If you pay attention to this hobby for long enough, you’ll spot trends – some might say stereotypes – in various countries’ video game development scenes. For example, I’ve played quite a few games with incredible art direction but underwhelming mechanics that turned out to be French, Russia turns out a lot of depressing quasi-realistic military shooters, and many South Korean games are horny to the point of distraction.

Playing Star Fire: Eternal Cycle clarified a thought that I first had when I reviewed Evotinction last year: Chinese indie games play like they think the player was on their design team. No tutorial, no codex, little if any exposition: you’re thrown directly into the deep end in every way that counts.

On the plus side, that means you’re up and playing Star Fire in the first minute. It doesn’t burn its first hour on an extended tutorial or establishing its setting. Start a new game and you can be punching alien bugs in the face within 45 seconds. There’s something to be said for immediacy.

Star Fire begins in 2149 A.D., 7 years after giant insects emerged from the surface of the moon and swarmed over Earth. You’re the only remaining defender of humanity: a redheaded woman armed with electric gauntlets and dressed in club gear, because why be the last person on Earth if you ain’t cute. I think her name is supposed to be Erica.

Your goal is to jump into one of the Core Hive Zones and explode hostile bugs until they manage to get you to stop. Once they do, you respawn at your home station with whatever currencies you were able to loot, and can spend them to have a better chance of success next time.

Broadly, Star Fire is a roguelike that plays a little like an arcade beat-’em-up. At the start of the game, you can pick one of 3 weapons that determines Erica’s basic attack pattern, Hades-style, then start a run into the Hive Zones. It ends either when you die or when you reach the last available Zone for your current difficulty.

Along the way, you can level up, collect equipment for passive bonuses, and equip Insectoid Cores that you’ve seized from the Hive. These come in a number of specific elemental varieties, and while they all give you random buffs, all of them start getting really degenerate once you equip two or more of the same type. For example, Shadow Cores let you summon invincible clones of yourself for backup, Ice Cores provide a high chance to stun on hit, and Thunder Cores trigger an electrical field for close-range AoE whenever you use your heavy attack.

In another game, these might come off as somewhat overpowered, but Star Fire really wants you to immediately go for the really broken shit. Even on Difficulty 1, every boss is a giant sack of health with at least 5 additional lifebars’ worth of armor. If you aren’t deliberately pursuing a degenerate strategy where every individual attack lands like a small nuclear device, you will not survive. It sort of reminds me of the Disgaea postgame.

As a result, Star Fire is one of those power-crazed experiences that’s only really fun if you get a perverse, nearly erotic thrill from watching your numbers go up. It describes itself on its Steam page as “a love letter to classic arcade side-scrollers,” but the real audience for Star Fire is people who love it when enemies explode into a cloud of death arithmetic. It’s got more in common with Dungeon Fighter Online and various mobile games like it than with old-school quarter-munchers.

Its lack of interest in explaining itself does mean it’s got a learning curve. The first few minutes of Star Fire is a deluge of random stats, skills, bonuses, and synergies, and it’s up to you to figure out what they all mean. Some have tooltips, others don’t, and still others have tooltips but they’re not where you’d think they’d be.

It’s nothing you can’t figure out eventually, especially if you’ve spent any time with other similar roguelikes. For example, Star Fire’s stacking elemental synergy system isn’t a million miles away from Inkbound’s. Even so, Star Fire seems to have been designed on the presumption that it will never have a new player. One of its loading screen tips even encourages you to look up third-party guides.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t entertaining. The big draw behind Star Fire is that it’s happy to let you be profoundly overpowered, but each new difficulty turns up the dials more than enough to keep you guessing. Even when I’d reached a point where I could vaporize incoming bugs without effort, the next boss always had something blatantly unfair waiting for me.

Star Fire: Eternal Cycle isn’t exactly what it says it is; it’s a roguelike that wants to pretend it’s an arcade brawler. Fortunately, it’s a decent roguelike, especially if you enjoy it when a game lets you deal millions of points of damage at once. You’ll want to give yourself some grace as you figure out its finer details, but Star Fire isn’t a bad way to spend about 40 minutes at a time.

[Star Fire: Eternal Cycle, developed by Ethereal Fish Studio and published by Indie Herb Games, is now available for PC via Steam for $16.99. This column was written using a Steam code sent to Hard Drive by an Indie Herb Games PR representative.]

You could accuse Stick It to the Stickman of belaboring its one joke, but in its defense, it’s a good joke. That joke is late-stage capitalism.

Now available for PC via Steam Early Access, Stickman starts out as a deliberately awkward brawler, with the sort of shaky control that’s typically reserved for games with the words “Totally Accurate” in their title. Everyone in Stickman moves like they’ve been drinking since noon yesterday and have black licorice for bone marrow.

Your goal, as a newly-hired employee of a nameless corporation, is to fight through your co-workers and confront your boss on the office roof. Win, and you’re appointed to your deceased boss’ position by a shadowy cabal of shareholders. Soon, a new hire will enter the building to repeat the cycle all over again.

At this point in its core loop, Stickman is a goofy roguelike beat-’em-up with a ton of different abilities and characters to unlock. It’s entertaining while it lasts, if a little insubstantial, but it’s fun to pick up whenever you’ve got 10 minutes to kill. It also lets you body-check a couple of dozen of your former co-workers out a 15th-story window, and in this house, we respect that kind of thing.

Once you’ve successfully completed a few runs, which is to say, once you’ve thrown the previous CEO off his roof like Geese Howard, Stickman abruptly opens up into a collection of dystopian minigames. I’ve played other roguelikes that would’ve settled for adding new maps and enemies and calling it a day, but Stickman turned out to have more ambition than that.

As you climb the corporate ladder at the behest of your eldritch shareholder masters, you unlock more and different businesses across the city map. Some of them send you back into the trenches to beat the hell out of your co-workers, while others ask you to (poorly) drive a car, commit multiple homicide, or work in the fulfillment center, which is, much like a normal Amazon warehouse, basically level 1-1 of Super Meat Boy.

Obvious disclaimer: this is an Early Access game, so everything I’ve written so far is subject to change. Stickman is stable and polished enough at time of writing to pass for an actual retail product, but the developers have continually added more abilities, classes, and upgrade paths in the couple of weeks that the game’s been out.

It’s worth noting that, maybe appropriately, Stickman ends up putting your nose to the grindstone. Every building you unlock has its own unique upgrade tree, you eventually have to deal with a stock-market mechanic, and you have to collect both cash and a bunch of different upgrade tokens in order to purchase specific facilities, bonuses, and passives.

In a game that exists as one big joke about the corporate rat race, some of its humor bleeds out when you’re expected to clock in every day and beat the hell out of the same 60 dudes in order to finally unlock the gym. I suppose that’s also part of the joke, how these people keep showing up to work at the “and then my co-worker superkicked me into live power lines” office, but it can wear thin.

To be fair, Stickman does mitigate some of that with the surgical pace of its various unlocks. Everything you do gets you something, and you accumulate a lot of weird abilities, enemy types, obstacles, difficulty levels, and build options as you go. You’re distinctly not playing the same game after an hour.

That’s something it could probably stand to call more explicit attention to, or maybe include a short cooldown on each building so you’re encouraged to vary up your approach. Stickman features some built-in mechanics that encourage you to avoid playing it in the most brain-numbing way possible, like how button-mashing stops being effective once you’ve picked up a few of the stronger movement abilities. I’ve put together some fun, fast-paced builds in Stickman, but if you aren’t paying attention, most of your combos end when you inevitably E. Honda sumo-headbutt your way out a window.

Stick It to the Stickman is the latest in a series of indie games I’ve played in the last year or so – see also Mouthwashing and Repose – that feel like their creators are working out some of the psychic trauma from a bad job. With Stickman, I knew I was in for something memorable when I saw the Lovecraftian council of unknowable, unassailable shareholders, and its satire just gets darker from there.

Stickman’s a little repetitive by design, but I could see this being great on your Steam Deck, or if it comes to Switch, as a portable time-killer. For right now, it’s a decent, funny pick-up-and-play brawler with a lot of inherent flexibility, and its developers are updating it roughly once every 30 seconds. It’s a hell of a deal for five bucks.

[Stick It to the Stickman, developed by Free Lives and published by Devolver Digital, is available now for PC via Steam Early Access for $4.99. This column was written using a Steam code that was sent to Hard Drive by a Devolver Digital PR representative for no adequately explored reason.]