Mugsters

My first impression of Mugsters was confusion, and I mean that as a mild compliment. You land on a bright low-poly hub island with zero instructions, no tutorial pop-ups, nothing. The game just trusts you to poke things until they make sense. Punch an alien. Hop in a car and send it flying off a ledge. Find the portal. It is a deliberate design choice from Reinkout Games - a one-person studio operating under Team17's incubation program - and once you accept it, the whole game opens up like a little pressurized box of satisfying chaos. The loop across all 25 sandbox islands is consistent: destroy a target structure or activate a machine, collect scattered crystals, rescue humans from alien containment pods, then find the airplane and escape. That sequence repeats level to level, and I will not pretend that repetition is not a real friction point by the mid-game. The objectives feel recycled in a way that some players will find comfortable and others will find dull. What keeps it alive is that the how is always open. You can use volatile barrels as door weights, ram vehicles through walls, lure UFOs into their own laser fire, or chain explosives across a generator cluster. The physics engine is expressive enough that no two runs through the same island feel identical, and that open-ended problem-solving is where Mugsters quietly earns its place in the indie puzzle-action category. The visual style is low-poly and cartoony, deep saturated colors keeping each island readable at the camera's fixed-distance isometric view. That zoomed-out perspective is both a strength and a consistent annoyance: it lets you survey threats and plan routes, but your character is genuinely tiny on screen, and in local co-op the camera pulls back even further, making it tricky to keep track of who is doing what. The sound design is the strangest corner of the whole package. There is almost no in-level music - just the clatter of vehicles, the reverb of explosions, and the unsettling hum of a UFO gaining on you. Whether that silence reads as atmospheric or merely absent probably depends on your tolerance for soundscape-driven tension. I found it eerie in a way that fit the low-key alien dread, but I also understand the reviewers who found the quiet grating after a few hours. Difficulty is front-loaded in the wrong direction: the early islands are forgiving to the point of feeling slight, and the more inventive puzzles arrive later, once some players may have already bounced. Hostage AI is genuinely unreliable - rescued humans get snagged on scenery, wander into danger zones, and occasionally refuse to follow at all. Dying sends you back to the start of a level with no checkpoints, which is more annoying in the longer, more elaborate stages. The co-op mode reuses the same levels rather than offering purpose-built co-op scenarios, though the islands are remixed to account for two players and the coordination required does produce some genuinely funny moments. Online multiplayer is absent entirely, so that local-only restriction is worth knowing if you are solo by circumstance rather than choice. For the right player - someone who likes open-ended physics puzzles, does not need narrative scaffolding, and ideally has a person to share the couch - Mugsters is a quietly enjoyable underdog worth the low asking price it usually sits at. It will not command your full attention for weeks, but it asks for a few evenings, delivers on that ask, and knows when to let you escape on the airplane. Kai, Scout Team

Valve rates this game Steam Deck Playable.

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