Flinthook asks one question from its opening seconds: can you move? Tribute Games built a roguelike platformer around a grappling chain hook, and everything else in the game follows from how that hook feels in your hands. Captain Flinthook, a masked space pirate, zips through procedurally generated ships, fires a plasma gun, throws bombs, and slows time when the room turns against him. The studio released the game in April 2017 for Windows, macOS, Linux, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. A Nintendo Switch version followed in March 2018.
Trailer, via Tribute Games.
The Hook Is the Whole Game
The grappling chain is not a travel gimmick bolted onto a shooter. It is the combat system. Flinthook swings the hook at environmental elements and at enemies alike. Some enemies stay invulnerable until the player tears their armor off with the chain, which turns every fight into a small mechanical puzzle before it becomes a damage race.
Tribute Games has said the hook was the hardest part of the design. That tracks. A roguelike lives or dies on whether its core verb stays interesting across hundreds of rooms, and the hook is a verb with real range — it moves you, it disarms enemies, and it aims with the same left analog stick that steers Flinthook.
The rest of the control scheme is deliberately plain. The trigger fires the hook. Face buttons jump, shoot, throw bombs, and interact with nearby objects. Nothing here needs a tutorial.
Rooms That Look Familiar, Enemies That Do Not
Flinthook generates its levels and room contents at random. A room can look like one you cleared ten minutes ago and still hold a different set of enemies, which keeps the pixel-art interiors from becoming wallpaper. You learn the shape of the game without learning the answers.
The structure is a roguelike in the strict sense. You unlock bounties to hunt, and when your character dies, the chapter starts over from the beginning. Death costs you the run, not just the fight. That is the bargain the genre makes, and Flinthook holds to it without apology.
Spelunky and Rogue Legacy in the Blood
Tribute Games has named Spelunky and Rogue Legacy as inspirations, and the lineage shows in the game’s priorities. Both of those games treat movement as the real content and the loot as the excuse. Flinthook does the same. The treasure is why you are on the ship. The hook is why you stay.
Early previews of Flinthook focused on how accessible and tight the controls felt, which is the right thing to notice about a game like this. Digital Trends and Kotaku both put Flinthook among the best in show at the June 2016 Electronic Entertainment Expo, months before release. That kind of pre-release attention usually rewards spectacle. Here it rewarded feel.
What Flinthook Gets Right
The slow-motion power is the second-best idea in the game. It gives you an out when a procedurally generated room stacks enemies in a way no designer planned, and it lets the hook do work that would otherwise be impossible. Time-slow plus chain plus plasma gun is a small toolkit, but it is a toolkit that produces different answers in different rooms.
The pixel art holds up. The science fiction setting — scoundrels, miscreants, a malevolent treasure hunter with a plan to unleash an ancient evil on the cosmos — is thin stuff, the kind of premise that exists to justify the next ship. That is fine. Flinthook is not asking you to care about the plot. It is asking you to care about the next room.
Where It Slips
The chapter reset is the cost of the design, and it is a real cost. Losing a run to a room the generator built badly stings more than losing it to your own mistake. Randomness cuts both ways, and Flinthook cannot always tell the difference between a hard room and an unfair one.
The story never rises above its premise. Flinthook is the galaxy’s smallest but toughest pirate, and that is the whole character. The game knows this and moves on quickly, which is the correct call, but it means the fiction gives you nothing to carry between runs.
The Numbers
- Release: April 2017 (Windows, macOS, Linux, PlayStation 4, Xbox One)
- Nintendo Switch release: March 2018
- Developer and publisher: Tribute Games
- Genre: roguelike platformer, side view, single player
- Critic aggregate: 8.1/10 across 5 outlets
- Named inspirations: Spelunky, Rogue Legacy
- Best in show: Digital Trends and Kotaku, E3 June 2016
Release Schedule
| Platform | Release window |
|---|---|
| Windows, macOS, Linux | April 2017 |
| PlayStation 4 | April 2017 |
| Xbox One | April 2017 |
| Nintendo Switch | March 2018 |
Flinthook earns its 8.1. The hook is the reason. Tribute Games took the hardest mechanic to design and made it the one you think about between runs, which is more than most roguelikes manage with a cleaner premise.
The procedurally generated ships and the chapter resets will wear some players down, and the story will not hold anyone who needs one. But the moment-to-moment play is tight, the pixel art reads clearly, and the combination of chain, plasma gun, bombs and slow motion gives you enough tools to feel clever when a room goes wrong.
That is the trade Flinthook offers: a small pirate, a small toolkit, and a galaxy of ships that never quite repeat. It is worth taking.
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