Wield hag magic against glitchy pixel dungeons in this glorious migraine of a platformer

In these days of combing online imagery for symptoms of genAI “hallucination”, it’s easy to forget that once upon a time, mutant video game visuals were beautiful. There’s a whole genre of art dedicated to them. Here to remind us is Babushka’s Glitch Dungeon Crystal, a gorgeously scruffy 2D platformer in which an old lady explores a big magic cellar, hitting graphics card malfunctions with a broom. Think Animal Well, but both you and the simulation aren’t as young as you used to be.

Babushka’s Glitch Dungeon Crystal is the work of Jakeonaut, who is partial to busted pixels. It launched on Saturday and still has a demo on Steam, which I encourage you to try. The world is made up of fizzy, marbled terrain tiles, wavering clots of white noise, and anomalous 3D fixtures. It’s like the game’s carcass is being feasted on by a bunch of different aesthetics. More literally, the geography also teems with critters such as frogs, crickets and chickens who can be meddled with to various end. I walloped a cricket and it chewed a hole through some scenery for me, which almost never happens in real life.

The protagonist is no less delightful for her determinedly low-tech method of making headway. Ah, if only I could fix my old iBook’s addled GPU by smacking it with a dustpan and brush. Mind you, it’s not all flailing broomsticks. You can also learn “hag magic” spells from totems, switching between them with spacebar.

These include higher jumps, the ability to climb up walls, and walking on air. It’s a familiar collection of platformer abilities, perhaps, but there’s the promise of others that let you “glitch” the levels more adventurously. You can only remember two spells at once because, as a tutorial NPC politely explains, you’re old. You also forget spells when you walk through certain errors, which feels like a device the developer will use to bookend the game’s puzzles. There’s a gloomier undertow: the Steam page mentions themes of “aging, senescence, and fear of mortality.”

Find a demo on Steam or Itch.io. Sold on this? You might also like to try Axiom Verge. Or for something that loosely fits the designation of being a game about glitches, but has a lot more going on than that, try Problem Attic.