Pinstripe

Most games are made by hundreds of people. Pinstripe was made by one. Thomas Brush of Atmos Games spent five years on it and did the art, programming, writing and orchestral score himself. That fact explains most of what is good about the game, and some of what isn’t.

You play as Teddy, a former minister. He is riding a train with his three-year-old daughter, Bo, when a well-dressed, smiling villain named Mr. Pinstripe kidnaps her. Teddy follows him into a snowy, broken afterlife made of six hand-drawn levels of Hell. His dog George comes with him. The places he visits are strange towns full of odd residents, and the things he fights look like drawings from a children’s book that has gone rotten.

In genre terms, Pinstripe sits with story-first side-scrolling adventures like Limbo, Inside and Little Nightmares. Its look is gentler and more fairy-tale-like than those games, but its themes are just as dark. It doesn’t compete on systems or length. It competes on mood and on a script willing to go somewhere uncomfortable. As Teddy goes deeper, the game uncovers his past and turns into a story about grief, guilt and redemption. The last act changes how you see everything before it.

It launched on PC, Mac and Linux on April 24, 2017, published by Armor Games Studios, and later came to Nintendo Switch. Few indie games get that kind of long life.

• Made by one person: Art, code, story and music all come from Thomas Brush. The result feels unusually consistent because every part follows one person’s vision.
• Six hand-drawn levels of Hell: Each area is a snowy, odd town with its own residents and creatures. The look draws on The Nightmare Before Christmas, Coraline and Alice in Wonderland.
• Slingshot for everything: Teddy’s one tool is used to fight enemies, hit distant switches and solve environmental puzzles.
• Exploration by conversation: You collect items and talk to the townsfolk of Hell to open new paths. It works like a simplified point-and-click adventure.
• Orchestral score and full voice acting: Brush composed the haunting soundtrack himself, and professional voice actors perform the script.
• A story built around its ending: A father-and-daughter rescue story slowly turns into a study of what Teddy did before the train ride.

The Gameplay Loop

Pinstripe’s loop is simple. You walk into a new area, talk to its residents, find out what’s blocking your way, find the item or switch that clears it, and move on. The slingshot does most of the work. Aim it at an enemy and it’s a weapon. Aim it at a far-off lever and it’s a puzzle tool.

The loop works because it never asks much of you. It also has a ceiling because it never asks much of you. The environmental puzzles are pleasant but rarely clever. They usually come down to fetch-and-deliver tasks or finding the right object to shoot. Experienced adventure players will almost never get stuck. That lack of friction keeps the story moving, but it also means the puzzles rarely produce the satisfying “aha” moment that games like Inside are built on.

Combat is the weakest part. Slingshot fights against Hell’s creatures are thin: aim, fire, reposition, repeat. They exist mainly to add some tension between conversations, not to test your skill. The movement is built loose and floaty, which shows most during jumps where a precise landing matters. None of this is bad enough to break the game. It just feels like a part Brush clearly cared about less than everything else.

Pacing and Length

This is a short game — an evening or two of play — and at $14.99 some buyers will want more for their money. The short length is arguably one of its strengths. Pinstripe has one story to tell and ends once it’s told. It doesn’t pad the runtime with collectible hunts or combat arenas to reach an arbitrary hour count. A longer version of this game would almost certainly be a worse one.

The six-level structure also sets a clear rhythm. Each new level of Hell arrives just as the previous one starts to wear thin, and the look changes with each descent, so the short runtime still feels full.

Narrative and Tone

This is the real reason to play. At first Pinstripe looks like a simple rescue story with a good villain. Mr. Pinstripe is charming, polite and deeply unsettling, and the actor plays him with obvious enjoyment. Underneath, the game is about a man who can’t face himself. Hell is a place Teddy is trying to escape, but it’s also a picture of what he’s been avoiding.

The twist won’t be spoiled here. It’s earned, it’s dark, and it recasts earlier scenes in a way that makes a second playthrough worthwhile despite the simple mechanics. The handling of grief and guilt is heavy-handed in places, and a few scenes lean on sentiment. But the emotional core lands, largely because Teddy and Bo’s relationship feels specific rather than generic.

George the dog does more than decorate the scenery. He gives Teddy, and the player, a steady companion in a world where no one else can be trusted.

The art direction is the best argument for buying this game. The hand-drawn look calls to mind Henry Selick’s stop-motion films. Characters have long limbs and hollow eyes, towns lean at wrong angles, and falling snow softens scenes that would otherwise be too grim to look at. Because one person drew all of it, the style never slips. Every building, background and creature looks like it came from the same pen, because it did.

The score deserves equal credit. Brush’s orchestral pieces are sad more than scary, which fits a story more about loss than jump scares. Professional voice acting lifts the whole thing. Many indie adventures of this size make do with text boxes, and Pinstripe feels noticeably more premium because it doesn’t.

As a modest 2D side-scroller of this scope, it is light on hardware demands. The UI is minimal: an inventory, dialogue prompts and not much else, so the art stays front and center. The main technical weakness is the movement, not the graphics. The floaty movement undercuts the few moments that ask for precision.

Steam (PC/Mac/Linux): This is where the game started, and it’s the most flexible way to play. Mouse aiming makes the slingshot more precise than a controller, which helps the weakest part of the game. It also runs on modest hardware and on all three desktop operating systems, which is rare.

Nintendo Switch: The port is arguably the most natural fit. A short, story-driven game suits handheld play: put the Switch into sleep mode between levels of Hell and pick it up at bedtime. Hand-drawn art suits a small screen, and the Joy-Cons’ analog aiming works well enough given how forgiving the combat is. For a single dark, quiet evening, the Switch version is the one we’d recommend.

Pinstripe is a clear example of an auteur-driven game, with the usual trade-offs. Its art, score and story come from one person, and the result is more consistent and personal than most games with ten times the budget. Its mechanics are functional and nothing more. The combat is thin, the puzzles are easy, and the movement never feels quite right.

It doesn’t matter much. You don’t play Pinstripe to master a system. You play it to follow a father through a frozen Hell of his own making and to be moved by where it ends up. It’s short, and it knows exactly what it wants to be. If you can accept simple gameplay in exchange for a story that stays with you, this is a solid, worthwhile pick — just don’t expect it to challenge your hands as much as your heart.