Completely Stretchy

My first few minutes in the Grombi Isles felt like someone had fed a fever dream into a pastel colour wheel and hit print. You wake up, smash your alarm clock, commute to work, press a big red button for Dr. Grimble, and emerge from the explosion bright blue, one-armed, and stretchy enough to latch onto a lamppost three floors up. That premise sounds like a bit, but Completely Stretchy actually commits to the bit for its entire runtime, and that commitment is almost entirely why it works. The core loop is first-person grapple traversal across three distinct zones of the Grombi Isles: a city district, an industrial plant, and a forest. Your single elastic arm shoots out, sticks to surfaces, and lets you swing, climb, or fling yourself across the map. A stamina-like blob meter in the bottom-left corner tracks how many consecutive grabs you can chain before gravity reasserts itself, and upgrades to that meter are unlocked by completing quests and finding collectible Elektros scattered across each island. When the swinging clicks, chaining momentum between buildings feels genuinely satisfying. When it doesn't, and it sometimes doesn't, there is a learning curve that borders on janky. The physics are floppy by design, which is charming in a Octodad-adjacent way, but precision platforming sections can tip from amusing into mildly maddening. A single autosave that writes constantly is worth knowing about before you set off. The side quests are where the game earns its keep. Deliver a package, find missing library books, help a Grombi break into a bank, assemble a hoverbike from scattered parts, race through timed rings. None of this is mechanically complex, but the NPCs delivering these requests are so relentlessly odd that reading their dialogue becomes the reason to seek them out. The Grombi vernacular replaces everyday words with invented nonsense, every resident looks like a humanised blobfish with a unique and anatomically baffling body, and some of them are simply standing in a corner spinning in a T-pose for no apparent reason. The world is packed with micro-jokes and visual gags that reward curiosity over completionism. There is also a secondary story layer that unfolds as you push through the main objectives, which several reviewers have flagged as a pleasant surprise. The critical consensus landing at 72 on Metacritic tells the real shape of the audience. Positive voices praise the groovy, squelchy soundtrack by composer Rupert Cole, the cel-shaded pastel art direction, the sheer commitment to weirdness, and the tight pacing of a five-hour experience that knows when to stop. Critical voices point at the thin overarching narrative, a 3D map that is genuinely difficult to navigate, and the feeling that exploration sometimes turns up nothing but empty space. The game sits closest to A Short Hike and Lil' Gator Game in DNA, but with a stranger, more anarchic sense of humour and considerably more jank in the movement. It does not have the movement precision of either comparison. It also does not want to. The traversal being slightly floppy is the joke. Completely Stretchy is the kind of small game I will remember because it made a specific face at me: somewhere between delight and complete confusion. It is not for players who need narrative direction or tight controls, and it has real limits in depth and replayability once the credits land. But for anyone who gravitates toward the handcrafted weird, who likes a world where every NPC might be staring into the void or hosting a spin class, and who can tolerate a movement system that takes twenty minutes to stop fighting, the Grombi Isles are worth the visit. Four to five hours. Self-contained. A world that tastes like sploffee.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on Completely Stretchy.