Prison City

I have a soft spot for the games that nobody licensed. The ones buried beneath Mega Man and Castlevania in the NES library, the ones that had great bones and zero marketing. Prison City is built in deliberate honor of exactly those games, and spending time with it feels less like playing a retro-inspired indie and more like finding a cartridge that simply never existed. That specificity of love is its biggest strength and, depending on your patience, its most demanding ask. Mechanically the game pulls from a narrow but well-chosen reference pool. The chakram, your only real combat tool, can be thrown in multiple directions, held in place, and even used to collect items on the fly. A weapon stamina meter governs how hard you can lean on it, nudging you toward measured attacks rather than button-mashing. Hal can grab ledges, shimmy along overhead cables, and slide to duck under hazards. The controls have a learning curve because nothing is automatic, but once the muscle memory sets in the movement starts to feel deliberate and satisfying rather than stiff. The Mega Man-style level select opens up after a short train intro, letting you pick from eight zones, including the Rooftops, Cold Storage, the Stadium, and the Sewers, before the final stage unlocks. Each zone asks you to track down an NPC contact who holds a keycard to the boss door. There are also hidden permanent upgrades tucked into each level for those who explore rather than sprint. A Boss Rush mode exists for players who want to chase time records once the main run is done. The level design is where the craft really shows. The stages branch enough to reward exploration without ever dropping dead ends on you, and the minimap keeps orientation honest. Zone variety is genuine: Cold Storage hits you with brittle ice platforms and ice trucks that kill on contact; the Freeway opens with an auto-scrolling bike section before the platforming kicks in; the Stadium leans into circular geometry for a different rhythm entirely. The bosses are the most inventive part of the package, ranging from sewer fights where rising water changes jump physics to a motorcycle battle to something that reads unmistakably as a 2D take on a Metal Gear. Not every boss lands equally well, but the ones that commit to their gimmick deliver the kind of moment worth repeating. Fairness is the honest conversation. On Classic difficulty the game recreates the specific cruelty of late-era NES action, fewer lives, less damage output, more aggressive enemies. Some zones stack hazard on top of hazard in ways that feel punishing rather than inventive. The ledge-grabbing is finicky enough that it costs you health in moments it really should not. Fullscreen scaling on PC has also drawn complaints about blurriness and flickering, so windowed mode is the safer choice until that gets addressed. The story is paper thin and Hal himself barely speaks above a grunt. If you need narrative texture with your action platformers, this is not the place. But if you are here for the geometry and the rhythm of a well-made side-scroller, the four difficulty settings, including a fully customizable mode, give you enough rope to tune the experience into something that clicks. Steam sits at Very Positive with 84 percent of reviews, which is exactly the reception you would expect from a game that finds its audience and serves them faithfully. The soundtrack, composed by Matt Creamer, carries 22 chiptune tracks with a Sunsoft-adjacent energy, the kind of writing that gives each zone a distinct harmonic mood without ever slipping into generic 8-bit wallpaper. Combined with pixel art that commits so seriously to the NES aesthetic that the sprites and color palettes are nearly indistinguishable from actual hardware output, Prison City has a soundscape and visual voice that feel earned rather than assembled. The backgrounds carry small animated details, spinning industrial fans, windswept trees in the Preserve, that give the world a quiet life without breaking the retro grammar.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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