![]() Eager to wring every last bit of versatility out of Strafe’s systems, Pixel Titans is also including the aforementioned Murder Zone, a ten-room Horde-style challenge arena with a persistent progression system, which uses spilt blood as currency for unlocks and upgrades. And that’s before you even get into the business of drenching burst monster corpses with more blood, to dilute the xenomorph-like acid some of them leave lying around.Īnd the invention doesn’t stop where the campaign (eventually) ends. It’s an important, entirely functional gameplay tool. The upshot of all this? You can literally paint the walls with gore, marking rooms with viscera and bloody notations, to act as persistent path-finding tools. And blood that drops through grates, and blood you can run through to leave footprints. And body parts that spurt blood like Catherine Wheels as they whirl through the air. ![]() Stuff like stickiness, and gravity, and gibs that burst when you stand on them. It might look all chunky pixels and boxy globs, but underneath the 1996 aesthetic, there’s a lot of smart stuff going on. Bloody dismemberment is just as much a part of Strafe’s identity as it is of the ‘90s and ‘00s shooters that inspired it, but Strafe puts as much effort into its gore as some games do their entire design. And by ‘bleeding’, I mean ‘pissing arterial spray at a rate and force that could take an eye out’. Speaking of systemic, Strafe also has a really nice – by which I mean ‘triumphantly grotesque’ – way of bleeding dynamic, gameplay-driven happenings into the wider scope of navigation. With the burnable items covering everything from auto-turrets to ‘aggro-sticks’ – used to draw the enemy into hazards and choke-points for easy execution – and the permanent stuff including the likes of a double-jump by way of a downward shotgun blast, it becomes rapidly, tantalisingly apparent just how many flavours the evolving, systemic toolbox of Strafe’s combat will include. But the gameplay base goes even deeper.Ī merchant sells a total of 20 support items, and only five of these are expendable, single-use affairs, the remaining 15 delivering persistent, gameplay-altering upgrades. Between these, and Strafe’s eminently physics-driven traversal (rocket-jumps and plasma-assisted wall-runs abound, in accordance with The Old Ways) that’s an extra-thick layer of mechanical marinara to play with. You’ll level up three main, persistent guns as you make repeat attempts at Strafe’s campaign, though a stack more, expendable, and ludicrously over-powered pick-up weapons will drop on the fly, to be used in the moment or saved for more strategic situation later. On a more intimate level, its gameplay mechanics deliver a deceptively progressive sandbox of systems, tools, and toys. Not that Strafe relies on its shifting level design alone. ![]() Obviously, this is great for the iterative replay Strafe is built around – you might think you recognise a room from time to time, only to find its whole feel and gameplay purpose entirely different – but it’s also instrumental in kneading and reshaping that pizza dough with wild abandon. Walls can become doors can become staircases can become pretty much anything else, leading to a remarkably bespoke, crafted feel and flow to every level I’ve seen and played so far. Each zone has 50 ‘modules’ but each of these level-design building bricks has a ton of variables in itself. The rough structure of Strafe takes you through four themed zones, comprising four dynamically generated levels each, but rather than the usual, predictable, repeated modules that tend to come with a roguelike, Strafe’s environments have an immense intricacy in their possible formulations. And a ton of genuinely interesting secrets. The exact nature of this stuffed-crust slaughter simulator? An extreme attention to granularity in the game’s randomly generated levels, balanced against a careful desire for depth and a rewarding sense of progression, despite the many, many restarts incoming. ![]()
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