The Indie Informer

It might seem silly, but there are few things I find more relatable than the meme that’s two pictures of Daisy in Smash Bros. Ultimate that reads, “Are you tired of being nice? Don’t you just want to go ape shit?” In the current world we’re living in, I am tired of being nice, actually, and I do sometimes “just want to go ape shit.” I’m exhausted and burnt out, but luckily, Stick It to the Stickman is here to provide some much-needed catharsis. In 2025, a game about kicking your way through your office building to go fight your boss has never been more relatable.

Stick It to the Stickman is a straightforward 2D brawler. It has the player pick a set loadout at the start of each run to use to fight their way to the top of a dreary office building. Once you reach the top, you become the new boss. Each loadout cycles through a small handful of upgradable moves each time you attack, and the sheer number of enemies you’ll need to fight at once as you get closer to the top of the building means that you’ll most likely spend your time with the game mashing the attack button and hoping for the best.

While that might sound pretty simple (because, I mean, it is,) the combat feels very scrappy and like each fight is taking place in a frantic, coffee-fueled rage. Bodies go flying everywhere thanks to the gooey physics engine, and sometimes punches you meant to land on one person end up completely missing as you tumble to the ground and scramble to get back to your feet. Despite the simplicity of the moment-to-moment combat, Stick It’s real complexity lies in planning each run, upgrading your attacks, and seeing what kind of office-related jokes the game will throw at you next. The combat largely exists to prove if you’ve made the right choices in planning things out.

Stick It to the Stickman is developed by Free Lives, the indie team responsible for games like Broforce and Anger Foot, among others. Free Lives’ games tend to dip a toe into over-the-top humor that leans heavily on pop-culture references. That sort of humor is back for Stick It, but it didn’t really land with me. Humor is such a subjective thing. Sometimes the humor can feel a little mean-spirited, but when I was starting to feel that way, I took a step back and realized that the entire premise is a little off-color. I took comfort in the idea that, sometimes, there’s catharsis in basking in the feeling of wanting to march up to your boss’ office and give him a real thrashing (in a cartoonish way).

While the humor didn’t quite land for me, the frantic combat and the roguelike elements made Stick It to the Stickman fun to return to between sessions. I was running into a progress wall after an hour or so, but it was because I wasn’t paying close attention to my loadouts and to the additional moves I was picking up as I was fighting through the office. On the surface, the game masquerades as a more mindless button-mashing brawler meant to deliver catharsis by spamming kick attacks and throwing coffee mugs, but it wasn’t until I hit that wall that I realized that it’s a little more thoughtful than that. Not too much more thoughtful, this is a game where you “haduken” your coworkers out of windows for committing the crime of wanting to keep their jobs.

Stick It to the Stickman is still in Early Access, which means that some bits are still a little uneven. Some enemies have guns and will insta-kill you from any distance if you let them get a shot off. This feels like it conflicts with the game’s often much less precise combat. Sometimes the physics bugs out so you end up trapped under a writhing mass of enemies who can all attack you at once, but I expect those sorts of balance changes to come as the game continues its development and takes a more finalized shape.

In a world full of near-constant layoffs, increased quotas, and corporate greed, Stick It to the Stickman exists as a way to live out the fantasy of showing your boss what you think of the idea of “more work for less pay.” It might feel a little mean-spirited at times, but all it takes is remembering the sting of being laid off or counting the digits in your company’s CEO’s yearly bonus to remind you that maybe there are worse things to play out in a video game.