WarioWare’s Spirit Is Back: Steam’s Wildest Minigame Free-for-All Is Here

Here is where my brain has been lately: Wario, but not Wario. The last few years have been a gold rush for games riffing on Nintendo oddities, and I am absolutely here for it. 2023 was stacked - Tears of the Kingdom, Baldur's Gate 3, Street Fighter 6, Alan Wake 2 - and yet I will still stump for Pizza Tower as the most purely joyful thing I played. AntonBlast in 2024 kept the momentum going. Those two revived the Wario Land side of the equation. Now we finally have a contender taking on WarioWare chaos, and it already rules.

Buster Jam: Tallglass makes a microgame chaos machine

Developer Tallglass - the team building the puzzle-platformer BOOM! Buster - announced a side project called Buster Jam late last year. The pitch was practical: make something in the meantime to keep the studio humming so BOOM! Buster never has to compromise on scope or weirdness. Earlier this week, they dropped the first demo for Buster Jam. I played it. I get it.

Buster Jam uses the same cast from BOOM! Buster. You play as Buster with partner-in-chaos Bridget, racing to stop a caped menace named The Wizard from rebranding New York as - and I promise this is the actual name - Wizardtopia. Structurally, it is an unexpectedly neat blend: an overworld you poke around in like the old handheld-era Mario & Luigi RPGs, and then hard cuts into rapid-fire microgame gauntlets straight out of a WarioWare fever dream.

The vibe: unhinged, in the best way

Plenty of games do minigames. Very few nail the specific flavor of WarioWare - the blink-and-you-miss-it intensity and the you-cannot-be-serious gags that would make Mario blush. From the little slice in this demo, Tallglass gets it.

• Classic Wario-style reflex tests: dodge-and-weave obstacle bursts that last two seconds and then vanish
• Deliberately clashing art jokes: out-of-nowhere realistic JPEGs of dogs slapped against the cartoony world
• Identity whiplash: Buster drawn in multiple styles, swinging from adorable to full-on gremlin without warning
• The stuff Nintendo would never touch: a microgame that literally asks you to 'stab the wizard'; another where you 'shoot the devil'; and a cursed doodle-jump riff starring Bart Simpson's head on a shoe

'Stab the wizard.' 'Shoot the devil.' Yes, those are actual prompts. It is gloriously deranged.

That last bit is where the game steps out of homage and into its own lane. The demo is short, but the hit rate on jokes and surprises is high enough that I was cackling more than I expected. It is not just copying a format; it is chasing the same unpredictable energy with its own sense of humor.

Why this exists - and why that matters

A quick business-footnote that actually matters for the creative: Tallglass made it clear when they announced Buster Jam late last year that this is the bridge project to keep the lights on. The idea is to finish something scrappy now so BOOM! Buster can stay as weird and ambitious as it needs to be. That context makes the demo feel even smarter - it is scoped for speed, but it does not feel cheap.

So, when can we play the whole thing?

The full release is aimed at 2026. That is a ways off, but if the demo is any indication, Buster Jam just vaulted near the top of my indie watchlist for that year. It is that confident already.

One more spooky rec while we are here

Completely different vibe, but if you want a cozy Halloween brain teaser: Spooky Express has you laying down train routes across Trainsylvania to ferry undead passengers. It is cute, it clicks instantly, and it scratches that seasonal itch without being loud about it.