KIT-10 REVIEW
by Psychbomb / January 03, 2025
Classic.
When I played UFO 50 back in 2024, I clocked it right away as my game of the year. Granted, it wasn’t a particularly competitive year, but it still would have been a serious competitor if it had released anywhere else in the decade prior. I’ve spent a good deal of time breaking free from an earlier conception I had that arcade and NES-era games were often so primitive as to not really be worth playing, and UFO 50 helped a lot in putting a crack in that conditioning. As such, I’ve been keeping an eye out for more things like it; modern interpretations of traditional principles, where creators look back on what worked in the past and then append the intervening forty years of shifts in design sensibilities on top.
KIT-10 is exactly what I’m looking for. Had this been in UFO 50, it would have been one of the best games present, easy.
The game is clearly taking a ton from 1983’s Mappy — collecting pairs of items to get bonus multipliers, the way in which the combo bonus points fly in from off-screen, KIT-10’s “microwave meow” having a sprite that’s almost identical to the microwave door blasts — but it never feels like a ripoff, and instead like an evolution. KIT-10 is prettier, has smoother animation, more interesting level design, and a stronger soundtrack. These bumps in production quality are really the only things that give away the fact that this isn’t secretly some long-lost arcade game. Well, that and the fact that the game isn’t a bullshit quarter-muncher, but these are all positives. I won’t complain about my lobster being too buttery.
Mechanically, though, KIT-10 invokes a lot of fun little changes that also help to set it apart from its inspiration. You can meow at yarn ball enemies to stun them, and then pick them up and chuck them a couple meters into their friends Doki Doki Panic-style. The vacuum cleaner guys are bigger and heavier, so need to be stunned with a yarn ball instead of a meow, but tossing them makes them go all the way off-screen and clobber everything in their path until they disappear off the edge of the field. Springs and lava pits and conveyor belts are all introduced in this wonderful, organic matter where they’re used to make you constantly discover abilities that you’ve always had but never known about. You can’t move while holding an enemy, for example, but riding off the edge of a conveyor belt while holding one allows you to reposition yourself to land otherwise-impossible combo hits. None of this is explained to you, and has to be learned through experimenting. It rules.
The final boss is super annoying to fight if you’re trying to get a decent time bonus, but that’s small potatoes when everything else is this strong. It’s unfortunate that this isn’t more of a hit, though perhaps not all that surprising when you consider how poor discoverability tends to be on Steam. What did surprise me was that this is Grizbyte’s first game. I have a sneaking suspicion that they’ve put out other work under a different alias, because this is a bit too polished and cohesive to pass as someone’s first-ever project. Then again, it might well be the first thing they’ve ever made, which would be something to be very proud of. There’s a stickiness to KIT-10 that many other, lesser developers trying to make the same thing would miss.
It’s to a point where the game’s got me replaying it to chase high scores, and that’s not something I often give so much as a fraction of a fuck about. There’s a real magnetic quality to this, but not in the numbing way that so many “addictive” games like Vampire Survivors often tend to be; I’ve been coming up with new routes for the past few days, trying to think up new ways to make those vacuum cleaners take out as many yarn balls as possible while I lay in bed. KIT-10’s got its claws in me. I wouldn’t actually buy a cabinet with this loaded onto it, because I don’t have that kind of money, but I’d daydream about it if one existed.
And not to brag or anything, but your boy is currently the second highest-scoring player on the global leaderboards at the time of writing.
