Kill the Brickman takes the basic premise of the arcade classic Breakout and adapts it to a Balatro-style deckbuilder roguelike in which you shoot custom bullets to break bricks, win cash, collect upgrades, and extend your run. So far, so neat. But no small part of Kill the Brickman‘s staying power is in its surreal presentation that puts Blendo Games-looking faces on all the violence. The bricks you kill? Human. The bullets you shoot? Human. It all adds up to a punchy bite-sized arcade experience published by Vampire Survivors dev Poncle that’s just weird enough to keep me coming back.
Revealed during the Microsoft Gamescom showcase on Thursday, Kill the Brickman is out August 21 on Xbox and PC. In keeping with its publishing partner’s tradition, the game is only $5. It’s made by Doonutsaur, a small U.S.-based team whose only other project on Steam is a similarly offbeat roguelike called Meow Legion. Poncle director Luca Galante apparently got an email about the game, immediately fell in love, and signed it just a few days later. “Imagine Tetris, but if the bricks had anger issues and a taste for human flesh,” reads the tagline in the press release.
Kill the Brickman has you control a revolver at the bottom of the screen that you load custom bullets into. Some do more damage. Some have more bounces. Others can deal corrosive damage, and so on. Think the original Breakout, or one of its many clones, but instead of bouncing a ball to break bricks like a spin-off of Pong, you’re playing a turn-based puzzle shooter infused with light Dungeons & Dragons RPG elements.
Why are you killing the Brickman? Well, if they get to close they will hurt you and deplete your health. Once all your hearts are gone the run is over. But like in any good roguelike, skill and intuition will only get you so far. You try to complete mini-objectives in each level to score extra cash, which compounds interest just like in Balatro, to purchase the sorts of upgrades that will make or break your run later on. There are relics to collect that provide special bonuses, and different gun chambers that will augment bullet effects based on the pattern you reload them in.
I’ve only played a couple hours (Poncle provided Kotaku with access to an advance copy), but it’s one of those games I’ve been trying to make 10-15 minutes for at the end of each day and end up playing way longer than I expected. Kill the Brickman is a tight set of gameplay concepts wrapped up in a cool CRT pixel art aesthetic and a bizarre sense of humor, or is it horror? I’m excited to keep playing and see where it goes.
