Cookie Cutter Overkill Edition

A fierce girl in a red skirt holds a chainsaw, titled "Cookie Cutter," amid a vibrant, urban background.

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Cookie Cutter, the bloody yet oddly beautiful Metroidvania, makes a belated appearance on the Nintendo Switch. Can the aging console handle the collision of gross-out art and frantic button-mashing?

Cut Me A Cookie, I’ll Be Back For Breakfast

After six years of blood, sweat, and tears on behalf of Subcult Games, we now have this eye-catching passion project. Born from an abandoned concept its creator simply could not let go of.

At its core, Cookie Cutter is a 2D Metroidvania with added RPG and beat em-up mechanics that double down on the blood and gore to the point where things get rather stomach-churning. With lovingly handcrafted character assets, the artistry required to bring Cookie Cutter’s world to life is evident and bursts at the seams with energy and charm

Gameplay

Gameplay-wise, Cookie Cutter plays it simple and never gets ideas above its station. Cherry can use light or heavy attacks to crush enemies in a flurry of deadly blows. The light attacks fill your Void meter, and the heavy attacks deplete it. Void can also refill your energy by holding down on the D-pad, but doing so is frustratingly slow. As you smash, crack, and dismember enemies, you will find yourself constantly managing your Void and energy meters. Trying to give Cherry the best chance of survival when the proverbial hits the fan.

Which it does. A lot.

Cherry unleashes a finishing move in Cookie Cutter — Cherry unleashes a deadly finishing move in Cookie Cutter

Story

The game puts you in control of half-android, half-burger waitress Cherry, as she sets off to escape the hellish Megastructure, a dystopian world created by the sinister Infonet corporation. Following a profoundly violent run-in with Infonet, Cherry must reunite with her creator and recover her partially lost memories. On the journey, we meet a similarly oddball ensemble cast, all of whom have been wronged by Infonet and grant Cherry additional powers in return for items that you scour the underground biomes for. The story is heavily front-loaded with an unapologetically distressing opening scene, which should come with a starker warning. More than anything, Cookie Cutter is not backward about being forward.

Cherry faces of against a large enemy in Cookie Cutter and loses — Cherry faces off against a large enemy in Cookie Cutter and loses

Upgrades

Cherry can also be upgraded with expanded energy and strength via items littered throughout and gain extra abilities, which keep the straightforward gameplay from becoming too labored.

It’s to its detriment, therefore that the game waits so long to put a more fully equipped character in your hands. Early progression can feel like a grind with some uneven difficulty. You may find yourself hitting a brick wall in the opening stages, only to breeze through later boss battles with ease once Cherry is more fully featured. It’s a trapping of the genre but feels particularly pronounced here. Disappointingly, there is no way to tune the difficulty down. Only basic gameplay options are available, limited to remapping the controls and altering a few UI elements.

That said, the hand-drawn art rather than the gameplay separates Cookie Cutter from its peers. The luridness may be an acquired taste and comes on like a mid-nineties MTV cartoon like The Head. You may love or hate it, but to make any headway with Cookie Cutter, you’ll have to learn to live with it.

A screetshot depicting some heavy action in Cookie Cutter — When the going gets tough, it’s time to unleash maximum destruction.

Graphics & Audio

Unavoidably for a game that targeted PC and current-gen consoles, there have been some sacrifices to bring Cookie Cutter to the Switch. The scrolling can become choppy when things get busy (as they often do) and the framerate is prone to tanking when the going gets tough. A handful of lockups and one lost save state during my playthrough had my heart racing during each loading screen, for fear that I was about to be kicked back to the console UI.

The 2D art has also undergone some heavy-handed compression to get it up on the screen, sometimes giving the appearance of an mp4 file from 2005. Weirdly, this added to the grunginess of Cookie Cutter’s world and imbued it with an almost digital VHS quality that felt very much on point.

The soundtrack is decidedly less bombastic and remains a background ambiance, save for the occasional boss battle or if you are locked into a room with several enemies. It’s at this point that the chugging guitars and synths take over, only adding to that nineties MTV aesthetic.

Cherry meets the Mudbot in Cookie Cutter — The bosses are impressively large, but their difficulty level varies wildly.

Final Thoughts

If you are a fan of the genre and enjoy games with more blood flying around than a transfusion centre then there’s plenty of fun to be had with Cookie Cutter. Control is responsive and fluid, and the game comes to life in its later portions. Once the power is in your hands, letting rip with a flurry of blows or skewering an enemy with your stratoblaster is a real hoot.

For me, though, the spikes in difficulty and the slow opening hours required to get Cherry into a place that was satisfying left me with mixed feelings. For the majority of its runtime, Cookie Cutter skirts on the edge of greatness. Lacking one original twist or idea to elevate it from the pack.

Overall – I give Cookie Cutter Overkill Edition the Thumb Culture Silver Award.