Unlinked Mask

I have a soft spot for games that wear their obsessions openly, and Klonoz wears the Game Boy like a badge of devotion. Unlinked Mask is a 2D side-scrolling precision platformer built around a single traveler named Viewer, summoned by gods for reasons left deliberately murky. That vagueness is intentional. The story is not really the point. The point is the pixel-lit world around you and the 20 stages standing between you and a final boss that the developer clearly built with a specific kind of player in mind. The difficulty curve here is gradual on paper but genuinely punishing in practice. There are two jump types - a spin jump and a standard jump - and learning when to use each one is the whole muscle memory lesson this game is teaching. The game never holds your hand, never floats up a tooltip, never scaffolds you toward a solution. You read the platform, you commit, you fall, you go again. For players raised on precision platformers, that rhythm will feel familiar in the best way. For everyone else, the wall arrives early and it does not apologize. Community notes mention a stat-tracking bug on the end screen and video settings not persisting between sessions, which are real rough edges for a small release, but they do not break the core loop. What keeps it warm rather than cold is the aesthetic. The Game Boy visual language - limited palette, chunky sprites, screen-filling tiles - is handled with obvious care from a pixel artist who has been doing this since 2010. The world of the People's Lands has a quiet mythology to it, the kind of dark-fantasy undertone you find in a game that is too small to over-explain itself, which is usually a virtue. Klonoz has since poured those ideas into the sequel Linked Mask and is actively working on a proper Game Boy Color cartridge port of that follow-up, which tells you everything about how committed this creative lineage is to its chosen aesthetic. Unlinked Mask sits in that honest, scrappy tier of solo-dev releases: around two hours for a clean clear, no padding, no filler, just stage after stage of considered platform design and one boss fight waiting at the end. The control scheme is simple but asks for precision the whole way through. Steam users sit around 75-80 percent positive across a small sample, which feels accurate to me. This is not a game with rough ambition outrunning its craft. It is a game that knows exactly what it wants to be and mostly delivers that within a tight, unpretentious package. The bugs are real, the runtime is short, and the difficulty is uncompromising. Go in with those expectations clearly set and you will find something genuinely handmade.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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