Veteran developer Nathan Fouts of Mommy’s Best Games brings a brutal, one-weapon-wonder action platformer to Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox — and it looks absolutely unhinged in the best way.

There are action platformers, and then there are action platformers that make you ask “wait, how is this all done with one button?” ChainStaff, the new brutal 80s sci-fi brawler from indie veteran Nathan Fouts and Mommy’s Best Games, is firmly in that second category. It launches April 8 on Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, and Xbox One and Xbox Series X, and pre-orders are already open right now.

Fouts is not a name you may know off the top of your head, but his credits speak for themselves. He cut his teeth at Insomniac Games on Resistance: Fall of Man and Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Mass Destruction before going independent and building a catalog of wildly creative action games under the Mommy’s Best Games banner. ChainStaff looks like the culmination of everything he has learned about making weird, joyful, kinetic action games.

Available April 8, 2025
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X
Pre-orders open now
Americas and Europe (Switch and PS4/PS5) · Worldwide (Xbox)

The Weapon That Changes Everything

The entire game is built around a single transforming weapon: the ChainStaff. It is a grappling hook that can become a spear, a shield, and more, all controlled with a single button. No context menus. No ability wheels. Just you, your ingenuity, and the ChainStaff. Hurl it as a spear to slice aliens clean in half. Plant it as a shield to deflect incoming attacks. Swing across gaps on just about any surface. The same weapon does all of it, and the depth comes entirely from how creatively you use it.

Fouts himself summed it up best in his own words:

“The ChainStaff is a truly multi-useful weapon and it is all controlled with mainly just a single button. There are no context menus to select, there is no build the bridge button, it is always just the ChainStaff and your own mind and ingenuity.”— Nathan Fouts, Director and Game Designer

That design philosophy is genuinely exciting. Single-tool game design done well forces players to think laterally, and every boss in ChainStaff is built around a new way to think about what the weapon can do. Break apart their teeth, pry open gigantic jaws, find the angle the designers did not telegraph. That is the stuff action game fans remember long after the credits roll.

Grotesque Choices, Real Consequences

The upgrade system takes the game somewhere genuinely surprising. Scattered across the world are stranded soldiers who need rescuing. The catch? You can rescue them for one set of rewards, or you can devour their organs for another. Both paths unlock upgrades across two separate tech trees, and the choices you make along the way feed into three distinct endings. This is not a cosmetic moral system. It changes what your character becomes, and it changes how the game ends.

It is the kind of mechanic that makes you want to play through twice, and with New Game Plus available alongside a tight four to six hour runtime, the game seems designed with exactly that in mind.

What You Are Getting Into

10 Wild Levels
Each level is described as a classic rock album cover come to life. If that does not sell you immediately, nothing will.

Massive Transforming Bosses
Every boss fight is designed around a new way to use the ChainStaff. These are not damage sponges. They are puzzles with teeth.

A Soundtrack Built for This
The score is handled by Deon van Heerden, the composer behind the iconic Broforce soundtrack and Warhammer 40k: Shootas Blood and Teef. Classic metal energy, through and through.

3 Unique Endings and New Game Plus
Your organ-eating decisions have consequences. All three endings are worth seeing, and carrying your upgrades into a second run is a real draw.

A Boutique Studio With a Serious Pedigree

Mommy’s Best Games has been at this since 2007, and they have built a reputation for taking classic action genres and bending them into something unexpected. Pig Eat Ball, Shoot 1UP, Explosionade, Weapon of Choice — these are games that found dedicated audiences because they had a genuine point of view. ChainStaff looks like the most ambitious thing Fouts has made yet.

The console ports are being handled by Super Soul, a Lexington-based developer who has become the go-to studio for bringing Mommy’s Best Games catalog to modern platforms. Their work on Pig Eat Ball, Shoot 1UP DX, and Weapon of Choice DX means they know this catalog inside and out, which is about as good a sign as you can get for a multiplatform launch.

Worth Your Attention on April 8?

If you are a fan of tight, creative action games with a bold aesthetic and a killer soundtrack, ChainStaff belongs on your radar right now. Pre-orders are live for Nintendo Switch in North America and for Xbox One worldwide. The PlayStation and European Switch listings are coming soon.

A four to six hour runtime, three endings, New Game Plus, ten levels that look like metal album covers, and a single weapon that does everything. That is a tight, confident package from a developer who has been building toward something like this for nearly two decades.

ChainStaff launches April 8, 2025 on Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.