Brutal Castle the indie game
Brutal! Hell yeah!

Hell yeah! Now this is a beat 'em up we can get behind. We're not fans of the genre, but whooping butt as a macho castle is as good as it gets!

In all our years of playing video games, we believe it's led to this profound moment. Howl's Moving Castle? It's time to move over!

Kick Some Buildings in Brutal Castle

From one-man indie developer Skinner Space, this concept immediately made us swoon in absurd, moronic delight.

Brutal Castle is an old school beat 'em up involving a fire breathing castle out to obliterate everything around it.

Pitched against giant monsters from the land (such as a huge, angry field of wheat), it's your task to beat them all up and progress through the stages.

And what's immediately impressive about the title are the brilliant little animations that breathe life into the bizarre world you enter.

It feels like a mixture of Clayfighter from the 1990s and Broforce (2014), with the pounding metal soundtrack of the latter in full flow throughout your experience.

There's a surprising amount of intricate animations going on, with every enemy you battle having some character.

Their animations will have them ducking your attacks and laughing at you, running away in panic when they know they've lost, catching fire, weighing up their options etc. It's an impressive level of detail going on.

Plus, the sound effects are very satisfying. As your castle jumps about, the crunching stone noises are very cool.

And as for the gameplay! Well, it's brutal (aptly enough) and complex enough to warrant your attention for chunks of time.

There are seven levels to crunch your way through.

And while the concept doesn't provide huge dollops of longevity, it's enough of a novelty to entertain you for multiple hours. Which, given the asking price, is a bloody fair deal!

You can pick Brutal Castle up on Itchi.io (the indie game dev site) at a super cheap price on Windows or Linux.

Recommended if you fancy messing around and beating stuff up as a giant, sentient castle. Hell yeah!

Brutal Castle's Development Log

As you can watch above, Skinner Space openly talks about how Brutal Castle progressed in the build-up to its launch.

Quite a lot of indie devs do this, but it's still always interesting to see how an indie team creates projects and develops them out.

Skinner Space (a one-man team) notes he didn't really have any structure to the game for some time, it was just about the castle smashing stuff up.

Then he added in a level structures and new features to make a more complete package.

It's all rather interesting and shows the incredible amount of effort that goes into making a game even as, seemingly, basic looking as Brutal Castle.

So, hats off to all the incredibly talented indie devs out there working on these projects in their spare time.