ANTONBLAST

I went in expecting a solid indie platformer and came out the other side having lost several hours to what might be the tightest movement system in a 2D action game since Pizza Tower rattled everyone's expectations. ANTONBLAST is built on a loop that sounds simple on paper: reach the detonator buried deep in each of its 12 side-scrolling levels, trigger Happy Hour, then race back to the entrance before the world collapses around you. What that description cannot capture is the feeling of executing it cleanly, chaining Clutch Boosts, bouncing off Ballbusters with the Mighty F'n Hammer, sliding under low passages, and threading the return sprint without dropping a beat. When it clicks, there is a genuine flow state here that few games at any budget can manufacture. The two playable characters, Dynamite Anton and Dynamite Annie, share a core move set but carry different energies, and swapping between them at Brulo's Casino hub is a free choice that lets you find whichever personality fits your playstyle. The hub itself opens up progressively as you clear stages and bosses, and Brulo's shop lets you spend collected poker chips on health upgrades, temporary power-ups, and a handful of cosmetic palette swaps. The unlockable range is the one area where the game feels a little thin for how hard you have to grind to afford everything, and some players will find the reward loop underwhelming once they realize most purchases are surface-level. It is a minor complaint against a game that otherwise uses every other system confidently. The level design deserves its own paragraph. Each stage introduces a gimmick, earns it, and moves on before it overstays its welcome, whether that is a mecha suit that ploughs through entire screens, a miniature ball transformation that demands trajectory reads, or a two-plane system that lets you flip between foreground and background paths hunting collectibles and hidden Spraycans. The screen-filling boss fights are a genuine highlight, each mechanically distinct and themed tightly enough that learning their patterns feels like solving a puzzle rather than grinding for muscle memory. The one repeated complaint across reviewers is that optional branching paths are one-and-done on a single attempt, meaning failure sends you back to retry the whole detour. The game is proud of that strictness, and honestly the pushback against it is fair, but platforming veterans will recognize it as intentional craft rather than cruelty. None of this would land the same without the presentation holding it together. The pixel art is produced from hand-drawn animations that were manually scaled down to sprite resolution, which gives every frame a density and weight that procedural pixel work cannot replicate. The art direction pulls from 90s cartoons, with the energy of Ed, Edd n' Eddy and the raw hostility of Beavis and Butt-Head baked into Anton and Annie's expressions. The soundtrack, composed entirely by Summitsphere founder Tony Grayson, is a 16-bit collection of tracks that feel like they were designed to make your thumb move faster. It is the kind of music you will notice is still running in your head an hour after you put the controller down. For a game built by a small team that nearly ran out of funding before the Kickstarter campaign rescued it, the cohesion of the audio-visual package is remarkable. ANTONBLAST earns its Metacritic 87 and then some, and if you have any patience at all for high-momentum action platformers, this is exactly the kind of handmade thing the genre needed.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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