Pull Stay

Pull Stay is a wacky beat-em-up brawler with tower-defense mechanics, built solo by a developer who frames the project openly as a reflection of his own situation. You play a guardian robot tasked with defending your buddy Susumu — a young jobless guy avoiding social interaction and shutting himself inside his room — from a parade of enemies trying to reach him for various reasons. Some are concerned about him, some want to mock him, some just want to see a hikikomori firsthand. None of them are allowed to actually reach him.

The combat layer covers a real beat-em-up framework. You can learn new moves by hitting each enemy type appropriately, which means encountering new threats is also how you expand your fight repertoire. The trap system is the tower-defense half: 15 silly gadgets unlock as you play, ranging from baked fish missiles to toothpaste turrets to watermelon bazookas. You break the neighbors' houses to collect the materials needed to set traps or build new rooms onto Susumu's house.

Susumu himself is part of the system. He can make power-up items for you as long as you keep him on task — but when he's goofing off, the game's solution is to give him some loving punishment to refocus him. Quirky bosses with their own tactical patterns punctuate the campaign, with their strange appearances often hiding genuinely tricky engagement strategies. The developer's note that he's also a hikikomori making the game alone gives the whole project an unusual personal weight beneath the absurdist surface.