Double

Double is a small, moody action-adventure from Tomato Fantasy Games that treats a soldier’s mental breakdown as a place you can actually walk through. Carlos, the man at the center of it, is holed up in a mental asylum working through what sounds like severe post-war trauma, and the game splits its time between his waking treatment and the dreams he keeps sinking into. The hook isn’t combat spectacle or a big open world. It’s the premise that reality and nightmare start blurring together the longer you stay inside his head, and that you’re the one steering which side wins.

How it plays

You spend the game choosing, over and over, whether Carlos keeps fighting for recovery or gives in to the illusions pulling at him. Those choices aren’t framed as simple good or bad options either; the story leans into situations that don’t have a clean answer, which fits a game about trauma instead of undercutting it. As you progress, the dream world doesn’t stay neatly separate from the asylum. It creeps into what’s supposed to be real, so the ground you’re standing on gets less stable the further you go. It’s less about mastering a combat system and more about sitting with an uneasy, branching story and an original score that’s doing a lot of the emotional heavy lifting alongside the visuals.

Who it’s for

This is a fit if you like narrative-driven indies that would rather unsettle you than entertain you in the usual sense, and if you don’t mind a game that treats mental illness as its actual subject matter rather than a backdrop. Fans of dream-logic settings and choice-driven stories where the choices carry weight will probably get pulled in. If you’re after tight, skill-based action combat or a long game with a lot of systems to dig into, this isn’t that, and you should probably look elsewhere. It’s also worth going in aware that the subject matter, a veteran’s psychological struggle, is played straight rather than for shock value, so it’s not a casual, breezy pick.

Is it worth grabbing?

For an indie built around one specific idea, executed with a clear point of view, it’s an easy one to add to the library. The scope looks modest, so it’s not going to eat your week, and a non-linear story you can replay with different decisions gives it more life than a single playthrough would suggest. It’s most worth your time if you actually gravitate toward story-first games and can appreciate a smaller studio taking a swing at heavy material instead of playing it safe. If narrative isn’t really what pulls you into a game, it’ll probably sit unplayed, but there’s little downside to grabbing it and finding out for yourself.

Quick facts

Genre: Action, Adventure, Indie. Developer and publisher: Tomato Fantasy Games (with GrabTheGames also publishing). Platform: PC via Steam. Released March 15, 2019.