Struggling

Struggling turns a simple request, move a lump of flesh from one side of the screen to the other, into a wonderfully stupid wrestling match. You guide Troy by grabbing, pulling, and swinging his two absurdly long arms through hostile spaces. In solo play, that means operating both limbs yourself; with a friend beside you, each of you owns an arm. Either way, the first successful climb feels less like executing a platforming move and more like surviving an argument with gravity.

Its awkwardness is the point, and it lands best when you can laugh at a botched grip rather than resent it. The grotesque hazards and cooperative tug-of-war give its physical comedy a nastier edge than Octodad. If you enjoy deliberately unruly physics challenges, Struggling is a funny, inventive endurance test. If repeated slips make you furious, its joke can wear thin fast.

Retro Replay Review

Gameplay

The first hour of Struggling asks you to make peace with looking incompetent. Troy does not run or jump in the comfortable platform-game sense. You place his two long arms, latch onto surfaces or objects, then pull the shared body through each obstacle. A clean swing or a carefully timed clamber can feel brilliant because you earned it one clumsy inch at a time.

Solo play turns every obstacle into a two-handed puzzle. You are constantly deciding whether one arm should hold firm while the other reaches ahead, and that rhythm starts to click after enough near-disasters. Local co-op changes the same idea into a communication test, with one person handling each arm. When both of you pull in sync, progress feels improbably smooth. When you pull against each other, Troy becomes a very gross rope in a very avoidable tug-of-war.

The route forward stays lively by making you crawl, swing, slide, work around hazards, and interact with things such as levers and dangling eyeballs. Rats and waste pools make failure feel appropriately disgusting, while the dirt-bike sequence gives the journey a welcome jolt of weirdness. Losing an arm is not necessarily the end, since it can regrow, but failed grabs still pile up. Struggling works when you treat those wipeouts as part of the joke. It can become exhausting when the same small mistake sends you into another round of scrambling.

Graphics

Troy is an unforgettable little nightmare: a pale, lumpy head-like body with several eyes, hairy stretched arms, and an anatomy that is funny because it is so unpleasant. In the laboratory areas, he clings to glowing green circular tanks above green liquid and a huge toothed fleshy creature. Dark teal walls, riveted rings, cables, and dull machinery crowd the background, making those bright tanks pop.

Later canyon spaces trade the lab’s murk for warm orange rock, green rounded cacti, and sharp red spines. The bold cartoon outlines keep the grossness playful, although some of the dim lab machinery blends together in shadow. The cacti read much more clearly, which matters when you are trying not to drag Troy straight into them.

Story

Struggling keeps its story simple: you are guiding Troy through a deranged world. That is enough for a game built around physical problem-solving, and it wisely lets the creature, the environments, and the hazards carry the tone.

Do not come in expecting a conventional character drama. Troy’s bizarre body and the world around him make the journey feel strange and comic, but the real momentum comes from reaching the next impossible-looking stretch of terrain.

That light touch is a good fit. More explanation could easily get in the way of the central gag, which is that this grotesque little thing has to somehow haul itself through every awful place in front of it. The game gives you a reason to push onward without pretending the tale is the main event.

Overall Experience

Struggling is a committed physics-comedy platformer that knows failure is part of its entertainment. Its best moments arrive when a plan that looked hopeless suddenly works: one arm catches a ledge, the other swings through, and Troy wriggles free by a hair. Those victories are satisfying precisely because the controls refuse to make them automatic.

It is also a game that can test your patience. Repeated failed grips are more irritating here than in a conventional platformer because every recovery requires careful limb placement. Co-op adds louder laughs and stronger stories of mutual disaster, but it also magnifies frustration if you and your partner cannot agree on the next move.

Give it a shot if you like games that turn awkward control into the challenge and the punchline. Fans of Octodad will recognize the joy of wrestling with unruly limbs, though Struggling is more grotesque and more focused on shared-body traversal. For a closer look at its arm-driven setup and local co-op, the official Steam overview is useful. It is not always pleasant, but it is distinctive enough to make every hard-won escape feel like a story worth telling.