DeadCore

My first hour with DeadCore felt like being handed a Quake movement engine and told to climb Babel in the dark. That tension, that sense of weight and wrongness when you mistime a jump and plummet back through laser fields you already survived, is exactly what 5 Bits Games was going for, and it lands more often than not. This is a first-person platformer built around momentum, precision, and a single extraordinary tool: the SwitchGun. That weapon does not shoot enemies in any satisfying combat sense. Instead, it toggles the world. Doors open, launch pads flip on and off, patrolling drones freeze mid-circuit. The trick is that you are almost always firing the SwitchGun mid-air, mid-dash, mid-fall, and the interplay between movement and environmental manipulation is where the game quietly earns its 78 on Metacritic. The structure is lean. Six levels climb a colossal tower hanging above a void, and the early floors ease you in through jump, double-jump, and dash combinations before the geometry turns hostile. By the time insta-death laser fields and timed gravity shifts enter the picture, you have either committed to the game's logic or you have quit. There is no middle difficulty. Community voices are split cleanly along that fault line: people who love precision dexterity games describe the pull-back-for-more quality even after death counts well into the hundreds on a single level, while players who wanted a speedrunner with clean short stages find the longer, labyrinthine later levels exhausting rather than exhilarating. Both reactions are honest. DeadCore is not trying to appeal to everyone, and it does not pretend otherwise. What the game does offer beyond raw challenge is atmosphere, and here is where I want to be specific because it matters. The tower exists in a sci-fi fog that reads almost like a fever dream, somewhere between the grid-geometry of Tron and the gothic industrial weight of early Quake. Collectible Logs scatter fragments of the unnamed protagonist's erased memory across the levels, and while the narrative is thin, the placement of those fragments inside demanding platforming gauntlets makes finding them feel earned rather than optional padding. The electronic soundtrack, which reviewers have landed on opposite sides of (some called it inspired, others cheap), sits in the ambient-to-dubstep range that I find quietly hypnotic during flow-state runs. It fits the ascent. Sparks collectibles scattered on branching paths unlock extra Speedrun mode stages, giving completionists a reason to revisit levels they thought they had mastered. The honest caveats: mouse and keyboard is the correct way to play this. The SwitchGun demands precision aiming on the move, and the console versions introduced auto-aim that occasionally fires in exactly the wrong direction. On PC, the feel is tight, if occasionally unforgiving in checkpoint placement. The story mode earns that label loosely at best, the world offers atmosphere over narrative substance, and players who want authored, hand-held storytelling will find DeadCore about as chatty as a loading screen. What you get instead is a small French indie that knows exactly what it is. For a studio of six people building their first game, the level design ambition, particularly in the anti-gravity sections and the SwitchGun puzzle choreography, punches well above its weight class.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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