Brut@l

My first instinct with Brut@l was that someone had taken the Tron aesthetic, glued it to Rogue, and shipped it before the combat design meeting ever happened. That's not entirely unfair. The visual hook is real: every wall tile, creature, and weapon is built from 3D ASCII characters, mostly black and white, with splashes of color for hazards like lava and poison that actually do a smart job of making danger legible at a glance. It looks striking in motion and it's genuinely the best thing the game has going for it. The mechanical loop is straightforward. You pick one of four classes, Warrior, Ranger, Mage, or Amazon, and push through 26 procedurally generated floors toward a final boss. Each class has distinct starting gear, the Mage opens with a staff for ranged pressure while the Warrior leans on big health and a shield, but the four shared skill trees mean the class distinction erodes fast. By the midgame most characters feel similar, which undercuts the replay argument. Combat runs in real time, not turn-based, which is the right call for this style, and the basic three-hit melee combos plus a dodge-and-parry system are functional if unremarkable. Weapon special moves add some texture: the Skullcrusher Warhammer's AOE ground pound and the Goblin Pike's charge-and-thrust feel decent to execute. The real personality comes from the crafting system. You collect literal ASCII letters from the dungeon as raw materials, combine them with weapon codexes to forge swords, hammers, spears, and bows, then swap in colored enchanted letters to add fire, ice, poison, or arcane effects. Watching a weapon assemble from scattered alphabet characters is a genuinely cool animation, and hunting the right letters for an enchanted build gives you a tangible short-term objective on each floor. Here's where the patience runs out though. Loot density actually drops in the back half, so runs that felt resource-rich early become starved for materials later. Armor is almost negligible: single slot pieces that soak a few hits and then break, with no passive bonuses or build expression. The potion system randomizes effects each run, which forces blind experimentation and adds chaos, but the hunger mechanic sitting on top of that just piles resource pressure without adding interesting decisions. The camera is fixed, and blind-side pitfalls that kill a run with zero warning are a recurring complaint across reviews for a good reason. On controller, where this was clearly designed to live, input feels adequate. On mouse and keyboard it's noticeably awkward. Local co-op works and is the most fun way to play: shared-screen, no split, and the resource scarcity actually forces real coordination around potions and food. The Steam Workshop dungeon creator is a legitimate bonus, letting you build, share, and rate custom floors, which extends the content ceiling past what the procedural generation alone can sustain. Online multiplayer is listed as a feature but local co-op is the primary mode you should plan around. The Metacritic consensus at 66 is fair. There's a game here that entertains for a few evenings, especially with a couch partner, but the class system, combat depth, and loot design all stop well short of the roguelite bar set by contemporaries.

Fred · Scout Team

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