Infernax

Retro revivalism is the most crowded shelf in independent games, and most of it is nostalgia cosplay: pixel art scaled to 4K, a chiptune loop, a dodge roll, and none of the friction that gave the originals their teeth. Infernax is the rarer thing — a game that understands why the NES era felt the way it did, and which parts of that feeling were craft versus which parts were just 1988 not knowing any better.

The pitch is direct. You are Duke Alcedor, a knight home from a crusade, and Upel — your land — has gone to rot. Demons, undead, unholy magic, the whole liturgical horror package. The obvious reference point is Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, and Infernax doesn’t hide it. Connected overworld, towns with villagers to talk to, caves and five castle-dungeons hanging off the map, experience points spent at your discretion on health, mana, or attack power, vendors selling weapons, armor, and spells. What it strips out is the cryptic garbage: the mistranslated hints, the invisible walls of logic, the tornado you summon by kneeling at a random cliff for eight seconds. Progression here is legible. Difficulty is not.

Behind it is Berzerk Studio, a Quebec outfit best known for Just Shapes & Beats — a neon bullet-hell rhythm game with the emotional register of a hug. Infernax is its inversion: gore-soaked, crude, and delighted by its own bad taste. That tonal whiplash signals a studio with actual range rather than a single aesthetic trick. Publishing comes via The Arcade Crew and Dotemu, the latter of which has spent years building a reputation as the label that treats retro properties as design problems rather than merch. The game launched February 14, 2022 at $19.99 on Steam and Nintendo platforms, and its critical reception — a Metacritic of 84 — reflects a game that found its audience and delivered exactly what it advertised. The recurring line in that reception, and it’s the right one: this is the game Simon’s Quest wanted to be.

• A morality system with teeth: Saving or slaughtering villagers pushes you toward Good or Evil, and the paths diverge into different spells, side quests, bosses, and endings. Decisions are permanent. There is no undo, no late-game absolution slider.
• Weighty, commitment-based melee: Attacks have wind-up and follow-through. Knockback is real and often fatal. This is deliberate combat in the Castlevania tradition, not the airy juggling of modern action platformers.
• Open-ended RPG progression: Earned XP goes into health, mana, or attack at your discretion, letting you build a tank, a caster, or a glass cannon that deletes bosses before they finish their opening pattern.
• Five castle-dungeons and a connected overworld: Metroidvania structure with genuine hidden areas and traversal that rewards mapping the world in your head.
• Substantial unlockables: Alternate campaigns, secret modes of varying seriousness, and a local two-player co-op option that turns the whole thing into a couch game.
• Uncompromising NES presentation: Chunky pixel art, chiptune-driven score, and death animations that are gory, over-the-top, and played for laughs.

The Gameplay Loop

Infernax runs on a loop so old it’s practically archaeological, and it works because every piece has been retuned. You leave a town. You fight through a stretch of overworld that costs you real resources. You find a cave, a dungeon, or a boss. You either win and bank progress, or you die and lose ground back to your last save point. Then you spend what you earned and go again.

What makes it land is the cost of a mistake. Enemy contact damage plus knockback means a careless approach to a two-enemy encounter on a narrow ledge can end a run that’s been going for ten minutes. The game is not asking for reflexes so much as for patience — read the room, position, commit, retreat. Anyone raised on i-frame dodges and forgiving checkpoints will find the opening stretch abrasive. That abrasion is the point, and it’s also the game’s biggest filter.

Progression is where Berzerk’s design intelligence shows. XP is a currency, not a track. Dumping everything into attack power turns bosses into brief conversations but leaves you dying to trash mobs; going all-health makes the overworld trivial and the boss fights long, grinding wars of attrition. Neither is wrong. The game never tells you which to pick, and it never punishes you for the choice beyond letting the consequences play out. That’s respect for the player, and it’s rarer than it should be.

The Morality System

Most games with a good/evil axis are running a coat of paint over a fixed skeleton. Infernax is not. Choosing to spare or butcher villagers doesn’t just shift a meter — it changes the content you have access to. Different spells. Different quests. Different bosses. Different endings. An evil run and a good run are meaningfully distinct experiences that happen to share a map.

More importantly, the choices are structurally permanent. Kill a village and it stays killed. Refuse a quest and it stays refused. This is the mechanism that makes the system matter: because you cannot roll it back, you actually think about it. The design asks you to accept the shape of a world you made rather than optimize toward a completionist checklist, and it holds that line even when it costs you content. That’s a real position, and Infernax commits to it.

The knock-on effect is replay value that isn’t padding. A second run is genuinely a second game, not a victory lap with the numbers turned up.

Friction and Where It Frays

Not all of the old-school fidelity is a virtue. Save points are sparse, and combined with backtracking-heavy traversal, losing a run means re-walking ground you’ve already solved. There’s a difference between challenge and tax, and Infernax occasionally crosses into the second category — particularly in the first act, before your movement options open up.

Early XP and gold grinding is the other soft spot. The opening hours ask you to farm before you’re strong enough for the content that would make farming unnecessary, and the loop briefly stops feeling like exploration and starts feeling like maintenance. It resolves. It shouldn’t need to.

And the combat’s weight, which is mostly an asset, produces a recurring irritation by design: hit detection and knockback interactions calibrated to feel unfair rather than demanding. Getting bounced into a pit by an enemy you already killed is authentic to 1988, but authenticity is a weak defense when it costs five minutes.

The art direction is disciplined in a way that separates it from pixel-art tourism. Berzerk sticks to a chunky, low-resolution, NES-adjacent palette and doesn’t cheat with modern lighting or particle effects the hardware never had. Sprites are readable at speed, which matters enormously in a game where a misread animation is a death. The death animations — florid, absurd, aggressively gory — are the release valve on an otherwise oppressive world, and the comedic timing works.

The soundtrack is the quiet standout. Chiptune-flavored without being pastiche, with dungeon themes built to hold up across the many, many repeats the game’s structure demands.

By design, this is a light load: a 2D game of this scope asks very little of modern hardware, and the modest spec targets on both platforms reflect that. The UI is spare and functional — menus don’t get in the way, and the map is legible enough to plan around. It could stand to do more to flag unexplored exits, but that’s a preference argument, not a defect.

On Steam, this is a controller game with a keyboard option, and you should treat it that way. The commitment-based combat wants an analog-free d-pad and clean face-button timing; keyboard-and-mouse works but adds a layer of imprecision the game’s damage model will punish. PC also gets the conveniences: cloud saves that make a multi-run structure less annoying to manage, and easy alt-tabbing to look up a boss pattern you’re too proud to admit you looked up.

On Nintendo Switch, Infernax is arguably in its natural habitat. An NES homage on a Nintendo handheld is the right hardware-to-content match, and the pick-up-and-die-repeatedly cadence suits short sessions — assuming you can reach a save point. Handheld mode’s smaller screen actually flatters the chunky sprite work. The local two-player co-op is far more likely to see use on a Switch in a living room than on a desktop, and that shifts the platform calculus meaningfully. Joy-Con d-pad quality is the one caveat; the split-button layout is not friendly to precise directional inputs, and a Pro Controller is close to mandatory for a serious run.

Infernax succeeds because it’s honest about what it’s doing. It doesn’t pretend the NES era was better; it identifies the handful of things that era did well — weight, consequence, a world you had to actually learn — and rebuilds them with thirty-five years of design knowledge applied to everything else. The morality system is the headline, and it earns the attention: permanent, content-altering, and refreshingly unwilling to let you have it both ways.

The rough edges are real. The grind in the opening hours is a pacing failure, and the save-point density belongs to a design conversation the rest of the game has moved past. Neither is disqualifying, but both will cost the game some players who’d otherwise love it, and Berzerk clearly considers that an acceptable trade.

We rate it a Good: a small, sharp, confident game that does exactly one thing and does it well — and one we recommend to the audience it was built for, with the caveats above attached.