Concurrency

I have a soft spot for games that lie to your face on the title screen, and Concurrency earns its place near the top of that list. The Steam page itself practically dares you to look closer, which is either the most charming piece of indie marketing I have seen in years or a very earnest bluff. Spoiler: it is not a bluff. On the surface you are running procedurally generated halls, killing enemies the game cheerfully calls "goopmen," and spending currency at a shopkeeper between runs. Branching paths give you a modest difficulty dial. The loop is unambitious, the pixel art functional rather than breathtaking. If you evaluate Concurrency on that surface alone you will close it in fifteen minutes and forget it exists. That is the trap, and the point. Andy Imm built this entirely alone during his final year of high school, coded in Game Maker Studio with audio assembled in FamiTracker and BFXR, and somewhere inside that modest shell he hid a linear adventure that hopscotches across more than half a dozen genre changes. When the distortions start, and they will start, the game stops being the thing it told you it was. The FamiTracker soundtrack deserves a specific mention because it does a lot of heavy lifting. Chiptune scores in low-budget indie games often feel like wallpaper, but here the audio shifts register each time the genre pivots, which is how you know you have genuinely crossed into new territory and not just a reskinned corridor. Imm clearly understood that sound design is half of tonal whiplash. The pixel art stays lo-fi throughout, and for most of the rogue-lite front half that is fine, though a small number of players will bounce off the visual austerity before the payoff arrives. That is a real risk and worth naming plainly. At its current price point this is closer to an extended experiment than a polished commercial release, and it reads that way. The rogue-lite loop that brackets everything lacks the mechanical depth of contemporaries in that genre, and the genre-hopping sections vary in execution. Some transitions feel revelatory, others feel like a student proof of concept, because that is precisely what they are. What holds it together is sincerity. There is no ironic distance here. Imm believed the premise was worth following through, and with roughly 79 percent positive Steam reviews from a small but real player base, enough people agreed to make that count. The game rewards patience and curiosity in roughly equal measure, and it knows when to end.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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