Monochroma

I wanted to love Monochroma in the way you root for a first album from a band you discovered before anyone else did. Nowhere Studios, a small outfit out of Istanbul, built something visually arresting here, a side-scrolling puzzle platformer rendered almost entirely in black and white with precise, aching splashes of red scattered across its mid-century industrial backdrop. The 1950s dystopian setting has genuine personality: rain-soaked city ghettos, retro-futuristic factories, tenement blocks that lean too tall, sewer tunnels where something feels deeply wrong. When the camera zooms out to reveal one of these environments in full, it is legitimately stunning. The OST by Gevende, sparse and plaintive, mixing electronics with strings and brass, earns its keep completely in those moments when it actually plays. The silence between those moments, though, is less intentional atmosphere and more just absence. The core mechanic is borrowed from two places at once and it is honest about both. You carry your injured little brother on your back for most of the game, which slows you down and cuts your jump height roughly in half, a direct echo of ICO. When you need to unburden yourself to reach a higher ledge or trip a switch, your brother can only be set down under a direct light source because he is scared of the dark, which becomes the central logic around which most puzzle rooms are built. That mechanic, at its best, produces clever multi-step setups: shuttle the kid to a safe spotlight, clear the path, come back, carry him forward, repeat. There are also tense chase sequences involving a hulking pursuer in a striped sweater where you cannot fight back and can only run, and those sections carry a genuine spike of adrenaline that the quieter puzzle rooms often do not. Here is where the difficulty becomes hard to talk around honestly. The controls were Monochroma's most consistent critical complaint on release, and while the developers issued patches quickly, the underlying issues were structural rather than cosmetic. Jump timing is floaty and imprecise in a genre that punishes imprecision with death. The character recovers slowly from falls, which in a game that frequently kills you feels like a design choice specifically designed to frustrate. Puzzle communication is also inconsistent: more than one section requires understanding rules the game never clearly states, and a few puzzles are gated by visual feedback that does not match what is actually happening on screen. Later sequences in particular demand a precision the engine simply cannot reliably deliver. Steam user reviews sit at roughly 75 percent positive across several hundred votes, which suggests a player base more forgiving than critics were, but the Metacritic consensus of 55 and an average OpenCritic score of 57 from twenty reviewers is a fair reflection of a game that looks like a 9 and plays like a 5. What keeps Monochroma worth considering, even now, is the sincerity of its ambition and the specific emotional register it manages to occupy when everything lines up. The wordless storytelling lands its quieter beats well. The brotherhood between the two boys is communicated through movement and proximity rather than cutscenes. The world is genuinely strange and unsettling, drawing from dieselpunk aesthetics and corporate-horror undertones in ways that feel more considered than the average atmosphere-heavy indie. The runtime of around five hours also means that even when the game frustrates, it does not overstay itself. This is a game that knows roughly when to end, even if it stumbles on the way there. If you have already played Limbo and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons and find yourself hungry for something adjacent but imperfect, Monochroma offers a specific kind of handcrafted melancholy that is hard to find elsewhere. Go in knowing the controls will test your patience, lower the expectations you bring to the puzzles, and let the visuals and occasional soundtrack moments do their quiet work. It is the kind of underpopular game I find worth defending, not because it is secretly great, but because what it reaches for matters, even when the reach falls short. Kai, Scout Team

Valve rates this game Steam Deck Playable.

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