Brütal Legend Is Still Double Fine's Best Game, Sequel or Not

Published Sep 2, 2026, 3:00 PM EDT Some legends don't need a part two Image: Double Fine Double Fine’s new $400K Kickstarter has a stretch goal that reads like either a dare or a joke, I can’t decide which: Raise $100 million for the studio’s upcoming Amnesia Fortnight game jam, and the studio will make Brütal Legend 2. That’s fabulous, we love to see new games being made, a crowdsourced upwelling of affection for a rad IP will always get me, and I get the dopamine of seeing a progress bar creep to the right, but I think this distracts from the bigger picture: Since the perfect Brütal Legend game already exists, do we need a sequel? Do we really want a sequel? Or is it time to admit that despite any very publicized crowdfunding goals, we’re probably not getting one? Admitting this would free us up to play Double Fine’s best game again, which is the ideal outcome here, because the first and only Brütal Legend was a wild ride. Brütal Legend, available to play on Windows PC and Xbox Series X, drops Jack Black’s Eddie Riggs into a fantasy world built entirely from ‘80s metal album covers. Think: amps carved directly into mountainsides, forests where tires replace leaves, gigantic swords driven directly into the earth like obelisks. It’s an open world that Tim Schafer, the founder and creative director of Double Fine, estimated as covering roughly 64 in-game square miles. Eddie fights battles with an axe called the Separator and a flying V guitar named Clementine, along with spells like “Anvil of Burden” and “Bring it On Home” and “Face Melter.” It’s School of Rock meets the now-defunct Rock’n’Roller Coaster Starring Aerosmith meets every odd KISS collab meets, uh, 2000 real-time strategy and exceedingly rules-heavy game Sacrifice. It’s the oddest possible concept, but it worked because it was unique, because it was a tribute to metal, and because — likely due to that sense of “what in the world are we building here” — it got such loving attention to detail. Every faction in the game, from Eddie’s Ironheade to villain Doviculus’s Tainted Coil, got its own aesthetic and sound identity down to the unit design. Judas Priest guitarist Glenn Tipton even recorded the real guitar solos used for Ironheade’s in-game riffs, while bandmate K.K. Downing recorded solos for the enemy factions, Drowning Doom and Tainted Coil. Image: Double Fine Free sign-up Get Polygon’s Wishlister newsletter A weekly cheat sheet to what you’ll eventually love to play. No buying, no commitment — just saving for later. Sign up free Free. Unsubscribe anytime. If we got a Brütal Legend sequel, what are the odds we’d get the absolute slam dunk of a cast we got with the first? In Brütal Legend, Ozzy Osbourne voices the Guardian of Metal. Lemmy Kilmister plays the Kill Master. Rob Halford voices General Lionwhyte. And Tim Curry plays Doviculus, Emperor of the Tainted Coil, whose ear-piercing screams and squeals will be near-impossible to outshriek in a sequel. The game’s soundtrack, which is worth it on its own merit, runs from Motörhead to Dimmu Borgir to Judas Priest, and it pairs so nicely with story beats: Slight spoilery teaser, but a castle may collapse to the tune of “Through the Fire and the Flames,” and the final battle is set to “Painkiller.” This is the game playlist and beat-for-beat storyboarding of a team that loved the music and wanted you to feel the adrenaline they felt as they swung for this risky concept. I would love to be proven wrong, but it feels like a lightning-in-a-bottle situation that would only be tarnished by a sequel that couldn’t possibly go as hard. Double Fine has a portfolio of very charming games, but none have the same out-there vibe or commitment to the bit. Psychonauts (a 2005 platformer) is beloved, and for good reason, but it lives inside a smaller, safer container: one summer camp, one kid’s head at a time. Costume Quest (a 2010 Halloween monster-fighting game) and Stacking (a 2011 nesting-doll puzzle game) are charming and modest by design, since they came from quick game jams. Even Psychonauts 2, one of the studio’s most polished releases and a lovely game in its own right, feels cautious: It’s a known formula, executed well, but sans any sense of risk. If, perhaps, one of the most metal things about Brütal Legend was the fact that it could totally have flopped and the devs went for it anyway — which, incidentally, it did fail commercially — that’s certainly not something we’re recreating in a sequel. Especially if the only way we get a sequel is with a gigantic before-the-fact crowdsourced budget (read: safety net). That doesn’t feel very rock and roll. Image: Double Fine Is Brütal Legend itself a good game? Opinions on this remain mixed, even years later, and everyone is right. Some call it a brutal slog. Some hate the real-time strategy mechanic. Others refer to it as their favorite game of all time, even if it is flawed, while still other reviewers report feeling compelled to beat the game out of pure spite. But the fact that people were heatedly debating the game a decade-plus after its release — and that fans are rising up in droves to support or rant about the current kickstarter — shows us that the game was weird and unforgettable, that it didn’t slot nicely in any box, that it was imperfect but people loved it anyway. That is Brütal Legend. I don’t want to see a safer sequel, one that may be forgettable or feel overly fan-service-y or even too similar to the first. I want to see more wild, one-off ideas executed in the same messy, risky vein as Brutal Legend — not another safe or same idea executed competently. We’ll see whether the idea of a sequel is popular enough for the internet at large to hit a likely-impossible stretch goal (and whatever happens after that) but, in the meantime, I’m revisiting the original instead of hoping for a softer version of it. After all, I’d bet no metal-strategy game since, if one exists, has made anyone scream this loud, for this long, for or against the game. And I don’t think any Brütal Legend sequel ever will.