ChainStaff Hands-On — This Psychedelic Alien Shooter Proves Retro Gaming Has Barely Scratched the Surface
Every year, a dozen new indie games promise to be “retro-inspired” and deliver yet another Metroidvania in Zelda’s clothing. You know the ones. The same pixel palette, the same dungeon flow, the same Chrono Trigger chord progression winking at you from the title screen. ChainStaff is not one of those games — and playing it feels like discovering a hidden gem on a dusty shareware disc from a universe where game development went sideways in the most beautiful way possible.
Developed by Mommy’s Best Games (the same singular-vision studio behind Shoot 1UP DX and Bumpy Grumpy), ChainStaff is a run-and-gun shooter that wears its obscure influences with absolute pride. Its aesthetic doesn’t nod to Castlevania or Mega Man. It draws from the legacy of Psygnosis — those infamous Amiga box artists who plastered alien dreamscapes across cardboard in the late ’80s — and from freeform computer run-and-guns like Turrican. The result is like someone handed a fever dream a level editor and let it cook.
What Even Is This?
On any given level you might find yourself platform-hopping across the heads of enormous square flying owl skulls, blasting your way through screen-high fish, fighting a flying eagle-snake hybrid, or navigating architecture where skybound jellyfish tentacles function as perfectly normal platforms. Red butterflies exist entirely for art’s sake. Alien pigs with neon assault hairstyles — bringing a devastatingly literal meaning to the word “haircut” — are a routine encounter.
The real hook is the titular weapon: the ChainStaff itself. This Swiss Army knife of a tool functions simultaneously as a grappling hook, an aerial platform, a shield, and a spear. The levels are designed around it — wide, vertical, and deliberately freeform in a way that forces you to master every trick the weapon offers. Combat and traversal blur together into something that feels genuinely new even when every individual visual reference is old.
The Feeling It Chases — And Catches
What Mommy’s Best Games understands that many retro-revival developers miss is that the magic isn’t in replicating specific games — it’s in recapturing the feeling that any given stage could present something you’ve never seen before. In ChainStaff, that promise holds on every screen. The art has the energy of a prog rock album cover escaping into a game engine. The level design has the anything-goes spirit of a game that hadn’t been told what games were supposed to look like yet.
Old has rarely felt this fresh. New has rarely felt this strange. ChainStaff is available now on Steam, PS4/5, Xbox, and Switch — and it’s the kind of game that quietly earns a permanent spot in the “actually special” folder of your library.
