WASTED

I have a soft spot for the kind of solo-dev game that shouldn't work on paper. WASTED is exactly that: a first-person shooter stitched to a roguelite structure, set in a post-nuclear 1980s wasteland where the dumbest survivors inherited the earth and toilet paper became currency. It sounds like a novelty pitch, and for the first hour it absolutely reads like one. Stick with it past that initial awkwardness, though, and something clicks. The core loop sends you into procedurally generated underground bunkers called Coolers, hunting for radioactive Booze and whatever weapons and armor the dead inhabitants left behind. Combat is faster and more tactile than you might expect from a solo-developed FPS - you have pistols, rifles, a DUZI that chews through ammo at an alarming rate, baseball bats, and your fists, plus stealth as a genuine option if you read the room carefully. Enemies include raider factions, explosion-prone mutants, and a relentless stalker-type enemy called the Purifier whose arrival is announced by a rising musical motif that genuinely raised my pulse the first time I heard it. The synth-heavy soundtrack overall is one of the game's quieter triumphs - Mr. Podunkian reportedly gave spotlight to smaller indie bands, and it shows in how cohesive the whole soundscape feels. The S.H.O.T.S. system is where WASTED earns its RPG badge. Drinking Booze gives you permanent Hangover mutations - buffs or debuffs that stack across a run and occasionally produce chaotic, funny results. The deeper into a Cooler you go, the better quality the Booze tends to be, which creates a real tension between pressing forward and retreating to safety. Your persistent home base survives character death, so any gear you managed to store there carries over to the next poor Waster who stumbles through the door. It is a legacy system that softens permadeath without defanging it. There are also daily Courier Run mini-missions with global leaderboards, NPCs to trade toilet paper with, side quests (mostly fetch-or-murder, no illusions there), and light home base crafting. For a one-person project, the content density is quietly impressive. Where it stumbles: the early Coolers have a punishing learning curve that critics and players alike flagged at launch. The stalker enemy that hunts you down mid-run was controversial enough that Mr. Podunkian patched it and addressed it directly in the forums, which tells you something good about the developer's attentiveness. The visual style, cel-shaded with oversized cartoon heads, has a divisive Marmite quality - it reads cheap in screenshots, but in motion it earns its absurdity. Story is thin to the point of irrelevance; the world-building exists to service jokes rather than lore, and those jokes range from sharp 80s parody to genuinely childish toilet humor. Metacritic lands at 68 and Steam reviews sit around 79 percent positive, which places this squarely in honest-gem-with-rough-edges territory rather than overlooked masterpiece.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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