Nothing cures a boring weekend quite like having a digital parasite graft onto your skull and scream for alien blood. When Mommy’s Best Games first dropped ChainStaff, I was expecting a straightforward throwback. Instead, the screen completely lit up with laser fire and had me sweating bullets right away. If you love uncompromising side-scrolling action platformers, ChainStaff offers an incredibly punishing ride. You drop into an opening room filled with active hazard turrets and incoming mutant swarms. They rip through your health bar before you can even find the exit. This side-scroller drops you into situations where second guessing guarantees a quick trip back to your last checkpoint.
My spent my entire Saturday afternoon getting absolutely wrecked by the opening corridor. The jumping has a heavy, sudden drop. It sent me straight into floor spikes every single time I tried to rush through. Clearing that initial wall of turrets forced me to change how I moved completely. It proves right away that you can’t just sprint your way through. This campaign refuses to baby your progress. Your survival rests entirely on how quickly you adapt to the stage design. I treated the opening rooms too casually and got ripped apart by aggressive alien placement.
You’re forced to actively monitor enemy positions from multiple angles, treating every combat arena like a tactical puzzle. ChainStaff balances punishing environments with immediate button response. It ticks away your life points instantly but keeps you hooked for one more attempt. Instead of recycling safe concepts, ChainStaff builds an identity around aggressive forward movement. Trying to treat these vertical gaps like a modern platformer will get you killed instantly. Survival means measuring the exact arc of your staff throw.
Grotesque head mutations force punishing moral choices
Sgt. Jesse Varlette wakes up from a botched extraterrestrial experiment with a terrifying uninvited guest hardwired straight into his nervous system. Known to his squad mates simply as Var, this soldier is stuck acting as an unwilling lab rat while Earth gets completely overrun by alien bugs spawned directly from Star Spores. The military calls this ecological catastrophe The Encroachment. To keep Var alive, that alien parasite has to stay bound directly to his skull, because trying to tear it off kills him instantly. This horrifying biological fusion forces you to navigate ten levels completely packed with branching corridors and hidden secrets.
Your interactions with the remaining military forces dictate how the story unrolls. You get a clear choice between acting as an angel or a devil. When you locate downed soldiers scattered through swamp-like areas or icy caverns, you face an immediate moral crossroad. Sucking their brains out or eating their hearts provides an immediate firepower boost or a health increase. Doing this forces a steep cost to your remaining humanity, causing other characters to treat you with severe hostility. While playing, the story shifted when I gave in to the hunger during a difficult campaign attempt.
The campaign branches based on your immediate choice tracks. This alters dialogue scenes and dictates which non-linear branching corridors unlock next across all ten levels. You’re actively deciding Var’s remaining soul. Each branch yields unique dialogue exchanges that pay off when you test the boundaries of your monstrous transformations. Your choices shape the final outcome directly. Every soldier you pass is a decision the game remembers. The path that opens up after reflects exactly what kind of person Var is becoming.
Steel spikes and grappling swings turn these alien corridors into an absolute blast
Jamming a steel spike directly into a plaster ceiling to swing clear of green laser fire is an absolute blast. You can launch your weapon straight ahead or throw it in an arc. Planting it directly into vertical surfaces constructs temporary platforms. It functions as a shield to block incoming attacks and works as a grappling hook across wide gaps. It even allows mid-use repositioning for better combat angles. Holding the shoulder button throws the implement forward to create an instant bridge over toxic pools. Slapping it straight into a wall lets you vault clean over an incoming wall of fire.
You also carry an automatic side arm. Activating the firing input shoots a full-spread cover fire spray in all directions to handle small enemy swarms. If you choose to rescue downed soldiers instead of harvesting them, you earn tech points. These unlock secondary weapons such as orbiting mines or homing shots to expand your tactical options. Collecting chain staff fragments permanently upgrades your base weapon reach, damage, and charge speed. Additional parasites provide specialized traversal abilities, letting you utilize a double jump, execute explosive attacks, or float across hazardous terrain.
Unlocking the explosive parasitic stomp or the float upgrade changes how you navigate older zones. You’re forced to double back to earlier corridors to crack open hidden paths left behind on your first pass. Your progression forces you to use these tools to gather Star Spores to unlock subsequent branching stages. Once you complete the full campaign, New Game Plus lets you explore alternate outcomes. This completion mode unlocks alternate paths with your upgraded gear.
Retro science fiction styling
The visual framework relies on a blend of 1960s sci-fi concepts and psychedelic artwork. It looks like a 1970s rock album cover illustration. Moving from swamps over to frozen caverns means trading toxic green sludge hazards for slick floors and bottomless pit drops. ChainStaff has a wide variety of enemies raning from floating monstrosities to armoured beetle-like creatures. Deon van Heerden handles the audio score, providing a rock-driven soundtrack that pumps energetic melodies through every corridor. These heavy audio arrangements repeat during long exploration stretches, matching the raw visual energy of the side-scrolling stages. Cutscenes utilize a distinct motion comic layout to transition between major campaign acts.
Playing on Nintendo Switch, it’s apparent that there are some optimization issues with ChainStaff. The moment crossfire got heavy, the whole thing started stuttering like it was running on fumes. Worse, I experienced game crashes directly at the extraction zones at the end of multiple levels. This wiped out my progress instantly. I also came across invisible walls that stopped my jumping paths mid-air, causing Var to drop straight into instant-death hazards.
It looks exactly like it should, but the performance issues don’t just annoy you, they actively get you killed at the worst possible moments. If you choose to play ChainStaff on the Nintendo Switch, expect a bumpy ride, for now atleast.
ChainStaff offers a grueling retro challenge
Mommy’s Best Games didn’t create a flawless package here, but ChainStaff succeeds exactly where it counts for diehard action fans. The multi-functional chain weapon is an absolute blast to control once you commit it to muscle memory. It changes how you approach platforming and defense simultaneously. You’ll love the freedom of jamming your staff into an alien mouth or swinging across a frozen cavern.
Choosing between saving soldiers for tech upgrades or harvesting them for raw power gives you a real reason to play the campaign again just to see how the other path plays out. The Nintendo Switch version makes that harder to stomach than it should be, because underneath the bugs there’s a genuinely clever game fighting to get out.
Despite that, the retro science-fiction style and pumping rock audio track create a high-energy atmosphere. ChainStaff offers a wide range of paths and branching endings that make it worthwhile. You aren’t getting a casual experience, but you’re getting an honest throwback that doesn’t compromise its vision.
ChainStaff isn’t here to hold your hand or meet you halfway. When I finally finally beat the game, my hand were cramped and sweaty. Staring at that extraction screen, all I felt was pure, exhausted relief. If you can live with the Nintendo Switch version’s issues, until an update comes out or you play on a different platform, that feeling alone makes the whole brutal ride worth it.
ChainStaff
Summary
ChainStaff is a genuinely clever, uncompromising action platformer. The chain weapon is inventive and fun to master, the moral choice paths give you real reasons to play again, and the retro sci-fi look hits exactly the right notes. The frame drops, crashes, and invisible walls on Nintendo Switch are bad enough to derail all of that. Hold off on the Nintendo Switch version until a patch lands, but if you’re playing on another platform, this one’s worth your time.
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