TL;DR – A game that is as frustrating as it is fun. Just be sure it doesn’t end a relationship in the process.

Disclosure – I paid for this game.

Chained Together Review –

Today, we are looking at a bit of an odd game in that it is very purposely designed to cause grief. It’s like an old arcade game trying to take all your quarters, but instead of money, it is streamers yelling on Twitch. It should not have worked, but I was captured for the entire time.

So, to set the scene, Chained Together is the next in a long line of rage games that stretch back to Only Up! and Getting Over It! These use finicky controls and an odd visual environment to cause grief when you miss a jump and lose all the progress you have made. One step forward, and then a crushing fall back to Earth. The main difference this time around is that you are not climbing alone because you are chained together [said the name of the game]. Which can be a bonus or a great burden. You need to climb up all the puzzles and traps and escape hell, lest you fall back to the suffering below.

Chained Together is, in many ways, an improvement in what has come before, even though you can feel that same DNA in everything. The visual presentation clearly has a whole lot of visual assets cobbled together to make a puzzle you need to parkour your way through. Full of puzzles that can’t wait to boot you off the map and laugh as you fall precariously back to hell. However, unlike a lot of games in this genre, there is at least a visual consistency to the assets that help tell some story. That is not to say that the game is not full of jank, and the story is also barely there, but it is just enough to keep you going. The controls do take a bit to get used to, and the backend is a bit of a mess, so it may take a bit to get a game going.   

The following mechanic change to the genre is that, as the name implies, you are chained to your fellow players. Working on this review, I have tried two, three, and four-player, including the square variant. I think the game is best optimised for three players, but you can even play a single-player version if you want to avoid other people. While you can play it without being in voice communication like Discord, I would not recommend it because it is hard enough when you can talk to each other. Being connected can help because if you fall, your teammates can pull you up, but sometimes, one person being yeeted off can take everyone down with them.

However, I will say that this is a game that is very much dependent on who you play it with. To be clear, you will be frustrated, you will fall and lose so much progress, and you might very well test the bonds of friendship. I have played it with two different groups now, and I can say in my experience that it was as fun as it was frustrating. I can’t quite describe the feeling when you are being blasted off a bone bridge, and you are frustrated to the core, but also you are laughing deep into your soul. I will say that there may be a hard cap to the puzzles when you start getting depreciating returns, but I have not hit that yet.  

In the end, do we recommend Chained Together? Well? I think that will depend entirely on who you are playing with. Trust me, if it is someone who gets frustrated easily, make sure you turn on teleport to the last highest place. It is also a game that works best in small bursts.  

By Brian MacNamara: You can follow Brian on Twitter Here, when he’s not chatting about Movies and TV, he’ll be talking about International Relations, or the Solar System.

Have you played Chained Together?, let us know what you thought in the comments below, feel free to share this review on any of the social medias and you can follow us Here. Check out all our past reviews and articles Here, and have a happy day. 

Credits – All images were created by the staff of Chained Together
Game Direction – John Szoke
Voice Acting – Joe G. & Bodhi F.
Developer – Anegar Games
Publisher – Anegar Games