Ever since I played the charmingly brilliant FEZ back in 2012, I have sought out games that play with perspective and space. From Viewfinder to The Outer Wilds, these games sent my mind racing and taught me to enjoy moments where spatial logic collapses and reassembles; where the world you inhabit is the puzzle you must solve, learning its rules to adhere to, bend, and even break them.
In 2025, I caught a glimpse of Cassette Boy, an isometric puzzle adventure game built around rotating your perspective to uncover secrets and hide obstacles. I saw it first at the London Games Festival and later in the year again at Gamescom, but much to my chagrin, the game eluded me. So over the holiday break, I sat down and played the demo for Cassette Boy on Steam to find out if what I had been seeing was worth believing. After just under an hour, the rotation mechanic had proven it wasn’t just a gimmick, but also left me eager to see how far Cassette Boy pushes the idea.
A Strange Vision
The demo opens with our pale, cubic protagonist standing in a near-empty void, a mysterious floating cube calling out to follow it. Interacting with the cube, I am guided forward as it cryptically mentions the moon disappearing due to our not looking at it. We reach a wooden crate, which the cube instructs me to push behind a wall that it raises from the emptiness. I move to the side of the crate, pushing it slowly until it disappears completely from view. The moment the crate is gone, my movement snaps back to normal, and an exclamation appears above my character’s head. In a single sentence, the cube sums up the most fundamental rule of Cassette Boy’s Schrödinger System: “If you don’t see it, it doesn’t exist.” No sooner had I absorbed this principle than the dream ends, leaving me tasked with finding the fragments of the moon.
Hello World!
Waking up in bed, our character wonders if it was just a dream, and I get my first real look at Cassette Boy’s visuals. The game’s world, objects, and inhabitants are all rendered in the nostalgic monochrome green 8-bit style of the original Nintendo Game Boy, an altogether new yet familiar feeling. I talk to Mom, who is both unperturbed by my strange dream and very nonchalant about me going outside to play: typical hands-off video game parenting. Leaving the house, I am greeted by a black cat called Luna, who meows at me before running away, off the top of the screen.
Before following Luna, I spent some time wandering the village, getting a feel for Cassette Boy’s relaxed, low-resolution ambience. Interacting with NPCs, I noticed that the protagonist never spoke directly, instead offering an internal monologue that makes room for a bit of character and funny observations; a small but effective twist on the silent protagonist trope. That sense of familiarity carries into a brief detour north, where I stumble into a very traditional bit of adventure-game business: a legendary sword perched atop a cliff, an NPC hero who can’t quite reach it, and a conveniently placed way up. It’s a light, playful sequence that establishes basic combat and tone, grounding Cassette Boy firmly in genre conventions before it begins to challenge them.
There isn’t much else to do back in the village, so I go the only other available route, which is West, through an exit that leads me to a forest, and a second encounter with Rudin. After defeating a batch of slime enemies, Rudin gives me a key that opens a door deeper in the forest, behind which I find Luna, who promptly runs through a portal in a tree stump. Looks like my first act as a hero was going to be saving a cat from a tree, I thought to myself as I walked into the portal. Sorry, Mom.
Perception Is Reality
It’s here that Cassette Boy begins to break away from genre convention, reintroducing the rules hinted at in its opening moments. While searching for Luna, I pass what looks like a shadowy version of myself and enter a building that pulls me back into the void-like space from the demo’s opening. The talking cube returns, gifting me a pair of headphones that allow the camera to rotate around my character at the tap of a shoulder button, revealing the world from eight distinct viewpoints. The rotation is immediate and fluid, and I quickly find myself spinning the camera back and forth, just to enjoy its implementation.
My path forward is blocked by another shadowy figure, but by rotating the camera ninety degrees and obscuring it behind a wall, the obstacle simply ceases to exist, allowing me to pass through the space it once occupied. Rotating the camera back brings it into view again, but the lesson is already clear. Shortly after, I discovered that rotating the camera quickly can also activate certain objects, causing a previously unseen chest and the bow inside it to appear. Rather than resting on its laurels, Cassette Boy builds confidence by layering small, intuitive applications, hinting at a system with far more room to grow than the demo initially suggests.
Leave Them Wanting More
After utilising the Schrödinger System to solve various other environmental puzzles, I reached the end of the forest, where Luna waited, only to hiss at me and turn into a giant monstrosity! I did my best to keep my distance from the boss, running around the arena and turning the camera to keep my adversary in view. In the heat of battle, I noticed there were symbols on the ground that would activate when I spun the camera fast enough, firing projectiles that did a lot more damage than my sword. Using this ability half a dozen times was enough to defeat Luna, who disappeared, and a moon fragment descended from the sky.
That was where the demo content ended: a brisk 20-minute taster. Stepping through another portal, I woke up in my bed a second time, still wearing the headphones. I decided to explore the village again, rotating the camera to see what might be hidden out of view. After collecting a handful of Ancient Coins, I went back to the main menu and took on the standalone challenges that offered tougher versions of puzzles found in the main game. Not all of them clicked immediately, but even where I stumbled, the rules remained clear, and the solutions felt earned rather than arbitrary.
Cassette Boy’s demo doesn’t exhaust its ideas, but it doesn’t need to. What it offers instead is confidence: in its central mechanic, in its willingness to teach through play, and in a ruleset that feels sturdy enough to support far more complexity than I was shown here. I enjoyed what I played, and if this is only a glimpse of how far the Schrödinger System can be pushed, then I’m keen to see what waits just out of sight.
Cassette Boy, which is developed by Wonderland Kazakiri Inc. and published by Pocketpair Publishing, releases on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series, and Nintendo Switch on January 15th, 2026. A demo is available on Steam, which we included in the May issue of the GSC Demo Disc.
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