Party of Sin

I have a soft spot for games that arrive with a genuinely weird premise and actually commit to it, and Party of Sin commits hard. You are not one character; you are a rotating cast of seven, each Deadly Sin embodied as a playable avatar with a distinct mechanical identity. Sloth slows time to make a closing gate passable. Lust conjures cloud-steps out of pink pheromone. Greed swings on a gold-chain grappling hook. Gluttony inhales enemies to digest them for health, or swallows a fellow Sin and spits them into otherwise unreachable spots. Envy fires eye-lasers that, when aimed at an ally, equalizes both health bars, turning a healing action into a potential act of sabotage. The whole system is built around fast character-swapping, and when a puzzle clicks, that moment of chaining three Sins together across a single obstacle feels genuinely inventive. The four biblical worlds, Hell through Purgatory and Earth up to Heaven, give the designers room to escalate the puzzle complexity meaningfully across the game's six-to-eight hour run. The cracks show fast, though. Combat is the obvious weak link. Attacks land with no real impact, enemies absorb hits without selling the damage, and the whole affair reads more like a chore gate between puzzle rooms than something designed with care. Controls carry a persistent sluggishness; jumps feel slightly undercooked, and the shared health bar means a single spike floor or water bank is an instant reset for the whole group. Boss encounters are pattern puzzles more than fights, which is fine once you accept that framing, but the game does not really signal that shift in expectation. The rock-heavy soundtrack has energy but grows monotonous, and the character voice clips, while funny for the first hour, become noise you learn to ignore by the second. Where the design philosophy quietly shines is in the coopetitive local co-op for up to four players. Because every power that works on enemies also works on your partners, the door to mischief is always open. Envy can drain a careless teammate's health. Gluttony can literally eat someone and deposit them somewhere inconvenient. The tension between cooperation and sabotage is a legitimately clever structural choice, and it makes the couch co-op experience feel unlike most side-scrollers in that specific, slightly chaotic way. The catch: it is local only. No online. If your household does not have willing bodies nearby, you are back to cycling the hotkey wheel solo, which works but loses a dimension. Steam reception sits at mixed, and that is an honest read. The puzzle-switching core is the idea that deserved a more polished vessel. The visual style has charm in places, particularly the character designs, though backgrounds in the early zones are bleak enough to feel unfinished. Crankshaft was a small Kickstarter-backed team releasing their first game in 2012, and the ambition outran the execution in several areas. At its low price point, Party of Sin is worth the curiosity if you have someone physically present to share the couch and the chaos. Solo, it is a decent time for puzzle-platformer fans with patience for imprecise controls. Just go in knowing the fighting is the floor, not the ceiling. Kai, Scout Team

Doesn't currently run on Linux. Based on 8 ProtonDB community reports.

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