Glum is not your usual hero – if he’s a hero at all, that is – but when the ruler of his realm and all the more typical strongmen and magic-wielders are ousted in a surprise coup, it’s up to Glum to save the day. The one problem is, he’s just a weedy goblin, a crude, rage-filled janitor who’s not very good at fighting and only has one magical boot to help him on his way.
In what CinderCat call a ‘First Person Booter’, kicking is your one and only offensive weapon, but even that isn’t really a weapon in the traditional sense. This magical force boot is basically only good for shoving things quite hard, so you have to use this in creative ways, pushing enemies around and using the environment to deal damage, rack up combo scores, and play around.
The initial inspiration for Glum came from 2006’s Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, where you could stick the boot in as part of the game’s blend of first-person action RPG combat. Kicking didn’t deal damage, but could shove enemies back, pushing them down stairs, out windows, into spike racks and more. As Glum strips away all the other attacking options, it’s that one idea that provides the lynchpin for its combat and its traversal.
You kick to do literally everything in Glum. If you need to open a door? You kick it (and you can charge up your kick to completely smash the door). Want to boot farmyard animals? You can do that. Need to get up to that ledge? Just jump and then wall-kick from an opposing surface to propel yourself up there. Heck, you even kick your way through dialogue in the game!
This all feeds into sandbox levels, the opening area of the game being a traditional-looking fantasy city, but it’s one that’s filled with cruel and unusual hazards. You can kick enemies into public toilets to have them swallowed up whole, kick them into unattended meat grinders and get a little sausage in return – this is a chicken nugget if you kick a chicken into one – kick them into bounce platforms to fling them across the world, into furnaces, and on and on.
As you progress, the magical boot gains more abilities, including the Boot-zooka, where you aim your boot and blast it from your foot to clobber someone from a distance. The Foot Fish, on the other hand, will pull enemies and objects toward you which, if you’re in motion and have good aim, gives you the chance to chain a kick together and send them off in a totally new direction.
It’s all about “play with your food” gameplay, as CinderCat call it, like a cat playing with a mouse before eating it. That’s pretty morbid when you think about it for too long (or when you find a deceased mouse buried behind your shoe rack a week later), but in this game it’s a kind of whimsical violence that will light up the eyes of anyone who loves shooters that reward deft movement and skill.
It will all build up, in this first level, to a boss fight against a combine harvester and showdown against Major A.S.S Lesley, but throughout there’s a score attack being totted up in the top corner of the screen, tracking the chaos as you progress through the game.
If the Major’s name didn’t give you a clue, then running through the game is a childish, puerile sense of humour. Glum is not a nice goblin, with a dedicated taunt button that doesn’t affect your score, but will let you give a one-fingered salute to anyone and anything in the game. I think it will be interesting to see how CinderCat balances that crudeness with being funny throughout, no doubt aiming to strike the kind of filthy balance that Conker’s Bad Fur Day managed 25 years ago.
There’s an uplifting story to the game’s development and the team in general, given the difficult times that are faced across the industry. CinderCat Games is a small indie team that was founded while a group of Masters degree students went through their final years of higher education. Having come together in 2021, they eventually managed to go full-time together after completing their degrees, got an initial batch of funding, and were able to take this First Person Booter around to publishers with a lot of positive interest. Interest that dried up in 2023, putting the project and company at risk, until they were able to pound the floor, speak to more investors and get the funding in the middle of last year to let them continue.
Now Glum is prepping for a kick and a jump into Steam Early Access on 22nd May, looking to build a community around the game to feed even more into the broader game design, world building and story. There’s already plans for a second map in the summer, and a third, spooky map in time for Halloween.