Bad Caterpillar

I have a soft spot for the games that live between the cracks of the Steam catalog, the ones with 42 reviews and a 95% rating that nobody talks about at dinner. Bad Caterpillar is exactly that kind of game, and it's been quietly earning those thumbs-up since its 2016 Steam launch. At its core it is a riff on Centipede, but calling it just a Centipede clone undersells how much the developer has pushed the formula. Where the Atari classic kept things tense and defensive, this one tilts hard toward offense, stacking power-ups, alternative weapons, and wave after wave of insect enemies that flood down from the top of the screen. The setup is straightforward: your ship sits at the bottom, enemies descend, and you clear them level by level. What keeps things interesting is the weapon economy. Certain segments of the titular caterpillar drop power-ups when destroyed, Arkanoid-style, giving you access to a spread shot, a railgun that punches through multiple targets, and bombs with blast radius damage. There is a small roster of ships to pick from, each with slightly different stats around weapon capacity, though the honest take is that the ship choice matters less than how quickly you can read the screen and prioritize targets. Each level ends with a stat screen: shots fired, accuracy, enemies cleared, and a letter grade that feeds into an insect-themed ranking system, starting at Grub and climbing toward the top rank of Bad Caterpillar itself. It is a modest but satisfying feedback loop for score chasers. The visual style is low-resolution pixel art with particle effects layered on top. Players expecting crisp high-def sprites will find it sparse, but the enemy types are clearly readable against each other, and the UI stays clean under pressure. The soundtrack leans into guitar-heavy rock, which gives the whole thing a slightly unhinged energy that suits the pace well. One note: at higher volumes and longer sessions, a sound bug was reported in earlier builds, though the developer has pushed multiple patches since launch, including a substantial v2.0 update that added animated level blocks, improved randomness of item drops, and better Steam stats tracking. The game has been maintained, which matters for something this small. The criticisms are real but proportionate. The ship selection could carry more weight than it does. At high speed it can be easy to misread the screen and shoot the wrong cluster, which is more frustrating than challenging. And the score-bonus spread between grade ranks is narrow enough that chasing an S rank does not feel dramatically rewarding in point terms. None of this breaks the experience; it just shows the seams of a one-person production. For what it is, a quick-session arcade loop with online leaderboards, achievements, full controller support, and trading cards, it delivers cleanly. If you grew up dropping quarters into Centipede and want something that adds weapons and keeps the chaos, this scratches that itch with no apologies and no filler.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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