Trials of the Gauntlet

I have a soft spot for games that exist because a group of people decided to finish something. Trials of the Gauntlet came out of a Full Sail University midterm, built over three months by a team of roughly ten students, and that origin story is both its most endearing quality and the honest frame through which you have to judge it. This is a roughly 90-minute steampunk metroidvania where you wake up in a mansion courtyard with your arm replaced by an electric grappling hook, and your only goal is to climb to the top of a clock tower and settle accounts with the mad scientist responsible. Small scope, clear premise, one setting. That focus is smart. The electric grappling hook is meant to be the backbone of everything - traversal, combat, puzzle-solving. The coil-powered puzzles ask you to interact with breakable electric nodes and conduct current through the environment, which is a genuinely interesting idea for a steampunk setting. Collectible gears can be traded at a shop, scattered journals fill in the story as you explore, and there are hidden chests and a handful of secret areas that reward curious players. Three enemy types and two boss encounters sit across the roughly linear mansion path. On paper, that is a complete little game. The visual presentation, featuring parallax scrolling environments and sprite work that carries a genuine retro warmth, is the highlight and the thing most likely to make you want to keep moving forward. Here is where honesty requires some weight. The grappling hook mechanic, central to absolutely everything, is inconsistent enough that it regularly works against you. Wall and floor clipping during platforming sections is a real hazard, not an occasional quirk. The hook's visual state can misread its own active status, which bleeds directly into combat feel and makes the already basic fight encounters feel worse. Collectible journals - the game's primary storytelling vessel - occasionally cannot be picked up at all due to interaction bugs, which stings when the lore is your main reason to explore. Sound design is quiet to the point of near-silence in stretches, with the soundtrack barely registering, and that absence of atmosphere costs the game the mood it otherwise earns through its art. Who is this for, practically. If you are the kind of player who genuinely enjoys giving student projects a fair hearing, who can appreciate that the visual craft here is real and that the core concept is well-chosen even when execution falls short, you will find something worth the hour and a half. The mansion has a quiet, slightly eerie character that the art carries even when the audio does not help it. If you need a grappling hook that feels like Bionic Commando or a combat loop with feedback and weight, this will frustrate you. Approach it the way you would approach a promising first short film - look at what they understood instinctively, and hold the rough edges lightly.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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