Rad

Developer Double Fine

Publisher Bandai Namco Games

Format PC (tested), PS4, Switch,

Xbox One

Release Out now

Weird soon becomes the new normal in Double Fine’s gaudy top-down Roguelike. Rad is yet another Lee Petty game about transformation, following the designer’s ingenious Stacking and the enjoyable Headlander. Only here, rather than swapping heads, you’re growing new ones – alongside extra limbs and maybe, if you’re lucky, an ovipositor. At one stage we find ourselves cutting about in crab legs, sporting a snake’s head that delivers quite the venomous bite, and yet something gives us pause. All of this should, surely, feel stranger and more exciting than it does.

These are just a few of’s irradiated environments. Despite the dangers, the place is not without its charms. Cassettes are your currency, while floppy disks are keys, and boomboxes and high tops (that respectively boost tape drops and give you a double-jump) are held up as vital artefacts: a sly poke, perhaps, at the way we fetishise the objects of our youth. commits to its ’80s theme, right down to its slightly incongruous – but enjoyable – electronic soundtrack, which at more than one point sounds as if it’s about to segue into Duran Duran’s Rio.