Some games I played in 2025: Flinthook
It’s that time again — time to grouse about a Tribute Games production that made a great impression in its announcement trailer, only to hear back after people had gotten hand-on with it and realise… this isn’t the game I wanted. I figured I’d splash the £4 on it during a Summer sale to get a feel for myself, because as eternally vexing as the studio’s output is to me, there’s always a glimmer of something salvageable in there.
A room-based 2D platformer here you jump, shoot, and explore enemy ships for treasure and bonus, using the titular tool to propel yourself towards hooks and anchors. Your ultimate goal in each level is the big treasure chest, framed as holding coordinates to the bounty you’re hunting; run through a few maps, challenge the boss ship, and then do it again on the next ‘world’.
It’s a solid little formula, its room-based layouts faintly reminiscent of the original Metroid, or even the dungeons in Kid Icarus, entering chambers through doors you unlock with your anchor — it’s fun and tactile, and you can see how it reworks the basic room structure to build new challenges and arrangements.
The game plays extremely solid. You move at a satisfying speed and have good vertical versatility, between the grappling hook and being able to climb walls ala Mega Man X. Getting acquainted with the hook takes some doing, mind: your dismount is a puny little hop when latching on from up-close, but from a distance, you can fling yourself a great distance, so even though you’re playing within enclosed spaces, momentum is a key factor to getting the most out of your grappling hook.
You can slow down time with the L Trigger, which is mostly used to navigate past lasers that’ll otherwise block passageways, and otherwise feels like a compromise for just how fast and furious gameplay can be at times. Whether it’s avoiding missile volleys or zipping through tunnels of spikes, it can present a hardcore challenge when it wants to, and the slowdown does alleviate the stress a little bit… though having to move, aim, and control your aerial speed all with the Left Stick does make things a little persnickety. (playing with a keyboard and mouse seems the intended way to play, to my chagrin)
This sounds like a knockout, you might think. My problem? I feel like I’m playing a ROM hack of a game I haven’t played.
If you’ll permit me to go on a tangent: randomizer hacks are popular these days for stuff like Super Metroid or Legend of Zelda, games people have played to death and want new ways to engage with. That can mean simply shuffling the item locations around, or rearranging the world itself and its layouts, to even more out-there stuff that’s outside the scope of what I’m getting at.
It’s not my bag, personally, but I’m glad people have opened up those possibilities for themselves, and it’s fascinating having to think on your feet in a game you otherwise know inside and out. Previously I could count on those early-game upgrades to get me started, but who knows where in the world they are now, or what awaits me on the next screen..!
The first comment I heard on Flinthook was “this does not need to be procedurally generated”, and… yeah, that’s about the size of it.
Like, I love the room design. It’s got a great tactile sensibility to it — obviously there’s hooks to pull yourself around on, but there’ll also be moving platforms, conveyor belts, spike traps, flame hazards, all sorts of things in motion that make the world feel alive, and an incentive to stay on your toes. It’s the sort of engaging environment I like to see in a game — and that’s before you even factor in the kooky variety of enemies it has to play with!
But each level is just a bunch of rooms randomly stitched together, without a true sense of flow. Yes, you can pick from one of several choices for the next level you pick, each with a tag that denotes its size, danger, and theme, whether it’s extra treasure or more flame traps or whatever… but the actual moment-to-moment traversal just feels disjointed.
You might go three rooms in a row where you have clear out multiple waves of ineffectual enemies. A 3-way junction might have the most hazards you’ve ever seen in one place, all leading to dead-ends. Feats of dexterity that get the blood pumping are not a guarantee they’ll actually reward you for your trouble. Levels have to juggle being divergent with multiple avenues to explore, and also being an A-to-B romp with an expressed start and end, and very rarely is it satisfying in either facet.
The enemy waves are the real drag, because the combat simply isn’t compelling enough to justify killing all momentum like this, turning it into a stop-and-go affair. For how zippy and tactile the feeling of whizzing around on grappling hooks is, its only combat property is breaking the occasional shield — you can’t latch onto baddies with it or land a flying melee strike or anything, because there are no melee attacks!
There is collision damage though, which feels like an unwanted obstruction. The action is at its best when you’re pulling off acrobatic hook-flings, staying airborne while whizzing past threats and blasting baddies… so grazing a totally stationary foe is a constant fret, and an extremely crap way of removing the wind from your sails.
One of the game’s seemingly arcade-y traits is that you’ll pick up sub-weapons during stages — grenades, shields, freezing all enemies, like stuff you’d find in a classic Castlevania. Though not only do you need to unlock these items before they’ll even show up in stages, but you can only carry one. Like, not just one item type, but one in quantity. You get a single grenade, and you better use it wisely! Who knows when you’ll find a replacement!
Otherwise, your gun is your only weapon. It has a full 360-degree range of aiming, sure, but it’s just piddly and boring, without even a charge shot to spice it up. You pick up sub-weapons, so you’d think you don’t pick up different weapons along the way like a rocket launcher, right…? No, that gun is all you’ve got, and you have to count on attaching a Perk between stages to liven it up.
Enter the upgrade system! You get XP for killing baddies and other gubbins, and levelling up will unlock more stuff you can purchase in the upgrade shops, bought with special currency… but a lot of stuff isn’t available for purchase unless you’ve levelled up sufficiently, including sub-weapons, so enjoy the grind, suckers.
Perks can be equipped for a variety of benefits: increasing your maximum HP or how much XP or gold you acquire, as well as change the properties of your gun or other passive traits. It’s similar to Paper Mario‘s Badge system in that each Perk has a different cost, and you only have so many points to allocate (you can increase your maximum at a cost in the upgrade shop), so it’s weighing up what you want versus what you can afford…
… but all Perks you find are random, either in rare treasure chests or in “booster packs” upon levelling up. As such, I spent my two hours of playtime with the most boring Perks imaginable, barely something I wanted to equip at all. All I want is a gun that’s fun to shoot, is it too much to ask!
Some of the Perks are a trade-off — getting more treasure at the expense of health refills being less effective, or doing more damage the bigger a combo you build… but none of it felt particularly enticing, just the kinds of percentile stat-tweaking we see so often in modern games.
In fairness, I have been extremely spoiled in the risk-reward department by Blazing Beaks, which makes that a core component of its entire gameplay loop — asking Flinthook to incorporate something like when it’s already bristling with features would be inappropriate. But, god, does the game need something to spice it up.
Because it’s rogue-ish, when you die your progress is lost on that world; if you were at the boss, you have to complete however many levels there were between you and him again. Health isn’t automatically restored between stages, so pick-ups are a commodity; it’s why Perks to restore more health or even spawn life items at the start of a stage are so precious.
But it lacks the ingredients to make me compelled to do another run. You can tweak your Perk load-out, sure, but the offerings are so crap and the amount you can equip is so stingy (at least early on) that it might as well be a non-factor. So many Perks are dedicated to earning more XP or currency, when what I want are new weapons, abilities, properties, something that meaningfully changes how I approach the game.
That, and an average run of the first world takes at least 20 to 40 minutes, based on skimming people’s streams. You could clear an entire loop of Blazing Beaks in that time! During which you’d visit five biomes, fight five bosses, and play with so many guns… which, needless to say, is not the case in Flinthook.
Because dying will knock you back so far, and it’s such a time investment to reach the end of a world, it causes a knock-on effect where I just don’t bother engaging with anything! Why explore if all I’ll find are boring upgrades? Fighting enemies is a chore, so why do it if I don’t have to? New worlds introduce new features to their environments — are they hazardous or helpful? Who knows, it’s too risky to bother experimenting! I don’t want this game to go on longer than it has to!
(while grabbing screenshots i bore witness to a particular excruciating example, where @minucupi successfully defeats the boss with only a sliver of health left and proceeds to the exit… but falls into an unforeseen hazard and is killed, forcing them to redo the entire world from scratch, boss included. at that point at least you know it can be done, but would you want to after a kick in the teeth like that…?)
My beef with a lot of games that make a slightly sour first impression generally comes down to… is it always going to be like this? How long do I have to play before I’m surprised or given a challenge? A lot of the ingredients in Flinthook seem promising, but all these bells and whistles and systems on top of systems, none of it feels like it’s adding to the experience. Instead of being presented with a meal, I feel like I’m being served something that’s still in the mixing bowl.
Like, if the game had a campaign mode — even a short one! — that laid out all it fundamentals across a couple of concise, sharply-designed worlds that flowed nicely and highlighted all its good points, and then introduced you to the randomiser, the daily challenge, and so on, I might be more sympathetic. It’s what I was getting at with that ROM hack talk earlier!
But because the randomization is the game, I’m left having to sift through it for the good bits, hoping things happen to come together in a way that meshes cohesively. Encountering challenges that feel tailored for the sub-weapons, or even a difficulty curve that doesn’t ping-pong wildly between rooms, really is a roll of the dice!
It’s vexing beyond belief, because there’s a great foundation to a game here: straight-forward and arcade-y, boasting great pick-up-and-play sensibilities while still leaving wiggle room for something extra, whether it’s the non-linear exploration or the promise of powering yourself up as you venture further and further. When the game was giving me what I wanted with no fuss, I was having an earnestly enjoyable time.
Instead its design feels like it’s in constant friction with itself. The pick-up-and-play aspect is snuffed when it has so few pick-ups and insists you grind to unlock gameplay elements. The random factor means nothing when the first hour of gameplay shows you all the rooms and enemies you’re likely to see, and has so few meaningful Perks or upgrades to look forward to. And if you choose to perceive its exploration element as something Metroidvania-like, then I don’t know how to let you down gently.
Browsing the “action rogue-like” category on Steam, I don’t see many entries that are straight 2D platformers, and I have to wonder if attaching all these rogue-like elements to one doesn’t do it any favours? The game is at its best when it’s straight-forward and in the player’s control, so to speak. Once it starts throwing unwanted objectives at you in every room, or makes you wrestle with the drip-feed of upgrades, it alleviates nothing and only demonstrates how design, intent, and curation could have fine-tuned the experience.
It has its moments. Making slick progress with your hook between chambers has a satisfying flow to it, it can’t be denied. When you find a room with sufficient dangers, you’re given good incentive to whizz around on hooks between aerial enemies and spraying flames, and in the right hands it almost plays out like an aerial ballet, soaring arcs and swoops reminiscent of the mech combat in Zone of the Enders. The Perks that grant greater control over your jumps feel destined for moments like that.
There’s glimmers of something incredible in here, but the game is literally over-designed to the point of encumbering itself, tacking on trinkets and doohickeys instead of honing what’s at its core. Does this studio need an intervention…?!
Someone needs to smack them when they try to add extraneous bullshit, that’s for sure. So much of Flinthook feels like an idea someone on the team wanted to find a home for, regardless of how much it dragged the rest of the game down with it.
They definitely struggle with combat as well. Curses ‘n’ Chaos is the epitome of this, a game literally built around defeating waves of enemies, yet practically mocking you with how simplistic and hands-off it is. Turtles was a step in the right direction, though it’s still far from perfection, at least in the boss department.
In a game like this, you want enemies that interact and engage with the player meaningfully — because why stop to make me fight them if they’re just going to run through the motions as if I wasn’t there? The boss fights are more engaging, but they rely so much on excess hazards, filling the screen with roaming enemies, bouncing shots, or entire walls of spikes, seemingly to distract from how simplistic the core boss’s patterns are.
With enemies this mundane, I am begging for some sort of nuance, whether it’s quirks in their behaviour, or being able to exploit them against each other. Friendly fire, deflecting shots, launching them as blunt objects… I’ll take anything!
It’s just so infuriating, because Tribute’s staff are clearly talented. The game looks a treat, boasting character designs with great Cartoon Network energy, like something out of Wander Over Yonder or what-have-you, all stringy limbs and googly eyes. They might not do much, but what animation they’ve got oozes with charm, and sets it apart from Tribute’s other fare.
And I’ve been saying again and again how the core of the gameplay is terrific — when it’s fun just to move around, you’ve got a great foundation to work from! Curses ‘n’ Chaos is easy to write off because once you look past the lush pixel art, the gameplay itself is thin as cheese. Flinthook is so much more a game than Tribute’s previous 2D platformers, and it feels like they’re finally on to something! But I’m left squinting and straining to find the experience I want to play in there, and I know if I stuck with it, I’d mine no more merit from it than I had already.
Designing a game around procedural generation still requires code and effort to piece itself together in a satisfactory manner, I don’t want to dismiss it as an easy solution to game design… but Flinthook genuinely feels like it feels like a shortcut to avoid having to stitch together a campaign.
And I get the reasoning: in the right hands, procedural generation can result in a game players can come back to again and again without getting bored or feeling like it’s the same challenge every time. Look at the hours I’ve put into Blazing Beaks! But with every added feature, Flinthook genuinely undermines every good thing it’s got going for itself.
It’s too late in the post to start another tangent, but I appreciate ROM hacks and modding in general as a means of celebrating and reclaiming what you want from a game, whether it’s increasing the challenge, trimming the fat, or simply putting a new aesthetic touch on it. If a board game doesn’t spark joy, then you use the pieces to make your own fun.
I guess I should appreciate Tribute for making unique games — there’s nothing else quite like them, warts and blemishes and all…! But, man, I just want to play the game I feel like I’m being pitched, and if I have to tear the code apart to accomplish that… this isn’t a ROM hack, this is a rescue mission. But is it easier to just look elsewhere at this point, or even make your own game, than try to mould something into the image you want it to be…?
