ChronoDojo is one of the most interesting games to have debuted during last October’s Next Fest, and it’s finally available on Steam. 

On the off chance that you skipped the demo, here’s the lowdown. 

ChronoDojo is a couch co-op tower defense beat-em-up with elements of time-travel. It sees you beating the living daylights out of waves of evil goons as you attempt to master the ancient art of Chrono-Fu. 

In the process you can adopt a rainbow-horned combat narwhal, or a bubble-spewing nautipod. 

Don’t worry: it’s not supposed to make sense. 

Developed by StarCouch Studio, ChronoDojo is a frenetic, cartoony, universally accessible piece of slapstick chaos in which you get to travel to different eras, bend time to your will, and take down a villain called Channel Omega (who appears to be a sentient business TV?)

And that’s just in the first world. 

As you rattle your way through the game you’ll unlock a vast array of combat towers, with zany-sounding names like Explode-a-Bear and Game Over Ray.

You’ll also hatch pets, equip character-specific power-ups at the “Kickin’ Arsenal”, and—if you’re anything like us—spend quite a bit of time floating around as a colorful ghost. 

The only way to get your head around ChronoDojo is to play it, and we’ve done just that – here are five reasons why you should be excited to play too.

A thrilling genre combo

ChronoDojo is a mishmash of different genres that you don’t normally see in the same game. 

It’s got elements of tower defense, beat-em-up, and 2D platformer all wrapped up in a goofy tale of time travel and martial arts. 

As if all that weren’t enough, there are mini-games to play, pets to collect, weapons to unlock, and plenty more. It’s a carnival of happy nonsense, and we got swept up in it straight away.

Fun alone or with friends

Couch co-op is, for many, the best possible way to play multiplayer games: up close and personal, shoulder to shoulder. It harks back to a happier era, when it simply wasn’t possible to get repeatedly pwned by an unblinking teenager on the other side of the world.

But couch co-op games can be restrictive. Despite your best efforts, you don’t always have three chums close at hand to join you for some button-mashing. 

ChronoDojo gets around this limitation by – in our experience – being pretty much as fun to play solo as it is with up to three other human beings. 

Pick up and play…straight away

There are some heavy, heavy, emotionally devastating games out there—but ChronoDojo isn’t one of them. StarCouch Studio has aimed squarely for the super-casual crowd, and hit it dead square right between the eyes. 

Whether you’re 7, 70, or neither, you can pick up ChronoDojo in half a second. This is thanks not only to a gloriously straightforward game mechanic but also to some fantastically unobtrusive in-game tutorial messages delivered by a loveable cast of cartoon bobbleheads. 

ChronoDojo contains all five of the Best Things

We’ll take you through them in turn. A) Time travel, i.e., the only scientifically proven method of meeting a dinosaur, which takes us neatly onto B), dinosaurs, which are like bizarre alien creatures out of Star Wars, but real. Just think about that. C) Robots, which are essentially human beings that have evolved metal exoskeletons, super intelligence, and giant boxing gloves, followed by D) ninjas, whose inclusion on this list of the coolest things requires no explanation.

Finally, E) pirates. They don’t care what anybody thinks about them, and that makes them cool. 

Early adopter discount

After several years of development and playtesting, it’s hugely exciting that ChronoDojo is finally here – and early adopters can nab it at a discount. The full game has a normal price of just ten bucks too, so there’s no excuse not to try it out.

So ultimately we recommend you become the hero you know you can be and download ChronoDojo straight away – here’s the game’s Steam page so you can do just that. And here’s the game’s official site as well.