a top-down twin-stick action RPG from Australian solo developer Gaterooze, Ink, and its central conceit, ripped straight from the DNA of old Rogue games where @ always stood for your hero, turns out to be more than a cute visual gag. The whole premise hangs together: villain Lord Z has invaded the village of Gentlheim, surrounded it with five extraplanar towers and dungeon networks, and worse, literally stolen language from the townsfolk. You, the warrior mage Ampersat, fight your way through enemy alphabets to return letters to the people. As someone who has spent too long in games where the lore is just window dressing, I appreciated that the theme is actually baked into the loop. The combat pulls its controls from a Hotline Miami-style twin-stick setup: one analog stick moves you, the other swings your crosshair for ranged shots. Melee and spells round out the kit, though overheating is a real limiter on how aggressively you can blast. That heat mechanic gives the combat a rhythm that stops it from degenerating into pure spray-and-pray. The enemy roster runs to around 50 distinct creature types, each with its own AI behavior, and there are ten bosses scattered across the level structure. The bestiary is varied enough that encounters don't go stale in the first half of the run, though genre veterans may find the difficulty ceiling lower than titles like Hades or Curse of the Dead Gods. Progression leans on classic RPG bones: leveling up unlocks new abilities and resistance to status effects like poison, slow, and stone; dying costs you a third of your gold and experience points, which stings without feeling punishing. Hundreds of pieces of loot can be found, bought, sold, and augmented, giving you genuine reason to care about what drops. The hub village of Gentlheim is upgradeable, which opens new services and is the satisfying kind of town management that rewards systematic players. Once you repair the Well, a separate procedural dungeon mode opens for those who want permadeath-adjacent runs after finishing the fifty-plus handcrafted levels. The handcrafted side runs around seven to nine hours for a main-story playthrough, with a completionist run extending closer to thirteen, which is compact but tidy for a solo-dev indie. Co-op is worth flagging specifically because it works differently from most games in the genre. A second player drops in at any time and controls an invulnerable fairy companion who can also fire attacks, but the fairy's shots contribute to your overheating, so there's a funny tension built into having a partner. The fairy can even nick your spells if you hand over control, which is either charming or infuriating depending on your couch relationship. Save-file bugs have been reported in the community forums, which is worth knowing before you sink a long session into it. Performance complaints on some Linux setups have also appeared, though Proton reportedly resolves them. The visual style, ASCII characters floating over colorful 3D top-down environments with Commodore 64 SID chip sounds layered under the music, is either going to click immediately or not at all. For me it clicked. The writing is light but has personality; the quirky cast of townspeople and the sheer absurdity of Lord Z's alphabet army give the whole thing a warmth that larger studios sometimes sand away in polish. This is not a game for players who need forty hours of content or branching dialogue trees, but for a laid-back evening of loot chasing and retro-flavored action with a friend on the couch, it does exactly what it promises and does it with a certain scrappy charm. Monika, Scout Team