Image: monthbug & offbrand games

I am flying at five thousand miles an hour, beaming up screaming rich people to throw into my illicit space gambling den. I am smashing a button to increase my score multiplier while wiggling a handle to pour more people into the casino. I am poking the TV so my 24/7 Space Family Guy marathon remains uninterrupted. I am weaving between missiles and orbital death-beams as I play three-card monte on my viewscreen. Every one of my senses is overloaded. I am JOHN GLEEP, and you can be too, as it launched yesterday.

So, you're a little green spaceman in debt to the galactic mob, trying to stay ahead of the debtors (literally -they're on your tail) long enough to raise enough money to pay off the literal galaxy that you owe them. You do this by building a Balatro/Peggle/Ballionaire like board of money-multiplying pins and dropping gamblers in the top. And you get these gamblers via a high-speed arcade game where you zoom around a 3D planet, abducting whole cities of people while dodging attacks. The casino also takes up half of your playable screen space. That amount of space will shrink. A lot.

As covered previously, John Gleep's demo was a fantastic time, and still available if you want to feel out what this ridiculousness is, rather than just read my words. The full game? Even better. More characters to meet, more mechanics to wrangle, more universe to explore, and some stuff like boss fights scattered in, as you frantically try to use your beam as a weapon against rabid antagonists like the incendiary Captain Missile. I still have no idea how much game there is in this game, but it's a lot of game already.

Some of these Balatro-inspired gambling games bank purely on just soothing your soul with bright lights and buttons to press. John Gleep turns that dial up to eleven, and then keeps going until mechanisms crack, sparks fly out of power sockets, and smoke starts rising from the machinery. It very quickly escalates to utterly overwhelming, overstimulating levels. That's the joke, and it just works. Fortunately, if you find your brain melting, there is an option to automate much of the fiddlier stuff during the action segments and just watch the chaos unfold, but as the game itself says, the intended experience is overload.

But even outside of that chaotic action plate-spinning, there are SO many more mechanics. There's stock trading, which you can use to make money or buy permanent upgrades to your UFO that persist between runs. You can accept challenges from the interstellar gambling commission to increase your overall income multiplier. You can develop a crew of full-time gamblers that never leave your casino, levelling their stats up like Pokémon.

It might start relatively simple and accessible, carried by cute jokes and easygoing vibes, but very quickly John Gleep turns into a truly hilarious exercise in brain-smashing excess, and so far, I can't think of a second where I've not been enjoying it. This is definitely one I'm digging deeper into this weekend.

John Gleep is out now for £10/$12, with a 20% launch discount until November 25th. And as mentioned, the (very juicy) demo is still available too. Give that a spin, before you double down on the roulette tables.