Judero Review

Weirdness and eccentricity can often be perceived as pretentiousness, so I appreciate it when a game is truly one of a kind. Jewish could only have been created by Talha Kaya and Jack King-Spooner, two independent developers who imagined the Scottish Borders using only action figures and modeling clay. The result is a game full of the flaws and pleasant surprises that can only come from a genuine artistic vision.

Judero casts you in the role of the titular Judero: an unpolished warrior-priest, clearly made of Milliput and an elderly GI Joe action figure. He looks imposing, but he’s actually a very thoughtful, open-minded guy: One of the game’s first defining moments begins with a jumpscare-adjacent, discordant introduction of a clearly evil witch, then cuts to her and Judero drinking tea and discussing the townspeople’s mistaken impressions of her.

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Judero is an indie game created by two guys, with most of the rest of the credit going to their family, friends, and Kickstarter backers. Much like this year’s Harold Halibut, Judero uses real, physical models for its digital assets, with full stop-motion animation in its cutscenes, while the gameplay uses sprites in fully 3D environments like the original Doom. The music is also a real treat: folk melodies with an acoustic guitar that set a nostalgic mood and tie in with Judero’s pagan, earthy influences.

The effect of using unique Judero blocks is Sinbad’s Last Journey but even more deliberately unsettling: the characters are all deformed and lumpy, with bulging eyes and shredded flesh, but somehow it’s not horror. Like many classic stop-motion animations, Judero’s characters are unsettling without being unpleasant, ugly-sweet and moving in that off-putting, jerky stop-motion way. This charm is reinforced by Judero’s writing: co-creator Talha Kaya wrote that the duo “hid a little bit of humanity around every corner,” and I absolutely felt it while playing.

In the shape of a friend

Towards the end of the game, one of those googly-eyed clay NPCs I love so much recounts a strange saga in which they forbid their lover from entering a locked wing of their shared home—not to protect a secret, but in a desperate attempt to seem like someone who might be compelling enough to have secrets. Every resident of the town of Judero will wax poetic about their strange, surreal, or tragic lives in handsome, moving prose, and one of my favorite parts of the game was simply wandering through each village, talking to every single NPC. There’s no filler like “I heard the Fighters Guild is recruiting again”: everyone has something to say, usually in several parts.

As you enter the houses in the towns, the art style changes to dreamy, dynamic watercolors, even the Judero replaced by an Impressionist double, and the residents inside often seem to have been torn out of time. In the second village, a pair of guys in T-shirts and shorts contemplate the merits of eco-terrorism in a world sleepwalking toward destruction: “We’re not trying to make these people love us. We’ve learned the sad lesson that no one loves this world.” In a neighboring building, a shirtless drummer extols the virtues of the divine feminine and predicts that the world will end in 2050: “The last 15 years will be a brutal genocide of the poor, and then we’ll all be gone.”

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Despite the sharply political tone of some of the digressions, Judero never felt clumsy or polemical—anachronisms hit me like a stiff wind or a drop of icy water, appearing without any introduction or explanation and making me look twice. Judero presents its gigantic ideas thoughtfully, wrapped in the overall surrealism of the experience, often in optional nooks. Its philosophical musings and open-ended side stories will stay with me for a long time.

Lest this sound too lifeless or arrogant, I can vouch that it’s also a very amusing game: while most of the enemies are mythical abominations, at one point in the game Judero is pitted against the “People of Carlisle” (an English city bordering Scotland) who inexplicably shout “Carlisle!” over and over again like a Pokémon. Towards the end of Judero, one of Simpson’s steamy lines made me laugh so challenging that my girlfriend came over from across our apartment to see what the commotion was: “The hallucinations are getting more and more vivid,” muses Judero, lost at sea. “Luckily my talking ape friend keeps me sane.”

Staff and sandals

Gameplay-wise, Judero is a strange mix, with digressions into different styles and perspectives that remind me of the NieR games. It also has the same core as NieR: hack n’ slash fighting and bullet hell dodging.

The melee combat is definitely the weakest part of the experience: it has generally needy feedback, hitting enemies feels weightless, the perspective often makes setting up attacks a chore, and many enemies have annoying multi-part attacks that can stun Judero and eat into his health bar. At its best, the brawl is adequate connective tissue: Another thing to do while you trek over hill and dale.

Frustratingly, every other aspect of Judero’s gameplay is so much stronger, especially the bosses and their screen-filling projectile attack patterns. One late-game fight in particular really scratched the same itch that 2016’s excellent Furi did for me: a duel with a forest goddess and her lover in the skies above a magical island. Instead of bashing them with Judero’s staff between attacks, you have to run around, activating magical sigils on a timer. These fights could be exhilarating, and I wonder if Judero wouldn’t be better if it opted for dual-stick shooting instead of melee combat, or completely abandoned its attack options in favor of dodging and puzzle-solving.

Judero’s possession mechanic could have helped fill the gap. Judero can utilize his druidic magic to possess enemies and get around obstacles, a bit like stealing an enemy in Mario Odyssey. The mechanic has moments of real genius, like a boss fight where you have to possess a bug and climb down the monster’s throat, reaching the key innards at the end of a nasty, faux-3D tunnel and eating the thing from the inside. Most of the possession puzzles throughout the game are a bit simplistic, but then there’s a wave of more challenging, complicated ones at the very end. I found myself wishing these brain-tickling puzzles were spread out better throughout the game—squashed all at once, they become a bit of a chore.

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Even with these complaints, Judero has a real capacity for surprise and whimsy in its mechanics, surprising me in much the same way as its conversations. One of the highlights is the set-up for the third act: an open-ended archipelago that you can sail and explore in any order you like, with optional dialogue and positively delightful poetry read by your passenger, that talking monkey friend I mentioned earlier. I activated the point of no return in the third act a little too early and probably left some exploration on the table, but the whole thing is a delight, full of oddly shaped and entirely optional islands to explore, as well as more of those NPC conversations that I love.

Performance-wise, Judero is as lightweight as it gets, and even runs well on Steam Deck, although installing it to an SD card instead of a challenging drive did result in some pretty sluggish load times, especially in that open-world sailing section. It’s worth keeping that in mind if you’re considering it for Deck or still utilize a challenging drive for storage on your desktop.

Judero is the kind of indie game that is truly worth celebrating. It’s quirky and has its flaws, but that’s in keeping with the nature of such a unique labor of love. Judero isn’t a transcendent action game or a next-level puzzler, but those aspects are good enough to support its true charm: a thoughtful, strange world and an incredible aesthetic.