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.]
