Iconoclasts

Most games are made by hundreds of people. Iconoclasts was made by roughly one. Swedish developer Joakim Sandberg wrote it, drew it, animated it, and scored it over about seven years, and the remarkable part isn’t that a solo project of this scope exists—it’s that it doesn’t feel like one. There are no obvious seams, no moment where the budget seems to have run dry. This is a polished, confident, fully-realized action-adventure that arrived on January 23, 2018, published by Bifrost Entertainment, carrying the weight of a decade’s obsession.

You play Robin, a young mechanic living under One Concern, a theocratic regime that has criminalized unlicensed repair work. That’s the premise’s clever hook: in this world, fixing things without permission is heresy. Robin fixes things anyway. Her wrench is both her tool and her sin. What starts as a story about a girl trying to keep her head down becomes a sprawling meditation on faith, authority, and the personal cost of being useful to people who won’t protect you.

Mechanically, it sits squarely in the Metroidvania tradition—an interconnected world, ability-gated progression, backtracking, upgrades—but Sandberg refuses to coast on genre convention. The wrench does triple duty as weapon, puzzle-solver, and traversal tool. The bosses are among the more inventive in the 2D space. The pixel art is a genuine highlight.

Positioned against genre heavyweights like Hollow Knight and Ori, Iconoclasts occupies a quieter, weirder niche. It’s less concerned with atmospheric dread or precision platforming and more interested in tone-shifting storytelling and mechanical variety. It’s well regarded but not universally adored, and that split tells you exactly where the cracks are.

• The Wrench: A single tool that handles combat, environmental puzzles, and traversal. Twisting bolts, deflecting projectiles, cracking enemies—it’s the game’s throughline and its best idea.
• Boss Gauntlet: A gallery of mechanically distinct, set-piece encounters. Each boss is a puzzle with a pulse, demanding pattern-reading and improvisation rather than a rote sequence.
• Tweak Crafting: Collect components scattered across the world to build Tweaks—modular upgrades that adjust Robin’s stats and behavior, with the catch that damage can knock them offline mid-fight.
• Character-Driven Narrative: A surprisingly personal story about faith and identity, carried by an expressive, memorable cast and strong sprite animation.

The Gameplay Loop

Iconoclasts runs on a fast rhythm: shoot, wrench, solve, climb, repeat. Robin carries a stun gun for ranged work and the wrench for everything else, and the design of the interplay between the two is where the moment-to-moment combat earns its keep. Stun a mechanical foe from a distance, close the gap, finish with a wrench swing. The control scheme is built for precision, which matters in a game that regularly demands platforming and shooting in the same breath.

The puzzle design is the quiet star. Sandberg builds intricate physics and mechanical contraptions that ask you to think about how the wrench manipulates the world—rotating bolts to reposition platforms, redirecting objects, chaining mechanisms in sequence. These aren’t filler between fights. They’re often the reason a room exists, and the good ones are built to deliver that clean click of comprehension that puzzle games live for.

Progression follows the Metroidvania playbook. New tools unlock new routes, and the interconnected world rewards curious, exploration-minded players who double back to pry open what they couldn’t reach before. The Tweak system deserves special mention because it does something clever: upgrades aren’t permanent buffs sitting safely in a menu. Take enough damage and a Tweak can go offline, forcing a fight at reduced capacity until you recover. It injects real tension into combat and discourages the passive stat-stacking that plagues lesser upgrade systems.

The backtracking, while light, occasionally overstays its welcome, and the pacing sags in stretches where the story pumps the brakes on the action. Difficulty is another sticking point—it doesn’t ramp so much as it spikes, dropping brutal encounters into an otherwise moderate curve without much warning. Cruising, then a wall, then cruising again. That will thrill some players and give others whiplash.

The Narrative Problem

The story is Iconoclasts’ biggest swing and its most divisive element. Sandberg is clearly reaching for something profound—faith, authority, purpose, the exhaustion of being the person everyone relies on—and when it connects, it moves. Robin’s arc carries real emotional weight, and the cast around her is written with care.

But the script is heavy-handed. It tells when it should show, over-explains its themes, and lurches between goofy comedy and heavy tragedy with a tonal whiplash that undercuts both. The ambition is admirable; the execution wobbles. This is a game where the mechanics are more disciplined than the writing, and for anyone after a purely taut action-adventure, the narrative’s insistence on Big Ideas may test patience. It’s a flawed, sincere, deeply personal story—and tolerance for earnestness that outruns its craft will shape the experience.

The art is the clearest evidence of what one obsessive developer can do with seven years and a singular vision: lush, saturated, hand-crafted pixel art with expressive character animation. Faces emote. Bodies have weight. Bosses are drawn and animated with a specificity that makes each one memorable. Every frame looks authored, not assembled.

As a 2D game of this scope, Iconoclasts is light on hardware, and its design reflects that: a restrained interface that surfaces tools and Tweaks without clutter. Sandberg’s own soundtrack complements the visuals with the same handmade sensibility—cohesive, expressive, and clearly the product of one authorial voice rather than a committee.

On Steam, a controller is the sensible choice despite the keyboard-and-mouse platform. The precision platforming and twin demands of aiming while moving map far more naturally to analog input and face buttons than to WASD-and-mouse. Keyboard works, but it fights the interface as much as the bosses. The PC version also benefits from higher resolutions that let the pixel art breathe on a large display.

On Nintendo Switch, the game arguably finds its ideal home. The pick-up-and-play cadence of its combat-puzzle loop suits handheld play, and the vivid art is well suited to the Switch’s screen. Portability fits the exploration-and-backtrack structure well—short bursts of progress work fine. The trade-off is the smaller handheld display, where finer environmental detail and puzzle telegraphing get marginally harder to parse. Docked, it’s essentially the Steam experience on the couch. Both versions are faithful; neither is compromised.

Iconoclasts is a labor of love that mostly delivers on its ambition, and the “mostly” is doing honest work in that sentence. Sandberg built a game that shines brightest in the doing—the wrench swings, the bosses fall, the puzzles click—and dims when it stops to lecture. The art alone justifies the $19.99 price of entry. The combat and puzzle design justify the hours. The story justifies patience some of the time and tests it the rest.

What lingers isn’t the plot’s stumbles but the sheer, stubborn coherence of the whole thing. One person made this, and every pixel knows it. Flawed, heartfelt, and mechanically strong, Iconoclasts is a passion project that earns the word—a distinctive Metroidvania we recommend to the right audience. Go in for the craft. Forgive the sermon.