Image: Paperhead te4m & HypeTrain Digital

Twitchy, silly, innocuously edgy FPS PAPERHEAD launched just as the Steam Hype team dispersed for the weekend, so we didn't have a chance to give it a proper look. Having given it some time over the weekend, I've just got to talk about it, because this one is legit. A high-speed movement shooter that takes notes from early access ULTRAKILL while still having plenty of ideas of its own, and a great aesthetic that turns what would be a truly grim sci-fi horror setting into a heavy metal arts-and-crafts project drenched in red paint.

The setup is the same as 80% of sci-fi horror games, just in a world made out of paper and cardboard, nothing quite cut at the right angles and with misspelled l33tsp3ak-era doodlings around every corner. There's a mysterious underground research facility that's gone silent. It's probably demons, and so you, Cooldude McGunnerson, are sent in, alone, to investigate. Without a gun.

Surprisingly, Paperhead is confident enough in its combat to not even give you a weapon until several big swarm-heavy arena battles against swarms of possessed cardboard enemies armed with nothing but a Kick button. It's a powerful foot, though, able to punt exploding barrels (in semi-homing fashion) into foes, trip enemies by sliding under them, or gain ridiculous air by kicking upwards twice after a double-jump, giving you a quad-jump right from the start, and Goomba-stomping enemies does damage and stuns them, too.

The combat here is extremely mobile and aggressive even before getting a gun, made even more-so thanks to a Devil May Cry/Ultrakill-inspired combat scoring system, where moving quickly and mixing up your attacks increases your score multiplayer, and pays out bonus cash (used for buying ammo and upgrade tokens) after each fight. And then it gets even smarter once you find a (cursed) pencil, adding even more moves. When you're not using it to just draw Cool S's on walls, the pencil constantly generates a pool of bombs that can blow armor off tough enemies, stun bigger soft targets, or convert swarms of smaller enemies into ammo pickups.

The pencil can also erase projectiles and pencil-scribble enemies from existence, as well as heal you by erasing dead enemies from the ground. And lastly, the pencil is used in puzzles, opening up doorways in walls by drawing on them, hacking computers by changing inputs and outputs, and even fixing cabling by filling in the blank gaps. There's a lot of cute ideas here, like erasing the weight number from massive container crates to make them float harmlessly out of the way. They get a lot of mileage out of the aesthetic.

Not that the guns here are any slouch. The infinite-ammo pistol alone feels like a high-tier revolver in most other shooters. The shotgun reduces most smaller enemies to a red splat in one hit. The machine gun is an ungodly bullet hose. It's just that this game is strong enough to have solid combat even before giving you any traditional damage-dealers, and that's a rare beast. While the campaign doesn't look MASSIVE (18 levels, but several of them are short, non-combat story segments), there are secrets to uncover, a whole Lore Map that fills in as you find clues and hints to the game's overall story, and multiple characters to unlock to spice up repeat playthroughs.

There's even a big horde survival mode with its own long-term progression mechanics, and there's plenty of enemy types (including papercraft undead, demons, unhinged cardboard cultists, and meatier creatures that extend fully into the third dimension, plus some cameos from the Madness series of flash animations) to keep things varied. It's not too surprising how packed this game is, considering that it has been in development for MANY years (a second demo appearing on Steam as far back as 2023), but I'm still very impressed by what I've played so far, and I'm excited to see if it can stick the landing.

Paperhead is out now for £16.75/$20, with a 20% launch discount running until October 23rd. There's a good chunk more sliced off the price if you own just about any of the must-have indie FPS games of the past five years. Y'all should own Ultrakill, if nothing else.