Anger Foot

Play it on: Windows (Steam Deck OK)
Buy it from: Humble Bundle
Current goal: Kick stuff, and in the game

It’s very important not to have favorites when you’re an impartial games journalist, so Devolver is definitely not one of my favorite publishers of indie games. The problem is, the company keeps releasing exactly the sorts of games I love—original, peculiar games with a creepy edge. Children of the Sun, Pepper Grinder, Wizard With A Gun, all in just the last year. Let alone Cult of the Lamb, Inscryption, Loop Hero, Gungeon, The Swords of Ditto, Minit. Oh, and the first thing I ever wrote about on Kotaku, Carrion But I’m still capable of balance: Gris was a grimly overrated pile of mawkish crap made by adult men trying to pretend to be a sad girl.

Which is all to say, I want to play Anger Foot this weekend not because I’ve read any reviews telling me I should (I just looked, and they’re amazingly unhelpful, spreading from 4s to 10s), nor indeed because I’ve hyped myself for it—I genuinely have no idea what you actually do in the game, and think I might have watched a trailer for it a few months back. It’s just because it’s from Devolver, and that seems to be a team that has good instincts when it comes to what to publish. Apart from Gris. Gris was bathetic dross. Oh, and also because it’s very obviously a game about running around and kicking people.

It sounds an awful lot like Mullet Madjack, and oh boy must Anger Foot developers Free Lives have freaked out when they saw another kick-based rapid RPS coming out two months ahead of theirs. Still, there’s definitely room for more of that sort of madness in my heart. — John Walker