THOTH

I spent an evening sitting closer to my monitor than I probably should, watching a small white dot get swallowed by geometric shapes that had no business being this threatening. That is THOTH in a sentence. Jeppe Carlsen, the lead puzzle designer behind LIMBO and Inside, took the twin-stick shooter format and compressed it to something almost meditative in its cruelty: no story, no text, no tutorial. You move, you shoot, and when you fire while moving, you slow down. That single mechanical wrinkle, the deliberate drag on your momentum when you commit to an attack, turns every decision into a small, pressurized puzzle. The 64 handcrafted stages are grouped into sets of four, each set sharing a color palette that shifts when you reach the next checkpoint. The enemies are geometric shapes, mostly cubes and spheres, but their behavior varies in ways that are never explained upfront. Some release projectiles when destroyed. Some eject smaller shapes that drag you across the arena. Some grow faster and more aggressive after you shoot them. The game teaches entirely through death, which is either pure design philosophy or pure cruelty depending on your tolerance. What keeps it from tipping into unfairness is how short each stage is: most take under a minute to clear, which means failure costs you seconds rather than minutes. The checkpoint structure is the main friction point critics have flagged, and it is real. Two failed attempts on any non-checkpoint stage and the arena walls turn lethal, adding a final-chance layer of pressure that some players find exciting and others find punishing in the old arcade quarter-munching tradition. The soundtrack is the piece that elevates this above a competent budget shooter. Composed by electronic musicians Cristian Vogel and SOS Gunver Ryberg, it dips in and out of the mix like something circling you in the dark. It does not hype you up in the conventional sense. It unsettles you, which is exactly what it should do. Paired with the clean, high-contrast visuals by artist Niels Fyrst, the whole thing builds into something close to a trance when you get a run going. That hypnotic quality is THOTH's real argument for itself. Co-op is local only but genuinely changes the feel of the game. There is a brutal wrinkle here worth knowing: when one player dies, they do not simply sit out. They become a hostile shape. The void absorbs them and turns them against their partner. It is either hilarious or devastating depending on the session. For those who clear the main campaign, procedurally generated stages extend the run indefinitely. The game knows exactly how long it should be and does not outstay its welcome. Where it falls short is honesty about its own limits. The menu is barebones, there is no pause function worth speaking of, and players coming from richer twin-stick shooters like Geometry Wars or Robotron may find the content sparse once the novelty of each new shape type wears off. THOTH is a precise, intentional object, but it is also a small one, and critics have been split almost exactly on whether that restraint reads as elegance or incompleteness. If you want the distilled, almost philosophical version of arcade shooting, this is it. If you need momentum, progression systems, or variety at scale, look elsewhere.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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