Flinthook is a platformer with roguelite elements that reminds me a lot of the rosy coloured arcades from a long time ago. From minute 1, the game's pixelated world screams of a time when you needed quarters to keep going, to try again. Gorgeous artwork and fun, action packed music help to push you onwards through one ship after another.

Why chase through ships though? Is it loot? Story? a combination of the two? The narrative backbone exists, and it does try to create a cohesive experience. You're hunting down pirates all over the galaxy to rescue little ghosts that might or might not have something to do with Captain Flinthook, the pirate you play as. This loose, simple narrative doesn't get much deeper, but that's fine. The point of the game is not a narrative one; the goal is to have a mechanically sound game.

Flinthook delivers on that promise well, combining tough platforming segments with satisfying combat. Along with jumping and shooting, you have access to a few other mechanics to help navigate the spaces you find yourself in. The titular flinthook itself is easily the most used, and very satisfying to master. Hooks abound on these space ships, and thanks to your flinthook it's an easy matter to throw yourself across a room with incredible speed. It's much harder to do so without taking damage, so practice is necessary; once mastered, the flinthook is essential for attack, defence, and maneuvering. Everything, really, and it's a good thing that the main mechanic is so fun and challenging to work with.

You also have access to the chronobelt, an item that slows everything down to a crawl for a short time. At first, it was easy to ignore the chronobelt; you slow down as much as everything else, so why would you ever use it? This, it turns out, is a fatal mistake to make. The game constantly reminds you that the chronobelt is amazing, either through loading tips or even ingame characters remarking that "I wish I had a chronobelt!" Used properly, the chronobelt makes even the toughest rooms possible, since the slowed time allows for the precision needed to execute remarkably cool actions. Flinthooking through a spray of bullets, flipping over your opponent, and then blasting them to space dust is fun, and made possible through the combination of all of your abilities.

Several other abilities can be acquired throughout the game, if you're lucky enough. Many of the ships you raid have red and white cards called "perks" scattered about. They aren't too rare; it's often you'll see them in shops, as rewards for completing a room, or by paying for them through certain rooms. Although not as transformative as items in other roguelites, these perks offer distinct advantages over the course of a run. Bouncing bullets? Extra shields on every ship? The ability to bounce on an enemy's head, Mario Style? Even a dodge roll. This is a small portion of the perks you can get.

As you play, you get the ability to equip perks at the beginning of a run as well. This allows you to tailor your experience to the run, or to your playstyle, without completely upsetting the balance/feel of the game from the word go. Every Flinthook run will be the Flinthook experience; within that experience, perks will change how it feels.

That said, the game's focus is mechanical. To a fault, really, since the game doesn't really look different or feel much different from the first 10 minutes to the next 10 hours. There's a gradual increase of power, as is necessary in a good roguelite, but it isn't as pronounced as it is in other games in the genre. It's subdued, even. It's as if the developers wanted a certain type of experience, and wanted to keep it that way. This prescriptive type of development is okay, and I am totally fine with it myself since I find the game fun to play from a mechanical perspective. I was happy the game would never be too easy. Unless I learned what the game had to teach me, the game would never have a moment where I would feel like "this run is over already, let's just finish it" that happens often in other roguelites. Even when I learned the patterns and learned to navigate the trickier corridors, that feeling hasn't happened once to me. This is a plus in my books, since that means the game will always be challenging and fun, regardless of my meta power level.

The only time where it feels like the game drags on is on the final story based raid. As you're hunting down the final boss, you beat the old ones in a spaced out boss rush over the course of 12 ships. 12 ships is a lot of ships, and only 3 of those ships are bosses. the other 9 are regular raids; if it wasn't for the game's ability to pause a run and come back to it later, this final mission would be nearly impossibly long. And if you want an alternate ending, be prepared to go through this ordeal at least 2 times, once of which will be much harder since you'll be actively taking disadvantages throughout the whole mission.

The end goal of Flinthook, however, isn't about the story or the narrative. It's not really about growing your collection of perks and story items either. The main aspect of the game is hunting for points. Every single mission has a leaderboard, where every high score a player has earned is archived. This, I think, is what sells Flinthook as a game to me, and as a love letter to the arcades of old. Passing by old game machines and seeing the top score-to-beat is exactly the same as in Flinthook. Losing is sometimes brutal, ending what might be well over 20 minutes of gameplay only to start again. But the thirst for points, for the rush of blasting, jumping, and hooking your way through pirate ships, this drives the game forward.

But is Flinthook a good better game for that? Certain aspects of the game suffer. The brutality of losing a lot of mission progress can absolutely break the experience for some people. This happens often enough for one reason: the environment. The environment is hard to read to an untrained eye because of the subdued, unsaturated colour palette. Even after playing a decent amount, several of the traps are difficult to parse from the foreground and abckground, easily taking chunks of health from the unwary player. Other times, stacking difficulty modifiers, such as rumble room (pressure plate spikes) and tenderizer (additional spike strips) can be put together in lethal, sometimes unavoidable combinations. Careful players might avoid the majority of the issues there, since you can often choose which ship you go to based on the modifiers present.

It's funny though. The rooms, barring any major modifiers, are carefully crafted, sometimes down to the half second. I was working through a room with moving floors, spike balls, and thugs blasting down the lanes constantly. From the outset, it seemed impossible not to take damage. There was simply too much stuff to avoid. It's at that point something snapped into place, and I felt like I was seeing the code of the game. A properly timed jump and a judicious use of the chronobelt to dodge incoming projectiles in time was suddenly obvious. I beat the room flawlessly, and I felt like a king. A degree of observation and of self-responsibility was all that was needed. This alone convinced me the game was somewhat solvable, where good skill and game knowledge was rewarded far more than good luck.

Flinthook is a brilliant game. The art, the actual process of playing, all of that is rewarding and worth my time. But then the question comes up; what about the perma death? what about the frustrating feeling of losing? That's far more subjective, but I found my time well used. I'm hooked on the game, and play it when I have spare time simply for the fun of blasting more pirates for points. If that's not arcade era game design, I don't know what is.