You can’t exit each dungeon level until you’ve earned a specific amount of gold so you’re left wondering whether to buy a ghoul-decapitating sword or hold onto your hard-earned cash. You get to choose your class, purchase weapons and, although permadeath is a fixture, if you play it enough you’ll earn permanent upgrades. It’s not initially as difficult as surviving Paint the Town Red‘s pub fights, but it escalates very quickly. The Arena mode, which pitches you against waves of foes, has a learning curve start a fight in Paint the Town Red’s regular mode and you’ll get a challenge every time.Īnd I haven’t even covered the roguelike mode, dubbed ‘Beneath’. Unless you expressly set enemies to be weak, however, you’re going to have to fight for your life, no matter what mode you’re in. Enemies only move when you move which turns each level into a hyper-violent chess variant. There’s even an option to turn on SuperHot mode, which apes the game in question, complete with white and red aesthetic. Want everyone in a location to want you dead? Turn on the zombie modifier and you’re good to go. Three attacks might not sound like much but they’re enough, but if you really want guns you can select the “gun show” modifier. However, all of that is just the vanilla game you can then apply modifiers to warp Paint the Town Red to your heart content. The levels aren’t enormous but there’s a little room to explore and, if you’re not careful, get penned into a room but, as the person who started the punch-up, you’ve only got yourself to blame. That, in itself, is a good enough reason to keep moving. The twisted genius of this is that you can be so distracted by the chaos that you won’t notice the two angry patrons coming up the stairs behind you. When the fight breaks out, it’s everyone for themselves you’ll have a few people coming after you but you’ll also witness other people pummelling each other, grabbing weapons off the floor and so on. Secondly, you’re not the only person getting punched. If Paint the Town Red looked in any way realistic it’d be absolutely horrific but the game gets away with it due to its aforementioned Minecraft-style graphics. Thanks to the voxel-based graphics, you can literally smack someone’s face right off, revealing their skull beneath. Firstly, they’re so amazingly chaotic you can punch, you can kick, you can fling anything you can get your hands on. There are two things in particular that make these brawls stand out. Then you throw a chair, or fire a cannon and it all kicks off maybe I should feel more guilty about that than getting two games for one. You’ll wander into a blocky Minecraft style location – a biker bar, a disco, a prison, a pirate cove – and everyone’s just enjoying themselves. Especially since, in all bar the challenge and dungeon levels, you’re the one who starts the fights.

When it comes to brawling, you don’t quite have the precision of, say, Assassins’ Creed Valhalla, but fighting for your life never gets old. Still, there’s so much to love about Paint the Town Red that you’ll be happy to overlook that particular oddity. This is a game that’s ostensibly about starting pub fights but it has an entire roguelike dungeon crawler inside it. Not because of all the gratuitous murder but because, as glorious as this first-person brawler is, it feels like two games.Īfter six years in development ( we first got our hands on it in 2015), I suspect the only reason Paint the Town Red left Early Access was because someone at South East Games physically dragged the programmer away from their keyboard. At first, I felt a little guilty playing Paint the Town Red.

Beneath paint the town red