Beerman

I went into Beerman expecting the kind of throwaway Steam filler that lives and dies by a two-dollar price tag. What I found instead was something stranger and more self-aware: a solo-made side-scrolling action-adventure built around a reluctant caped hero whose origin story involves 1980s Hollywood stunt work and a forced career break caused by the end of prohibition. That premise alone tells you whether this game is for you or not. The setting is Boston, and the threat is The Society of the Ninth, a criminal outfit that has pivoted from alcohol suppression to peddling an addictive drug across the city. You team up with the Boston PD and work through environments spanning streets, hotels, and shores, fighting the Society's dastardly machines across land, sea, and air. The tonal reference points the developer leans into are Family Guy and Futurama territory: cartoon violence with adult innuendo, jokes that land at an odd angle, and a story that does not take itself seriously for even one second. If that register clicks with you, there is a scrappy charm here that bigger games rarely bother with. The gameplay is a Unity-built side-scroller with partial controller support, and average playtime sits somewhere around five hours, which is actually the right length for what it is. A game this peculiar has no business overstaying its welcome. The graphics quality settings matter more than you would expect from something this modest: the community guide specifically warns that sub-optimal settings meaningfully degrade the experience, so set everything to Fantastic before you start. That detail, someone cared enough to write a guide about picture settings for a two-dollar game, tells you something about the small but committed pocket of players Beerman found. The honest caveats are real, though. With 26 Steam reviews and a 76 percent positive score, the audience is tiny, which means sparse community support and near-zero chance of patches arriving for modern compatibility issues. There are reports of the Unity intro causing hang problems on Windows 11, something to factor in before you commit. The production is exactly what one solo developer could manage in 2016: functional, idiosyncratic, rough at the seams. The appeal is precisely that rawness combined with a story concept that nobody with a publisher would have approved. For the right person, someone who collects micro-budget indie oddities the way others collect vinyl, Beerman is worth an evening. It knows what it is, keeps its runtime honest, and brings a villain whose backstory involves competitive powdered snacks. That is not nothing.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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