CRITICAL REFLEX ROUND-UP

by Lucas White

Critical Reflex exudes wholesome punk rock energy that’s impossible to overlook

At PAX East in 2024, a new indie publisher caught my eye. They had a bright, pink logo with aggressive, scratchy lettering, and a game called Freaked Fleapit that had the kind of deranged energy that reminded me of reading indie comics and watching 1980s anime OVAs for the first time. It took my back to my formative years in a funny way, and made a lasting impression. 

Fast forward to May 2025, and I’m back at PAX East and checking out Critical Reflex for its second year in action. Freaked Fleapit is nowhere to be seen, but this kooky publisher, fresh off the glow of critical darling Mouthwashing, has a new set of intriguing indies. This time, the headline title is an adorable, cartoony adventure about a mail-delivering tanuki who loves doing sick tricks on his BMX bike. As I’m playing Tanuki: Pon’s Summer for myself, an employee keeps walking up to add new “game of the show” trophies to the table. Clearly, these folks are doing something right.

Critical Reflex isn’t the only indie publisher with a kind of subversive, edgy energy. There’s degenerate superstars Devolver Digital of course, and the horror-focused Dread XP to name a couple. But Critical Reflex feels different. At first there’s almost a scattershot kind of vibe, as you can see with the two games I’ve mentioned so far. You’ve got an ironically sleazy joint in Freaked Fleapit that’s almost like someone put Ren and Stimpy in a blender with a Persona game, and Pon’s Summer is just cute and silly. This year’s spread also included serious horror joints like No, I’m Not a Human and Drowned Lake, a Vampire Survivors-inspired roguelike with WarioWare energy called Gimmiko, and an epic, absurdly well-drawn action Metroidvania called Altered Alma.

You’ve also got Mouthwashing and Buckshot Roulette making waves between the PAX events, and this year they had a tabletop version of the latter that had people pointing fake guns at each other’s heads to win pins. The PAX community is all about pins for some reason. Sickos out there sitting in hallways with canvases full of those things laid out to make trades. They’d probably be in that shit even if the guns were real. Anyway, despite this disparate-seeming spread, there’s something else happening with Critical Reflex I’m still working on putting a finger on, but can’t stop thinking about.

There’s much to be said about the power of deliberate curation. When you aren’t just taking in whatever or throwing darts at a board to see what sticks, and instead putting that extra effort into really thinking about what you’re doing. It feels like not only Critical Reflex is putting that work in, but it’s doing so in a way that’s producing a feeling beyond “we choose good video games.” It’s like watching a house style develop in real time, and quickly. 

And the feeling is, despite some of the deranged energy of its library so far, almost wholesome. I keep seeing a phrase blinking into my head like subliminal messaging: Wholesome Punk Rock. If Devolver Digital’s whole thing was rocking the boat while vomiting on the deck after binge-drinking and making jokes about hard drugs, Critical Reflex is here to have a good time, and making sure everyone else does too. Without the substances, but maybe a badass pizza or two it made itself. It isn’t “wholesome” in the same way a Wholesome Direct event shows up every year to sell us on “cozy” games, but wholesome in a way that produces a welcoming atmosphere even when the content is kind of edgy.

Pon’s Summer is a perfect example, and probably why that bad boy was getting covered in accolades. On the surface it kind of looks like one of those cozy games, with bright colors, soft outlines on the character models, tasks that adorably gamify a crappy real life job, and so on and so forth. But when you get on your bike, the music changes to crunchy guitar riffing, and the controls go into Tony Hawk mode. There’s a bite, but one that doesn’t use irony as a springboard into shock value. There’s a joke, but unlike something like Devolver’s Anger Foot, the joke isn’t also slathered in excrement (literally).

Gimmiko does something similar with its jittery, WarioWare-like visual style and gameplay cadence. It’s like Vampire Survivors in that it’s another “bullet heaven” deal, but with its own layer of, well, gimmicks on top. To attack in this one you roll dice, and to make the dice rolls actually do anything you have to paste “gimmicks” on the numbers like stickers. So it’s a constant race to not only avoid enemies, but get in there and retrieve your dice after rolling. You meet all kinds of weird characters as you buy stuff and find items, and there’s a taunt button you can hit just to make your character flip the bird for no apparent mechanical benefit. It’s crass enough to be funny, but not so crass it sucks all the oxygen out of everything else.

Those are just two examples, and not every game from Critical Reflex plays by the same rules. No, I’m Not a Human and Drowned Lake are thoroughly serious and unsettling horror games, for example. Altered Alma is also pretty no-nonsense, despite its fantastical sci-fi elements. And Freaked Fleapit does lean into the over the top, and isn’t afraid to be both horny and gleefully violent. But these games still fit into the library this publisher has been building, feeling like deliberate choices, games that were considered as parts of a whole. And that whole is a collection of games that stand out as loudly and confidently as that logo, making sure you understand exactly where this dope stuff is coming from, and know where to come back to when you want more.