Judero

Genre: Action-RPG

Players: 1

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Review:

Judero is an Action-RPG released in 2024 on PC, ported in 2025 to PlayStation 5 and Xbox One, and then ported in 2026 to Nintendo Switch. The game puts players in the titular role of Judero, a shirtless wanderer using his abilities to commune with nature to fend off evil monsters and help the people of the Scottish countryside.

One can’t talk about Judero without immediately addressing the presentation, because it is clearly one of the most unique and striking parts of this game, for better or worse. All of this game’s people and creatures have been depicted using stop-motion photography of poseable figurines and clay sculptures, but this has been done very amateurishly – the animation is terrible, no effort has been made to hide the figures’ joints (Judero himself has a large hinge across his midsection allowing him to bend over, and that is seen at all times on his character), the clay figures are poorly-constructed to the point where they look grotesque even when depicting normal peasant folk, the images of these figures and sculptures themselves are so low-resolution and poorly cut out from the backgrounds they were filmed in front of that they stick out from the low-detail, low-poly 3D world around them, looking like paper-thin cutouts of blurry photos, and the video introductions you get to each new enemy are so poorly-constructed it seems reminiscent of a children’s school project rather than something made by adults.

It’s an absolute mess, absurdly ungainly, yet one that’s so unique and fascinating that it’s hard to tear your eyes away from it. It’s unpolished to the extreme, but in a way that is clearly full of personality.

Lest you think it’s just the visual presentation that’s odd, this game’s fully-voiced characters range from well-acted (in the case of Judero himself) to extremely poorly-acted and poorly-recorded, with many of the game’s heavily Scottish-accented characters obviously pitch-shifted to make them sound feminine or diminutive, or having the reverb turned up to make them sound monstrous, again in absurdly an amateurish manner that evokes the image of an art school project, and not one from the top student.

This is joined by a soundtrack consisting of a lot of British folk music, most of it with vocals, and while this gives the game a very distinct personality, it also clashes with the voiced characters who speak over these vocals, with some pretty bad sound mixing.

The story is similarly poorly-constructed. We’re not given any real introduction to Judero or what his goals are, the current state of this world, or anything like that. At one point early on, Judero’s odd fairy-like companion declares that it’s parting ways with him, something both characters are clearly sad about, but we’re not told why the companion is leaving, and why at that particular place that seems to have no significance in the setting. It’s just a random event that happens, and the player can’t do much more than shrug their shoulders and go “okay, well I guess that’s something that happened, then” and move on, and this sort of thing happens a lot in this game. This causes problems with the gameplay too, as it makes it unclear what the player is meant to be doing at a given time, and paired with some poor signposting makes it difficult to know where you’re meant to be going.

Speaking of the gameplay, Judero is an Action-RPG that has you wandering around a map trying to help out the local folk with their problems, fighting monsters, and at times solving puzzles. To this end, Judero can take control of “lesser beings”, often enemies, to do things he cannot. The game uses this mechanic well, and it is often at its best when players are made to realize they need to use an enemy to get past an obstacle.

Unfortunately, as an Action-Adventure, the actual Action is outright terrible, with poor hit detection and nonexistent forecasting of enemy attacks, and combat is just in general unsatisfying in this game.

With all of this said, I feel very conflicted about Judero. This game is an absolute mess, absolutely filled with problems, amateurish design, poor graphical and gameplay choices… and yet despite all of this it still has an earnest charm that’s hard to ignore, and all of its terrible choices make it like a train wreck that’s hard to look away from. This game’s problems may keep it from being a great game or even a good game, but they absolutely do make it an interesting game, and I think players may want to give it a look just for pure morbid fascination’s sake. For all its problems, I still came away from this game liking it despite of all the reasons I should have hated it. So if you’re curious to try something bizarre and unique, and willing to put up with a mountain of problems to see something truly original, you may actually want to play Judero.

tl;dr – Judero is an Action-RPG where players take the role of the titular shirtless hero as he wanders a mythologized Scotland and helps the common folk with their problems. This game is extremely amateurish and filled with issues, but it’s also charming and truly unique in a way that’s difficult to ignore, particularly with its odd stop-motion-style visual presentation. If you have the patience to put up with the numerous flaws this game has, you may find it’s original and weird enough to be worth a look.

Grade: C

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