Look Mum No Computer is a retro roguelite for dungeon crawler DJs

Random Select is a new column from Polygon about under-the-radar video games. Every week, Polygon’s editors assign a writer to check out a game at random, downloading the game without knowing beforehand what it is. The catch? They have to play for at least an hour and report on their thoughts — honestly. This week’s game is Look Mum No Computer, a twin-stick shooter from The Bit Father.

About an hour into playing Look Mum No Computer on Xbox Series X, I realized I had been subconsciously bobbing my head along to the crunchy synthwave tunes for god knows how long.

Released on PC via Steam and GOG in July 2025, Look Mum No Computer came to consoles — Xbox One and Series X, PlayStation 4 and 5, and Nintendo Switch — on Jan. 22, 2026.

The game bills itself as a top-down, twin-stick shooter action RPG with a roguelite structure, but in that first hour, it felt like I’d wandered into someone’s extremely loud, extremely specific creative project. That someone is Sam Battle — better known online as Look Mum No Computer — a DIY synth builder whose garage-inventor energy defines the game he named after his online persona. In Look Mum No Computer, modular synthesizers aren’t just flavor. They’re everything.

You start in Sam’s workshop in the town of Soldersworth, where he’s just invented Kosmo, a sentient synthesizer backpack fused to a sound cannon. In recent months, electronics around town have become corrupted in strange, ominous ways. Kosmo’s solution? Shrink you both down and dive into infected devices to blast the problem away from the inside. So it’s Ghostbusters meets Tron, by way of a grungy synth YouTuber. Each malfunctioning device is a dungeon in its own right, each with unique characters and quests inside.

Like Hyper Light Drifter or Enter the Gungeon, combat unfolds directly in the environment. It’s chaotic and full of projectiles, at times verging on bullet hell. You’re constantly spamming weapons in every direction until they overheat, then frantically swapping to the next module. The first two are a pea shooter and a short-range laser. Because enemies are so varied in their attacks and behaviors, it behooves you to mix up your primary weapon often. Early on, I found myself gingerly stepping through each area and picking away at enemies carefully, but I still got hit often. Look Mum No Computer wants you to embrace the chaos and rush into battle, twirling between enemies and narrowly dodging projectiles, vibing with the synth tunes to enter a flow state. Precision is tomfoolery. Controlled panic is how you win. Even when Sam does bite it, death is merciful. You respawn at your most recent save point without losing any of your resources, which removes most of the friction.

Enemies drop various components that you use to construct synth modules that enhance Kosmo with new weapons or passive abilities. Crafting and upgrading these is pretty straightforward. Every time you construct a new module, you see a little clip of Sam building it in real life, a nice touch that grounds all the ridiculousness in a cool way.

Back in Sam’s workshop, you can manually adjust the music you’ve discovered across various areas by tinkering with your synth modules — flipping switches, twisting knobs, pushing buttons, etc. For DJs and synth enthusiasts who appreciate the process here, this is probably the dream: a playable instrument wrapped around a roguelite action game. These modules kind of lost me, however. I’d personally rather listen to the music than create it.

I had no idea what I was doing as I tinkered with the modules. I just knew that Kosmo kept pestering me to do it for some reason. This deep system is clearly foundational to the whole experience, but it felt a bit like a pro DJ shoving you in front of their homemade kit and telling you to jam out. That’s not really a knock against Look Mum No Computer by any means, but it does reflect that it’s for a specific audience. I’m just not the kind of gamer who wants to be both a DJ and a dungeon crawler at the same time.

Image: Headup Games

That said, Look Mum No Computer boasts really strong and genuinely funny writing. The whole experience is delightfully absurd. A broken refrigerator is likely the second device most players will enter (though it seems like you can discover and enter them in any order), where Sam slips and slides across the freezerburned surfaces. When an anxious egg warned me about feral fruit in thawed sections of the fridge, I laughed out loud. The writing is confident in its inherent weirdness. Kosmo, who does the most talking of any character, has these massive, unblinking eyes that are mildly terrifying and might give you nightmares. Even in those dreams, however, you’ll probably be laughing.