To R.E.A.C.H. For The Stars But Falter - A Review of REPLACED

Warren-ty Required

I love noir, I love cyberpunk (not the game, haven't played it yet) and I love a good soundtrack with gorgeous visuals. Sad Cat Studios have nailed a lot of what I just talked about with REPLACED. A brand new indie cyberpunk 2.5d action platformer (try saying that 5 times fast!) that has been in development for over 8 years now and is one of the most wishlisted games on Steam.

And it's also incredibly frustrating.

But before I get to that, let's talk about REPLACED.

You start as a man named Warren Marsh whose brain has been taken over by an AI named R.E.A.C.H. but for my grammatical sanity I'll be referring to them simply as Reach. Your mission throughout the game is to give Warren control back over his body. That mission, of course, will not be easy as you scamper through sewers, jump past obstacles, and duke it out with all kinds of corrupt police.

Classic cyberpunk! Complete with beautiful technicolor, retro 80s pixels, fantastic lighting in the background, and a strong aesthetic presentation more generally. I took nearly 200 screenshots of this game. I cannot emphasize enough how beautiful this game is, it has one of the strongest (if not the strongest) aesthetic choice in 2026. The animation work is also incredibly good, the executions you can perform are always cool, I took quite a few screenshots of those as well.

Sad Cat Studios should be proud.

The combat is also quite good. It garnered a lot of comparison to the Batman Arkham games and that ended up being, more or less, accurate. You counter based on a yellow prompt, dodge based on a red prompt, deal with bigger enemies, opponents with riot shields, you have special moves and gadgets, etc.

But there are ways in which this isn't Arkham Batman. For starters, Reach has a gun which he uses quite frequently. Reach also (and quite violently) kills people. I'm not sure of the exact count but I must've killed over 100 enemies in this game, a large portion of which were corrupt cops, Batman would never.

On top of those differences however, I would add that Reach does not move nearly as quickly or flawlessly as those games, especially City, had Batman move quite fluidly throughout a given battle arena. Reach is not quite that speedy, and can in fact stumble every now and then. Sometimes it feels like moves are a bit clunky or slow, enemies can be much faster or even tank your hits if they're in the middle of an animation, and sometimes you end up shooting the wrong way.

And while there are cool abilities they often feel underused or too sporadic because the audio/visual cues for them can be subtle. This is especially true when you are doing your best to fight around 10 guys with 5 in the background like the Foot Clan in the live action TMNT movie back in the 90s.

Much of that does not matter in the early stages of REPLACED but towards the end you will need to be juggling multiple gadgets, abilities, and meters, to make sure you live through each fight. Thankfully there are accessibility options and you can change the difficulty from easy, normal, or hard, at any time.

Unfortunately, the accessibility options do not help the platforming.

Full disclosure: I am not the biggest fan of platforming nor am I particularly good at it. But hey, I grew up playing Spyro, Crash Bandicoot, Banjo & Kazooie, and many other platformers, I have the pedigree to know a good platformer when I see it. I've played more recent action platformers like Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, Astro Bot, and It Takes Two, so again, I know a good platformer when I see it.

I've also played bad platformers like Croc: Legend of the Gobbos (sorry Croc, still love you buddy!), I remember playing The Great Maze in Brawl and how much of a pain it was. Not to mention all of the countless bad discount platformers as a child.

REPLACED is definitely closer to the latter category of games, than the former.

The problem is threefold, as problems often are:

1. The checkpoint system is, at best, lackluster. Charitably I could say that the developers wanted the platforming to be challenging and have players test their patience. But then you have checkpoints immediately from simply interacting with a random object or talking to a random NPC. It's more likely the checkpoint system just wasn't very well thought out. This results in stretches of platforming where even one mistake can cause you minutes of lost progress over and over again until you're (hypothetically) yelling at pixels.
2. That's because there are way too many instant death mechanics in this game. Almost everything in this game when it comes to platforming kills you. Did you accidentally moved too far to the left? Death. Did your arm graze that hot air? Death. Did the game make it unclear where to go next? Believe it or not? Death!
3. But the platforming fundamentals are solid, right? Well, no. Remember that part about "accidentally going too far to the left"? That's due to how finicky the platforming feels. Didn't make a jump? Better pull yourself up incredibly slowly while you're being hunted (which when it catches up will instantly kill you, naturally). More than a few times when I simply wanted to let go of an object Reach jumped somewhere else and I instantly died. You can imagine how much progress I lost each time this happened based on the checkpoint system.

Far and away the most frustrating part of this game for me was the platforming and this does not even touch on the fact that sometimes how beautiful and engrossing the pixel art can be hurts the platforming. I had a hard time finding certain latchable sections with Reach's pickax, sometimes I could not tell what I should jump to or should not, and combat can be hurt by this too as mentioned.

And look, I wanted to love this game, and I came away from it still liking it to be clear, but not having a solid checkpoint system (like Celeste for example, or Shotgun Copman) is just unacceptable in 2026. I know REPLACED is technically set in an alternate 1980s, but that doesn't mean we still have to play like it is.

But it's not all doom and gloom, there's a lot of good here too.

Arcade (on) Fire

One of the coolest things about REPLACED is it was not content with only telling a linear action-platformer driven story. There are also cool characters to meet, great writing to behold, and side quests to engage with. Now, none of these side quests are necessarily worth writing home about. I am not even sure what your hypothetical parents would even say, but it certainly would not be much!

No, REPLACED does not have the strongest side quests, some of them are fetch quests, some of them are collectibles, and one of them is all about helping a little girl with her (very obviously autistic) interest in arcade cabinets. Throughout this game you find a little girl whose just chilling by herself in an arcade next to your hub (her mom is away at work) and she wants you to beat her high scores.

Pfft, do not cite the deep magic to me, child!

Anyways, you end up playing an off-brand arcade game or two, but the rewards you get for this (and the other side quests throughout the game) are almost always worth it. I would not say the journey of these quests is ever the best part, though some characters make it more interesting than others. But you may get more health, an ability to generate energy to recharge your meters for specials faster, you also get an ability to avoid death once, though it never worked for me.

I found these arcade games charming and frustrating in equal measure. I admit I hadn't played some of the games they were clearly inspired by in quite a while so my skills were rusty at best. This made for some agonizing failures but also some incredible moments of victory when I finally beat the high score.

Take that small child!

...And now I just look sad.

Anyways, I found all of the side quests to be worth doing even if they aren't in of themselves particularly memorable or designed incredibly. There's something to be said about a bog standard side quest that gives you a super solid reward and makes you feel like its all worth it anyways. Plus, the characters are good!

Still, I cannot deny that the pacing of this game is harmed by these pit stops and although the side quests are optional they never really felt that way because of how good the rewards always were. This is especially true when you get further into REPLACED and you are getting hit by more powerful and numerous enemies. The pacing also gets hurt by a lack of being able to skip dialogue once you are done reading it. This may seem minor (and it is, relatively) but it adds up over time.

Getting back to characters, I do not want to get too deep into spoiler territory here but suffice it to say all of the characters have backstories, motivations, strengths as well as weaknesses to examine. I never felt like anyone was written particularly badly, besides a late-game plot twist that had me scratching my head a little.

Reach himself is playing the "fish out of water" trope that we all know so well. The "I can't believe you humans live like this" kind of story. But it's done well in the same way that Drax from Guardians of the Galaxy says that a joke would not go over his head because he would simply catch it. Yeah, exactly like that.

In some ways Reach reminded me of myself and other autistic people because how often he was confused by the people around him. Certain social norms he simply did not understand or find very intuitive. When people tried to make jokes, crack wise, or otherwise do a play on words, he might find himself confused at times.

I suppose I am not doing the whole "autistic people are just robots" stereotype any favors here. But the stereotype comes from the (mistaken) belief that autistic people can never learn, are unemotional, and struggle with empathy inherently. Reach shows some of these same struggles but also does their best to rise above them as you go through the game. It is a classic tale, but one that worked.

Elsewhere, you have the impetuous young man named Tempest who is bent on avenging his father and helping his community. His partner Veronica is a dedicated nurse but spends much more time taking care of others than of herself, a classic for those in the healthcare industry. And likely a reason some folks go into that field to begin with, they want to feel useful to society, at any cost.

There are some, let us say, less kind individuals in the game too. While there is no single central antagonist, Reach often finds himself warring against The Phoenix Corporation. A company that helped rebuild America after a nuclear accident made much of America unlivable. Honestly, the real villain of this game is, and I know it is cliche' but stick with me, society. And no, not in the Joker kind of way, but in the "uh capitalism is bad, actually" way. Which is good! The game does not beat you over the head with its political messages, but they are obviously there.

Of course, there is also a lot of commentary on AI and how that is being used by mega corporations. But you could have written this same exact plot out in the 1980s and it still would have made sense to people. That is to say, there is not a lot of ingenuity that this game is bringing plot wise.

If I had to criticize any part of the writing, its that it does feel very formulaic and trope-heavy at times. One minor example here are simply too many times Reach falls from a far height, just to have the screen warble and fizzle and then Reach is perfectly fine. It happens so much even Reach themselves comments on it.

But admittedly, those are nitpicks. The writing overall is solid, the characters feel real, the audio logs (only readable) are excellent at setting the scene for what has happened, and the world feels lived in. There are some big threads left unattended to by the end of the game, but those feel intentional and whether Sad Cat Studios decides to make a sequel or not, they told an overall solid story.

A GEM in the Rough

There is no doubt in my mind that many folks will love REPLACED. And they should! It has strong action, an incredible aesthetic, and the soundtrack, I have not even touched on it, but it is amazing so allow me to rectify that.

In a word: Haunting. The soundtrack of REPLACED feels like it is lost in a techno dystopia where the ceilings are never-ending and the walls reflect. And when there are vocals the singers are more like town criers, screaming about an end of the world that has already happened and that we are far too late to do anything about.

There is also a physical device that you can interact with, a PDF I guess you would call it, that means you can always re-listen to your favorite tracks. That is, if you are lucky enough to find them out in the game itself. I found quite a few just by doing a basic search of my environment, so I am sure completionists will get even more out of this game than that. But yes, the soundtrack is excellent.

What's not excellent, is the hacking minigame.

This minigame involves a Tetris like setup where you have to match some symbols on the left with symbols that would fill the pattern on the right.

Unfortunately, REPLACED feels this puzzle is very intuitive and does not require much explanation apart from a sparse tutorial. So it doesn't! And this led me to spending nearly 20 minutes on the first instance of the hacking minigame wondering how I was supposed to do it. All REPLACED tells you is that you need "complementary patterns" but it does not do anything more to explain.

This roadblock nearly spelled the end for my time with REPLACED. I thought I would never get it, my sense for pattern recognition did not seem up to snuff. But eventually I realized that it kind of was a matching game like I originally thought. You need to look at the pattern on the right, hone in on one notable section and see what pattern matches it the most on the right hand side, it usually worked.

The problem is you are under a timer and that timer goes down even faster when you get something wrong. I know I am not the only one to find it frustrating as I posted on the Steam discussion boards about this (I was desperate). The first time I completed it I was so happy and the unhelpful tutorial had been so long ago that I forgot to toggle off the obstacle in front of me. So I just walked right into what I had been trying to turn off the whole time and, well, would you believe me if I told you Reach instantly died and I hadn't gotten a checkpoint for hacking it?

Luckily, I eventually got through the hacking minigame, but I am not really sure who was asking for one of these in the year of our Lorde 2026. I certainly was not!

The last thing I want to mention may get me some flack, but it is worth saying.

Sad Cat Studios was made by some fine folks from Europe, specifically near Ukraine and Russia. They released an anti-war statement towards the Russian aggression in Ukraine and announced the studio were moving as a result.

REPLACED is also at least partially funded by GEM Capital, a Russian corporation that invests in war profiteering. REPLACED is about the horrors of capitalism, war, oppression, etc. You can see the problem, I'm sure.

Now, I am not into holier than thou speeches, I think of Tom Morello and his quote about Rage Against The Machine being under Sony or having their records in Barnes and Noble and playing big shows, etc. You have to meet people where they are, not where you wish they were, for accessibility if nothing else.

I'm currently typing on my Nitro V 15 which runs Windows. Which is in turn owned by Microsoft and they are named in a boycott movement involving the Palestinian genocide caused by Israel. I use a smartphone made by Google, a company that is currently investing millions (if not billions) of dollars into AI, a technology that is causing ecological damage, taking away jobs from hard-working artists, and can generally be harmful for our brains to engage with.

My point is that I am not immune to criticism or hypocrisy. Indie developers need to eat like everyone else. There is also something to be said about using the enemies money against the enemy, especially if they may not get it back.

Still, I'm also not going to give Sad Cat Studios a free pass on this. It does not look good when they have an investor on the scale of millions who is helping the very people they criticize (Russians) develop weapons to kill Ukrainians. It just does not make for a very compelling anti-war statement and hurts that message overall.

One final thing, when I started played REPLACED, not a lot of reviews were out, this was my mistake because if I had waited for them I would've seen that it is now (at time of writing) at "Mostly Positive" instead of "Very Positive" (75% vs 82%). But I was so excited to play REPLACED I decided to go in semi-blind. After all, I had played the demo and liked it, it was only $20 for over 8 hours, and I was enraptured by the graphical design, the trailers, and the music, so I took a risk.

But now, you have many players complaining about what I am: The gameplay is finicky, the combat can be clunky and overwhelming (multiple prompts need to be reacted to at a time), the checkpoint systems are underdeveloped making platforming feel like a chore. Obviously, I bought into the hype for better or worse.

But ultimately, I still liked a lot of REPLACED. The music, much of the combat, the visuals, and most of the writing. Unfortunately, the problem comes in when REPLACED tries to do anything more. The puzzles felt unoriginal at best and tedious at worst, the platforming was agonizing, especially as the game went on, and my patience wore thin as I got close to the end, despite solid combat.

As such, REPLACED is good, but is can't quite Reach true greatness.

Score: 3.75/5