Dad 'n Me

Dad 'n Me is a small file with an unusually solid credential attached to it: on 27 July 2005, Tom Fulp and Dan Paladin uploaded a ten-screen beat 'em up to Newgrounds about a kid fighting his way across town to find his father, and eight months later it walked away with the Independent Games Festival's Best Web Browser Game award. That's a real juried recognition, not a portal vote count, and it's worth taking seriously as a reason to look past the game's reputation as a cute footnote between the Flash original of Alien Hominid and the console studio Fulp and Paladin were already building around it.

What's actually in the .swf

The controls are about as simple as a Flash brawler gets — arrow keys to walk, A for a light jab, S for a heavy attack — and the game's own instructions tell you the whole design brief up front: experiment with the combo system to clear enemies as efficiently as possible. That's not marketing copy so much as an accurate description. Chaining light and heavy attacks in different orders behaves differently against different enemies, and landing enough hits without taking damage builds a rage state that opens up new, harder-hitting attacks for a limited window before it drains back down. It's a genuine risk-reward loop layered onto a two-button moveset: pushing for rage means taking a hit that empties the meter is now much more costly, and the choice of when to spend it against a screen full of enemies versus save it for the next one is the one real decision the combat asks you to make, over and over, for ten screens.

That's more mechanical depth than a lot of Newgrounds' brawler crop had in 2005, when the default was closer to one button mashed against a wall of identical enemies. It also holds together for the length the game actually is — roughly ten screens of walking into a cleared area, beating every enemy present, and moving on — without the combat ever going stale before the file ends, which is its own kind of achievement for something this short.

Paladin's art, and the characters that outlived the file

The purple, white-masked father and son at the centre of Dad 'n Me are Dan Paladin's design work, and they're distinctive enough that Newgrounds kept using them as recurring cameo characters in other projects well after this game's own front-page run ended — a small but real sign that the character design did more work than the ten-screen brawler built around it strictly needed. It's also the same visual thread that runs forward into Paladin's better-funded work: the thick outlines and blunt, exaggerated character silhouettes here are recognisably the same hand that would go on to draw Alien Hominid's console expansion and, later, Castle Crashers at The Behemoth, the studio Fulp, Paladin and their collaborators had already founded by the time this game shipped. Newgrounds' own wiki traces the father character back further still, to Fulp and Paladin's 2002 game Chainsaw the Children, whose protagonist got retroactively adopted as "Dad" once this game gave him a son and a name worth remembering — a small piece of internal Newgrounds continuity that's easy to miss if you only ever encounter Dad 'n Me on its own.

Dustball's music is functional beat-'em-up backing, upbeat enough to carry the pace of a screen clear without ever becoming a reason on its own to remember the game — competent rather than notable, in the same register as most Flash-era soundtracks built to loop under gameplay rather than to be listened to.

What the file doesn't have

Set the combat's actual quality against the game's total shape and the limits show quickly. Ten screens is an honest length for a free 2005 browser upload, but every one of those screens is the same beat: walk into an area, clear every enemy present, move to the next. There's no boss fight breaking up the rhythm, no set-piece screen that asks something different of the combo system, and no escalation beyond marginally tougher enemy placements as you go. The plot is a single line — find dad in the bad part of town — and the father-son premise that makes the character design so memorable is barely used as an actual story beat; it's a framing device for the walk, not something the game does anything with. Clear it once and there's nothing built in to bring you back: no score table, no unlockable content, no alternate path, just the option to run the same ten screens again faster or cleaner. And unlike Alien Hominid, whose ten-minute Flash prototype at least led somewhere — a funded console sequel with everything the original lacked — Dad 'n Me got its IGF award and then nothing: no sequel, no expansion, no follow-up brawler built on the same combo system. A genuinely solid piece of combat design got exactly one short outing.

Playing it today

Dad 'n Me predates ActionScript 3 by two years, which puts it squarely in the era Ruffle handles well; Newgrounds itself has been re-serving pre-2007 uploads through Ruffle emulation since the early 2020s, and the game is also catalogued in the Flashpoint archive for offline play through its launcher, both checked 5 September 2026. There's no online leaderboard or server-backed feature that could have gone dark in the meantime — what a Ruffle session shows you today is functionally the same ten-screen file that won the IGF award in 2006.

Verdict

Dad 'n Me earns its 7.0 on the strength of a combo-and-rage system that's genuinely better built than a short 2005 Newgrounds brawler needed to be, and on a character design sharp enough that Newgrounds kept finding uses for it long after the file itself stopped getting traffic. What keeps the score from climbing further is that none of that ambition extends past the combat: ten screens of the same encounter, a one-line premise that never becomes a story, and no reason to return once you've cleared it. It's a genuinely good short beat 'em up, reviewed honestly as exactly that — not as the bigger game its IGF award and lasting character cameos might suggest it should have become.

Players interested in what Fulp and Paladin built with a real budget once The Behemoth existed should see Alien Hominid, the ten-minute Flash prototype that funded the studio in the first place; anyone tracing the same purple-masked character design forward into a much bigger production should look for Castle Crashers, which this review's slate does not yet cover.