If you like lootin' and shootin', Sima, you might do well to pick up
Nightmare Reaper.
Following on from my post in the
other thread, the summer GabeSale and a nearly 2/3 reduction in price proved enough of an excuse for me to pick it up.
And I'm very glad to say that not only have my previous impressions with the chapter one demo borne out, but I'm enjoying it exponentially more as I near the middle(?) of chapter three.
The flaws that I mentioned previously are still present - sometimes even more glaring - but after a certain point I just plain stopped caring about them, and in some cases came to appreciate the limitations they place on both the core gameplay and the manner in which the game's world is expressed.
The levels have, by and large, expanded considerably - not just in terms of complexity, but in the amount of space they afford both the players and the opposing hordes. You're given comparatively massive arenas to bunnyhop around in at considerable speed, kiting increasingly larger and more viscious hordes, and there's a pleasingly
Quake-like feeling of being blessed with overwhelmingly superior agility compared to your foes - something that only increases as you unlock movement tech such as dashing, double jumping, and a formalised grappling hook.
The latter is available from the start of the game if you find a "chained saw" weapon, but the sheer amount of verticality from chapter two onwards necessitates it being part of your inventory, so, fuck it, dev just puts it straight in your backpack.
But, crucially, even when levels do bunch back up into more claustrophobic corridors,
it's more interesting past chapter one because of the way in which it's expressed.
The very modern city levels expand upon the previous medieval village theme and head into full Build territory, with office block buildings presenting enough of an approximation of a real world place, albeit one limited by the tile-based procgen of the engine.
So you still encounter situations where it feels rubbish to do any kind of exploration, because the randomness precludes it: 30 years of playing FPS's and
your human brain which is both conditioned to and hardwired for searching for patterns tells you that there is a reward at the end of the corridor, but, no, the alorithm just vomited three empty rooms back there with little rhyme or reason...
And as frustrating as that is, the more the levels come to resemble approximations of real world places, the more the tiling/procgen creates a fragmentary, stitched together nightmare-like atmosphere.
The docks are a great example of this: the levels play out in a bizarre diorama where movement is restricted to waterside tiles, the backsides of buildings providing the background, but nothing else is rendered - skirt into an alleyway to collect treasure whilst panning the camera around and you'll find that the other half of the building just doesn't exist. It's just you and the hordes atop small islands of illumination, the night sky above and the inky depths below, the bright pixelated cityscape way, way in the distance contrasting this effect even more harshly.
Practically, functionally, all this is little different to the caverns and "forests" of the opening chapter, but thematically, conceptually, it's a lot more interesting and therefore more entertaining to progress through. Part of this I'd put down to the visual vairety which leads to better navigability (rock interior -> rock exterior versus engine room -> first-class cabins); and part down to that dream-like, liminal space which is overexposed when the fourth wall is torn down and the engine can't really be bothered rendering more than 500 metres in front of you.
It threatens to come apart a little in the third chapter as the maps simply become islands floating in the void.
Again, conceptually great, but the Spider-Jank grappling hook just doesn't feel as slick as it could; and one level in particular just reminded me how much better Dusk's e3m7/9 handled the concept - you were always snapped straight back into the action, rather than pinballing about wondering if you were gonna make your next jump or not.
And whilst there are certain sections, particularly in the third chapter with it's "oxygen zones", that I vibe with less, I'm always appreciative that it's trying to add something to the exhilarating catharsis of the core gameplay. Certain ideas work better than others, but there's always something more than there was in the previous chapter; and in this respect it reminds me a lot of HROT. Both games ignore the Romero axiom of going back during development and making your first level one of the best - in both titles you can see the dev getting more ambitious and bolting more onto the chasis as the chapters advance. Sometimes those ideas don't gel well with the foundational building blocks of the game, but I always find that naked progression fascinating when it appears in indie titles like this.
30 hours in now and "oh god I can't see a thing" has blossomed into "I can't see a thing - that must mean everything within my splash damage and DOTs are cooking".
And the novelty of the random weapons still hasn't worn off.
And sheer fucking capacity the game engenders in making the player feel ingenious when kitbashing weapon combos is only just becoming apparent (vacuuming everything in a room into successive black holes, then laying down a napalm carpet for them to land on and soaking them with an assault rifle is my current fave).
Adore it.
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