Bonkies

I have a soft spot for games that commit completely to their one absurd premise, and Bonkies commits hard. You and up to three friends play as chimp astronauts equipped with banana-fuelled jetpacks and single oversized robo-arms, flying between planets to fill outlined blueprint shapes with whatever blocks the level throws at you. It sounds like a gentle afternoon. It is not. The physics engine is the heart of everything here, and Studio Gauntlet clearly tuned it with care. Blocks have real weight and momentum - move too fast and the piece keeps drifting, nudge a tower at the wrong angle and the whole structure goes over in slow, agonising physics-accurate fashion. Completing a level requires the structure to hold stable for a three-second countdown, and those three seconds can feel like a hostage negotiation. The block variety grows planet by planet: standard crates give way to glass cubes that shatter into smaller stabilising fragments, anti-gravity boxes that float mid-air, magnetic blocks, explosive charges that detonate if you grip them too long, and rocket blocks that fire off in the opposite direction when tapped. Each new element resets your intuitions just enough to keep things interesting well into the late game. The world design is light and gorgeous in a 90s Saturday-morning-cartoon way, with varied planetary backdrops and a mellow, unhurried soundtrack that works almost as a tonal joke against the on-screen chaos. Here is the honest part: Bonkies is a local co-op game wearing a singleplayer label as a courtesy. The solo campaign exists and is technically completable, but the difficulty curve was clearly calibrated for two pairs of robo-arms, not one. Reviewers across the board noted that solo play shifts from mildly challenging to grim fairly quickly, while the same levels in co-op produce the laugh-and-groan loop that defines the best party games. The PC version supports Steam Remote Play, which softens the local-only limitation somewhat, but do not go in expecting a satisfying solo puzzler. The absence of remappable controls is a real omission too, especially given that precision matters enormously when you are trying to thread a glass block past a tilting scaffold. It has been flagged by multiple critics and remains unfixed as of writing. For the audience it is actually built for - two to four people on one couch, controllers in hand, willing to blame each other loudly - Bonkies sits comfortably alongside Overcooked and Moving Out as a short-session chaos generator that earns its replays. The campaign travels from Earth to the Moon to Mars and beyond, with each planet introducing new mechanics rather than just harder versions of old ones. Unlockable characters including a koala and a dog (who can be petted) are the kind of small handcrafted detail that signals a developer who cared about the feel of the whole thing, not just the core loop. It is not a long game, and it does not pretend to be.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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