Bloodroots gives you a hatchet, a ladder, and a carrot, and then it asks you to kill everyone in the room with them. Paper Cult’s hack and slash game launched on February 28, 2020, for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and PC, and arrived on Xbox Series X/S on July 15, 2021. It is an isometric action game about a man called Mr. Wolf who was betrayed by his partners and left for dead, and who now wants answers.
Trailer, via Paper Cult Games.
Mr. Wolf and the Betrayal
The setup is a Western revenge tale, and Paper Cult does not dress it up. Mr. Wolf is alone and vastly outnumbered, fighting his way toward the center of a mystery: why was he betrayed? The game hands him a deranged cast of characters and a world that is more weapon than scenery.
That is the hook, and it holds. Bloodroots splits its levels into three acts, and each one is hand-crafted, moving from forests to mountaintops. You are not wandering a map. You are moving through a staged killing floor where every object has a job.
Everything Is a Weapon
The combat is the whole argument of Bloodroots. Mr. Wolf uses melee and ranged weapons, and the world supplies them: hatchets, ladders, and yes, carrots. Weapons have limited durability. They break after repeated use, so the game never lets you settle into one tool.
That single rule does more work than any story beat. It forces improvisation. You pick something up, use it, and throw it away, and the level keeps feeding you replacements. The result is a game that plays like a chase rather than a duel.
Progress comes from eliminating all on-screen enemies. Clear the room, and the stage ends with a score and a grade based on your performance. Worldwide leaderboards let you compete for fame, which turns each level into a repeatable problem.
In this relentless action game, you’ll choreograph spectacular, ultra-violent combos by making use of everything around you, from hatchets, to ladders, to…carrots?
Bird’s-Eye Violence That Reads Clearly
The isometric view is the right call. From above, the room is legible: enemies, exits, and the next weapon all sit in frame at once. Bloodroots wants you to plan a combo in the time it takes to cross a floor, and the camera gives you what you need to do it.
The pace is fast and the violence is extreme, but the game is not sloppy about it. Every object you grab changes both how you fight and how you move. A ladder is not just a club. It is a route. That double duty is where Bloodroots earns its keep.
What Holds Up and What Does Not
The weakness is durability itself. A game built on breaking weapons can tip from improvisation into scrambling, and three acts is a long time to keep that tension sharp. When the room runs dry, the combo you were building dies with it.
The story is thinner than the action. Mr. Wolf’s betrayal is a question the game keeps asking, and the deranged cast around him is color more than character. The revenge tale is a frame for the fights, not the reason to stay.
None of that sinks it. Bloodroots knows exactly what it is: a Western revenge story told through choreography, where the environment is the moveset. The leaderboards give it a second life after the credits, and the hand-crafted levels reward a cleaner run.
An 8.3 out of 10 is the right number. Bloodroots is not a game you finish so much as one you replay to make the violence look intentional. Paper Cult built a combat system with a real idea behind it, and the idea survives the weaker stretches.
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