Iconoclasts

I came into Iconoclasts expecting a tidy little Metroidvania and got something that felt more like a personal statement handed to me through a controller. Joakim Sandberg built this game almost entirely alone, composing the soundtrack, drawing every frame, and writing every line of dialogue over the better part of a decade. That kind of obsessive authorship leaves fingerprints on everything, and here those fingerprints are largely a gift. You play as Robin, an unlicensed mechanic in a world where practicing the trade without approval from the religious ruling class, the One Concern, is treated as a serious crime. Her giant wrench is both weapon and multi-tool: she swings from overhead bolts to reach high platforms, spins gears to trigger environmental puzzles, and parries incoming attacks in close quarters. A stun pistol with an overcharge feature handles ranged combat, and the game adds further tools as the story progresses, each with dual roles in combat and puzzle-solving. The Tweak crafting system layers on top, letting you collect scattered patterns and assemble small passive upgrades, things like extended wrench swing duration or a one-time damage buffer. The Tweaks are genuinely minor in impact, and players hoping for a deep build system will find that corner of the game underdeveloped. What is fully developed is the boss roster. There are well over twenty distinct encounters, and each one introduces fresh mechanics rather than recycling the previous fight with a health-bar increase. Some require you to swap between Robin and her companion Mina mid-battle, using both characters in coordination. The creativity never stops turning over. The linearity is real and worth naming plainly. This is not a game with sprawling backtracking rewards or hidden sequence breaks. The world resembles Metroid Fusion more than Super Metroid: structured, authored, and channeled forward. Puzzle rooms grow increasingly elaborate, and the environmental challenge is consistently satisfying. But players who need wide-open exploration and a sense of territory ownership may feel the corridors closing in. The story, meanwhile, is dense and front-loads its world-building hard. The One Concern, the Isi people, the substance called Ivory that powers civilization, and Robin's personal history arrive in rapid succession at the opening, and the narrative only coheres properly on reflection, after the credits. Some of the dialogue has moments of clumsiness that a co-writer might have caught. None of this derails the experience, but going in with patience adjusted correctly helps. Visually, Iconoclasts belongs in the conversation with the best-looking 2D sprite work on PC. The characters are chunky and smoothly animated, recalling the Metal Slug school of personality-through-motion, and the environments carry a brightness and color density that stands apart from the darker, grittier palette choices that dominate the genre. The soundtrack, also Sandberg's work, matches the mood without overshadowing the action. It sits under the game like something you notice more on a second playthrough, which is exactly the right instinct for a composer making an intimate piece. For the ten hours or so it lasts, Iconoclasts is a concentrated, handcrafted thing that knows what it is and does not try to inflate itself. That restraint is rarer than it should be. If you care about solo development as craft, about boss design that respects your attention, or about 16-bit aesthetic used with genuine feeling rather than nostalgia-bait, this deserves a place in your library.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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