BREKEKEKEX takes the lock-on off and makes you aim the sword

It is a short, single-player, third-person brawler set in a foggy swamp overrun with frogs, cultists, bandits and worse. There is no RPG scaffolding underneath it — no skill trees to grind, no stats to pad, no build that carries you. What you have is a character, a weapon with weight, and however well you can read a room full of things that want to land on you.

The unusual part is the aiming. There is no hard lock-on. The game takes its cues from anime arena fighters, which normally solve the problem of a three-dimensional melee fight by nailing the camera to whoever you picked, and then throws that solution away in favour of free aim. Attacks strike where you point them. Missing is now something you can do to yourself.

That one removal changes what the attack buttons are for. A horizontal swing sweeps a group; a vertical one comes down on a single body. Directional inputs open a full set of grounded and aerial moves, so choosing between them is a reading of the spacing rather than a memorised string. The question stops being which combo you know and becomes how many of them are in front of you, and where.

Defence is the other half, and it is entirely made of movement. You cannot tank hits. Survival is blocks, dodges and managing whatever resource those cost, in a fight that stays close-range and punishingly fast — the developer’s own phrase is that one bad step puts you in the mud. There are several playable characters, each with their own movement, weapons and combat style, which means momentum and spacing have to be relearned rather than transferred.

The Challenge of Cameras argues that a camera is not a viewpoint but a design decision: it sets what the player can read and how close the action feels. In a free-aim melee game that stops being a supporting argument and becomes the whole load-bearing wall. The camera is the aiming device, so every complaint about a missed swing is a complaint about framing, and a swamp full of fog is a deliberately hostile place to put that test.

The Secret of Mario’s Jump (and other Versatile Verbs) makes the case that a great verb is one where timing, speed and direction produce wildly different outcomes from the same input. That is exactly the bet here. Horizontal and vertical are not two moves on a list, they are one swing asked to mean two things, and the game only has depth if the difference between them is something you feel in the third minute rather than something you read in a menu.

Depth, Mastery, and Vanquish is the one that names the risk. Vanquish holds up because it has an easy surface over expressive depth — you can play it badly and still move, and the ceiling is somewhere else entirely. A game that has deleted its stats has also deleted its safety net: there is no upgrade to buy when a fight goes badly, so the early minutes have to be forgiving enough that a new player finds the floor before the swamp finds them.

BREKEKEKEX is developed and self-published by nohost, listed as coming soon on Windows, under Action, Adventure and Indie. It is single-player only, which is worth noticing given the arena-fighter inspiration — the reference is being used for how a fight is aimed and spaced, not for a versus mode.

Short is doing real work in that description. A skill-driven brawler with no progression has nothing to stretch itself with, so the honest length is however long the moveset stays interesting. Saying so on the store page is a better sign than a promised twenty hours would be.

If the appeal is close-range melee where you are never allowed to become powerful, Stray Dog is the other one on this list — a soulslike that keeps you a nameless hound rather than letting you grow into a hero, and asks the same thing of you: read the swing coming at you, and answer it with position.