Cookie Cutter: Overkill Edition

My first hour with Cookie Cutter: Overkill Edition had me picking my jaw up off the floor twice: once for the opening cutscene, which drops you into Cherry's broken, rain-soaked crawl toward her kidnapped creator with a visceral honesty most games would soften, and again when the combat clicked and I started bouncing enemies off ceilings like a cyborg pinball machine. This is a Metroidvania built by people who clearly love the genre but also love Tank Girl, Hotline Miami, and the kind of transgressive punk energy that makes critics uncomfortable and fans devoted. At its mechanical core, Cookie Cutter is an interconnected-map Metroidvania with a combat system that leans harder toward beat-em-up than most genre peers. Cherry cycles between light attacks that build her Void Energy meter and heavy attacks that spend it, creating a constant rhythm of aggression and management. That same Void meter doubles as your healing resource, so running dry mid-fight and facing a corridor of fresh enemies is a genuine anxiety. The Overkill Edition tightens this loop meaningfully - adjusted hitboxes, refined cancel timing, expanded combo routes, and new special weapons slot in alongside the chainsaw, electric guitar, and the various brutally animated finishers that reward aggressive play with a splash of Void Energy back. Parrying exists and, when it lands, feels glorious. When it doesn't, which is often until the timing ingrains itself, you will eat a lot of floor. The dodge roll with its generous invincibility frames is a reliable fallback, and the game never quite punishes you for leaning on it. Bosses are large, pattern-driven, and satisfying - expect two or three attempts on each until their tells become readable, then feel your frustration flip to satisfaction. The Overkill Edition also adds full voice acting for every character, new cinematics before boss battles, area completion tracking on the map, and a suite of new moves for Cherry. It is a substantive upgrade over the 2023 launch build - reviewers who played both consistently describe Overkill as closer to what the game was always trying to be, with the rough edges of the original sanded into something more intentional. The hand-drawn 2D art was already the game's crown jewel: every frame animated by hand, the style evoking a grunge comic aesthetic somewhere between Aeon Flux and a post-kawaii nightmare. On PC, where the resolution ceiling sits highest, it genuinely looks unlike anything else in the genre right now. Where the game earns its caveats is in the writing and world design. The narrative ambition is real - a dystopian android revenge story wrapped in cosmic mythology, a queer romance at its center, a cast of eccentric side characters populating the Megastructure's various biomes. But the story moves fast and leaves gaps. Cherry herself is deliberately difficult: crass, apathetic to everyone except Shinji, funny in the way someone who has just survived corporate murder tends to be funny. Some players will find that energy exhausting rather than charming. The humor leans juvenile in stretches, and the lore scattered across data terminals hints at a richer world than the main narrative fully delivers. Early-game progression can also feel uneven, with a stripped-down Cherry facing some surprisingly punishing encounters before her kit opens up into the genuinely expressive action machine the later hours reward you with. For players who can ride out that opening and connect with its specific frequency - loud, irreverent, aesthetically obsessed, and beating with something that is genuinely tender underneath the blood and chrome - Cookie Cutter: Overkill Edition is one of the more memorable Metroidvanias in a genre that has never been more crowded. It knows what it is. It commits completely. The soundtrack shifts between futuristic techno and heavy metal with the same confidence the art direction brings to every frame, and there are stretches of the Megastructure where all of it locks together into something close to euphoric. Not every room earns that feeling, but enough of them do.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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