#BLUD

My first hour with #BLUD felt like stumbling onto a lost Saturday morning cartoon that somehow became a top-down dungeon crawler, and I kept waiting for it to announce what it really was. It never does. It just keeps being itself: a Zelda-shaped adventure set in the very alive small town of Carpentersville, where protagonist Becky Brewster is simultaneously new kid, field hockey freshman, and the latest in an ancient bloodline of spellcasting vampire hunters. Exit 73 Studios is an animation house that has done work for Nickelodeon, Disney, and Cartoon Network, and every frame of this game knows it. Character portraits are constantly in motion during dialogue, enemy death animations are genuinely gleeful, and the boss fights escalate into full-screen spectacle in a way that plain screenshots will not prepare you for. The visual ambition here is real. Structurally, the game is a familiar loop: dungeon chapters bookended by multi-phase boss encounters, fetch quests that crisscross Carpentersville, light puzzles, and a weapon progression system built around Becky's hockey stick. You slot in runes and attach upgrades to change its attributes, which is not a deep system but provides just enough momentum to keep the build tinkering pleasant. A standout mechanic is Perch, an in-game social media platform styled after X-era Twitter, which tracks both main and side quests as posts. Becky's friends drop hints in comments, selfies taken mid-fight can reveal enemy weaknesses, and the whole thing doubles as affectionate satire. There is also a shovel that lets you dig across portions of the map, a rope-dart for reaching elevated areas, and a post-launch content update that added new quests, minigames like pinball and darts, and combat encounter polish. If you bounced off early reports about the combat, the patched version is measurably better. The honest caveat is that #BLUD arrived a little rough. Hitboxes drew consistent criticism across reviewers, the dodge roll had no recovery window at launch, and the opening hours front-load conversation and tutorialisation to an uncomfortable degree before the real combat momentum arrives. The game does not hand you the hockey stick for almost the first half-hour. Patience with slow openings is rewarded, but if you need instant mechanical satisfaction, the first chapter will test that. Enemy repetition is also a real thing in the mid-game, where the pacing pulls the action apart with connector quests that feel like hallway filler between the genuinely excellent boss arenas. What keeps me coming back to recommending it is something less quantifiable. The comedy works, which is genuinely rare. The writing stays goofy without tipping into grating, and there is a quietly sincere moment mid-game where Becky just wants to be normal that lands with unexpected weight. The tone, sitting somewhere between The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy and early Buffy-era supernatural horror, is calibrated carefully and never drops. If you grew up watching Cartoon Network's stranger corners and have been waiting for a game that actually understands that visual language from the inside, rather than approximating it, this is the closest thing we have. The rough mechanical edges are real. The soul underneath them is realer.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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