SKIPCHASER

I went into SKIPCHASER expecting a throwaway genre exercise and came out with something more complicated in my head. Ponywolf built this from a Ludum Dare jam prototype, iterated through 40-plus public builds across sixteen months of Early Access, and shipped it as a complete product in June 2018. That scrappy origin story shows in every corner of the game, and that is both its charm and its honest limitation. At its core, this is a top-down twin-stick shooter with dungeon-crawling structure and a contract-based mission loop. You play as a Skipchaser, a paramilitary bounty hunter working for a shadowy corporation called M.O.T.H.E.R., hunting targets across the procedurally generated wastelands and abandoned element mines of a planet called Paterae XI. The story is thin and deliberately pulpy. Do not come here for branching dialogue or a satisfying narrative arc. The premise is more of a coat hook than a story, something to hang the shooting on. What the game actually wants you to care about is the weapon smithing system, and it earns that focus. Rather than dropping whole guns as loot, SKIPCHASER hands you parts. You take those parts back to your ship, snap them together in the smithing screen, and tune a weapon to your needs. Fire rate, damage, and accuracy all shift depending on how you combine components, and then you layer one of three elemental damage types on top: fire, bio, or cryo. Each element has a counter-type among enemies, so there is genuine incentive to build a small arsenal rather than lock onto one gun. In practice, honest community feedback points out that it is fairly easy to find an overpowered combination early and stick with it, which deflates the elemental strategy somewhat. The difficulty balance leans soft for mouse-and-keyboard players, and the signature "skip" mechanic, a short-range bullet-time teleport, ends up feeling optional across most of the campaign. The visual style is where the game earns genuine, uncomplicated goodwill. Luminescent polygon shapes, a palette that feels authentically spacey without borrowing from anything obvious, and lighting effects that land somewhere between neon wasteland and fever dream. The soundtrack is legitimately good, the kind of atmospheric sci-fi score that a game three times this size would be pleased to have. Those two elements do real work in setting a mood that the thin story cannot fully carry on its own. The dungeon layouts, by contrast, are procedurally generated but visibly template-similar after a few runs, and enemy variety stays narrow: robots, humanoids, animals, and a few turret types. The AI is rudimentary, with enemies mostly charging or wandering until they spot you. The full campaign runs roughly two to three hours. There is an endless dungeon mode for players who want to keep optimizing loadouts beyond the credits. Post-launch, the 1.5 update added quality-of-life fixes, a new spider mine enemy type, a dedicated training level for the skip mechanic, and improved soundtrack distribution. The developer stayed transparent and communicative throughout, which counts for something. This is a small, earnest game that never pretends to be otherwise. If you want a tight, low-stakes twin-stick session with a satisfying crafting loop and a killer ambient score, SKIPCHASER delivers that in a compact, honest package. Go in with calibrated expectations and you will not feel let down.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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