Season's Beatings

I have a soft spot for small solo projects that commit completely to one idea and refuse to apologize for it. Season's Beatings is exactly that kind of game. Code Avarice built the whole thing around a single, merciless rule: one bullet in, one body down, no exceptions on either side. You die just as fast as the enemies do, and that symmetry is where everything interesting lives. The setup is deliberately ridiculous. You are trapped inside an office Christmas party run by militant holiday fanatics and the only exit is through 21 increasingly difficult levels of room-clearing violence. It sounds like a joke, and it is, but the joke is committed to with genuine craft. The level design asks you to read enemy positions, plan a route through a space, and execute before your nerve breaks. A stationary guard across a corridor is a puzzle. A patrolling pair near the stairwell is a much harder one. The game does not hold a hand or explain itself. You figure it out, you die, you restart, and eventually the choreography clicks. That rhythm will feel immediately familiar to anyone who lost hours to Hotline Miami's top-down equivalent. What separates this from a pure imitation is the first-person perspective and the weapon economy built around it. You start with whatever the level gives you, burn through ammo fast, and then improvise. Run dry on a tommy gun and you can hurl it at the nearest enemy's face, then close the distance and finish them with a baseball bat or a wrench before stealing the shotgun off their corpse. The weapon chain has a scrappy, improvisational feel that keeps the tension high even when the plan falls apart, which it will often. A dive move is also in the toolkit, letting you clear gaps, cut angles, and occasionally leap through windows when a room goes sideways. The Christmas-hard-rock soundtrack deserves a specific mention because it does real work here. The music is loud, propulsive, and genuinely funny in context, the kind of score that makes another failed attempt feel like an invitation rather than a punishment. Community players noted some optimization roughness at launch, and a sound bug tied to the hold-to-restart input has been flagged in player discussions. Neither issue ruins the experience but both are worth knowing about. The game is short, a focused burst of mayhem rather than a sprawling campaign, and it knows its length exactly. This is not a game for everyone. There is no story to follow, no gradual difficulty curve to ease you in, and no mode that softens the one-hit-kill premise. The player count on Steam is modest and the review sample is small, but the approval rating among those who played it sits extremely high. Sometimes a tiny game just does its one thing right.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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