Squareface

My first instinct when I loaded up Squareface was to laugh, gently and warmly, at how earnestly the whole thing commits to its premise. You are a tiny cardboard person. You have a square head. You wake up in a giant world you do not understand, and from that single absurdist seed, VAN CUBO builds out a surprisingly dense third-person action-RPG with more moving parts than its low profile would ever suggest. The breadth of systems here is what catches you off guard. Character creation lets you mix and match clothing per body part regardless of gender selection, pick your backpack, and load out your starting weapons. From a matchstick at the beginning, you expand into grenades, mines, guns, and cannons across more than 40 story missions. Alongside the main campaign sit survival waves, race levels, and what the developer calls experimental modes, which gives the whole package a scrappy, everything-including-the-kitchen-sink energy. Base building slots in as a light management layer, with a Barracks where your ally pets shelter between sorties. Those pets carry attributes like pocket size, damage output, and speed, and can be issued attack commands, which is a detail that speaks to how seriously the game takes its own toybox logic. A garage and vehicle system adds driving to the mix. For a title sitting in the sub-5-dollar tier, that is a genuinely generous pile of content. The visual identity is where Squareface earns real affection. Built on Unreal Engine 3, it renders its papery protagonist and surrounding world with a tactile specificity that feels hand-assembled rather than procedurally smoothed. Reviewers on mobile compared it favorably to Tearaway and LittleBigPlanet in its craft-inspired sensibility, and the PC version carries that same cozy materiality into larger environments. The original soundtrack reinforces the strangeness without overselling it. There is a quietness to the audio design that suits a tiny paper creature tiptoeing through a world built for giants. Where the game shows its seams is in polish and community signal. Steam sits at a modest 76% positive across fewer than 40 reviews, and the forum threads reveal some players needing to force DirectX 9 mode via launch options to get the game running reliably. The achievements are, by community admission, confusingly implemented, enough that a dedicated guide exists to parse them. This is a one-team production wearing its ambition visibly, and some rough joins are part of the deal. The game never quite shakes its mobile origins either, with mission structure that feels episodic rather than open-ended, which may frustrate players expecting a seamless world to wander. For the right person, none of that is a dealbreaker. If you have ever folded a paper crane and felt something, if you find the Tearaway lineage of craft-aesthetic games spiritually nourishing, if you want an action-RPG that fits in an afternoon or three rather than a month, Squareface is the kind of obscure little gem that sits on your drive and occasionally gets shown to friends as a curiosity worth defending. VAN CUBO took five years to make this thing, and that devotion shows in the details, even where the execution stumbles.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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