Cookie Cutter (v2024.04.03)

A hand-drawn cyberpunk nightmare fuels its revenge story with chainsaws, busted robots, and enough attitude to make subtlety irrelevant. Cookie Cutter casts you as Cherry, a combat android left for scrap after her creator and lover, Dr. Shinji Fallon, is abducted by the forces behind the decaying INFONET regime. Her hunt cuts through a colossal dystopian facility built on false promises, where industrial ruins, mutated creatures, and machine armies crowd every corridor. The tone is aggressively pulpy and profane: equal parts manga melodrama, splatter-film excess, and sincere anger beneath the crude jokes.

Cherry moves through the Megastructure in classic 2D Metroidvania fashion, opening routes through a connected map as new tools and abilities remove old obstacles. Combat is the main attraction, combining quick melee strings, firearms, special attacks, a brutal chainsaw, and execution-style finishers that reward close-range aggression. Enemies range from small mechanical fodder to grotesque bio-organic threats, while major bosses demand more attention to movement, attack patterns, and timing. Exploration pays off with health upgrades, useful gear, hidden areas, and encounters that flesh out a strange world rather than merely padding the route to the next fight.

What separates Cookie Cutter from the average genre entry is its animation and personality. Nearly every location, enemy, and violent impact is presented with lavish hand-drawn detail, giving the world a rough comic-book texture that feels far more expressive than its grim machinery initially suggests. Its ten distinct areas keep changing the visual flavor, from ruined urban-industrial spaces to increasingly bizarre sci-fi environments, and Cherry is an unusually forceful protagonist for a genre often built around silent wanderers. Players who enjoy the map-driven progression of Metroid, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, or modern brawling-heavy indies will find plenty to like, especially if they want combat that is louder and messier than usual. It suits experienced action-platformer fans best, though its direct objectives and frequent upgrades make the opening hours approachable for newcomers willing to embrace the gore.