Struggling

Struggling is a two-player cooperative platformer built on one genuinely strange premise: you and another person each control a single arm of a fleshy, gelatinous abomination. One player grabs with the left arm, one with the right, and together you haul this pathetic creature through a world that seems architecturally designed to humiliate you. The physics are intentionally sloppy, your grip is unreliable, and the levels do not care about your dignity. That is more or less the whole pitch, and for a certain kind of player, it is exactly enough. The game comes from Chasing Rats Games, a small developer, and that small-team energy shows in how committed it is to its own weird tone. The visual design leans into grotesque body-horror comedy, all pulsing organic textures and environmental hazards that feel like they were designed by someone who finds suffering genuinely funny. It is not pretty in any conventional sense, but it has a coherent aesthetic identity, which matters more. The sound design supports the chaos with squelching, flopping audio that keeps the whole thing feeling deeply, specifically wrong in a way that makes you laugh rather than wince. Where Struggling earns its Very Positive rating is in the local co-op dynamic. Communication breaks down fast. Blame is exchanged faster. The two-arm mechanic forces a kind of low-level negotiation on every single obstacle, and because the physics system has just enough unpredictability baked in, even familiar sections can go sideways without warning. There is genuine comedic chemistry here if you play with the right person, the kind of couch co-op friction that produces actual memories rather than just completed levels. For solo play there is a single-player mode where you control both arms on separate inputs, which is admirable to include but honestly punishing enough that it functions mostly as a difficulty selector labeled "I enjoy suffering alone." The weaknesses are real and worth naming. The Metacritic score of 65 reflects something genuine: the core mechanic, clever as it is, does not evolve dramatically over the course of the game. What you are doing in the later stages is essentially what you were doing at the start, just with more ambitious level geometry. Players who want mechanical depth or build variety will not find it here. The game is also bluntly inaccessible to anyone who finds imprecise physics frustrating rather than funny. Patience is a prerequisite. The opening hours demand it especially, before the muscle memory for coordinating arm grabs starts to form. As someone who cares about whether a short game knows what it is, I think Struggling mostly does. It is not trying to be a platformer with tight, responsive controls. It is trying to be a shared ordeal that you and one other person survive together while making noises at each other. At that specific goal, it succeeds. The runtime is appropriate. It does not overstay. If you have a co-op partner who laughs at failure and a tolerance for physics that behave like they were written on a dare, there is a genuinely odd little experience here that most people walked past.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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