Curved Space

My first hour with Curved Space felt like stumbling onto something nobody told me about - a small-team shooter with a spatial trick so visually wild it stopped me mid-level just to watch bullets curve over the horizon of an asteroid. Only By Midnight built their whole identity around one deceptively simple idea: your ship, your bullets, and your enemies all obey the surface geometry of whatever impossible structure you happen to be skating across. That means you can fire around the bend of a space station and catch a spider you can't even see, or flip to the underside of a planetoid mid-fight because the pressure got too hot topside. One level is literally a Mobius strip. That detail alone tells you this team cared. The core mechanics layer on top of the geometry in interesting ways. Your energy leash - not a weapon, a dedicated ability - lets you lash spiders to anchor pylons to drain their energy, chain multiple enemies together, or set up a dash-kill by yanking a target into your ship's path for a brief invulnerability window. Charge enough energy through lashing and you trigger Overdrive, which pumps up every weapon and briefly makes limited-ammo guns go unlimited. The arsenal itself runs from a conventional blaster and plasma gun to a flame thrower, a laser whip, and something the devs call a weed whacker. Weapon drops fall from enemies mid-fight, so you are constantly making small tactical calls about what to carry. Difficulty settings run from Casual all the way to Nightmare, with custom toggles sitting between them. The campaign threads a surprisingly voice-acted story through all of this - a spunky engineer protagonist who starts fragmenting into parallel versions of herself, each one a potential mid-boss or ally depending on which branching path you choose. The comic-book illustrated cutscenes have genuine craft behind them. But the campaign itself runs roughly two to three hours on a first pass, and the objectives it rotates through - clear waves, harvest energy by lashing spiders to siphon towers, assassinate a target - are not all created equal. The energy-harvesting objective in particular drags; it asks you to hold a lash connection while respawning spiders shoot at you, and the pacing just dies. Some boss encounters suffer a similar problem, with hit windows that are both rare and unpredictable, turning what should feel climactic into a war of attrition. Where the game genuinely finds its rhythm is in the post-campaign modes: Daily Runs, Arena, Survival, and Endless all strip away the awkward objectives and let the arcade core breathe. Leaderboard chasing in those modes is a different animal entirely - tight, replayable, score-focused in the way that the campaign almost promises but never fully delivers. The synthwave soundtrack, licensed from FiXT Neon and featuring Scandroid, 3Force, and Fury Weekend, is legitimately excellent; it carries sessions that the level design alone would not sustain. The neon-lit art style is crisp and communicates enemy types at a glance without visual clutter, which matters a lot when the geometry starts bending your sense of up and down. Fair warning for anyone prone to motion sickness: the constant surface-flipping and horizon-warping can disorient even on a good day, and the camera occasionally gets confused during curved transitions. The game also front-loads a fairly lengthy tutorial before the real momentum kicks in. But if you give it the patience it asks for in those first thirty minutes, the arcade modes and the sheer novelty of the curved-space geometry make it worth the ride - especially at the price point it typically sits at. Think of the campaign as a long tutorial for the score-chase modes that follow.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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