UnMetal

UnMetal is a 2D top-down stealth-action game built around a single comedic premise: what if the gruff action hero was just some guy? You play Jesse Fox, wrongly imprisoned in a covert military base, narrating his own escape in real time to an unseen interrogator. That framing device is not decoration. It shapes every mission, every choice, every improbable solution Jesse concocts from whatever happens to be lying around. Developer @unepic_fran, the one-person studio behind the similarly irreverent UnEpic, clearly grew up absorbing Metal Gear Solid and Commando and then spent years thinking about how funny those games actually are when you squint. The stealth and action mechanics are genuine, not just a backdrop for gags. Guards have patrol routes, line-of-sight cones matter, and you can set up distractions, choke out enemies, drag bodies, and craft rudimentary equipment from found items. There are also boss encounters that take direct inspiration from MSX-era design, meaning some of them will test your patience before they click. The controls are clean on keyboard and feel even better with a gamepad. The loop of sneaking, improvising, and occasionally just punching your way through a room holds up for the full runtime, which lands somewhere around eight to ten hours depending on how thoroughly you explore and how many dialogue detours you take. The humor is the star, but it earns its laughs rather than interrupting the game to wink at you. Jesse's live narration rewrites events as they happen, and the gap between what actually occurred and what he claims occurred is the running joke that never quite wears out. The writing respects the player's intelligence, references its inspirations without leaning entirely on recognition humor, and occasionally surprises you with a bit that has no right to land as hard as it does. There is also a surprisingly good chiptune-adjacent soundtrack that knows when to go tense and when to go absurd, and the pixel art, while not lavish, has a confident hand to it. Every sprite communicates what it needs to. What UnMetal does not do well is hand-hold through its puzzle logic. A handful of solutions require an item combination or environmental interaction that the game telegraphs only lightly, and you may hit a wall and feel the pacing sag. It is also a game that is funnier and more rewarding if you have some familiarity with the stealth-action genre it is satirizing. Players coming in cold will still find a solid, funny indie game. Players who remember sneaking past Genome Soldiers at 2 a.m. will find something that feels almost personally addressed to them. The difficulty modes give you room to tune the challenge, which is a thoughtful inclusion for a game where the story is a primary draw. For a solo indie release, UnMetal is a remarkably complete and confident thing. It knows exactly what it wants to be, it executes that vision with discipline, and it ends before the joke curdles. That last quality is rarer than it should be.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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