The first run was over pretty fast for me because I didn’t understand what happened when the energy dropped to 0. Because of that, I thought it was going to be hard to get to the border and I had wrong expectations of the game. I’m glad I stuck with the game and gave it another try. It’s really not that hard and a lot of the game is more about the characters you meet. You will meet them several times with different hitchhikers and graudally learn more about their objectives. It’s not too procedural at all if that’s what concerns you.
The game was well put together. The music is definitely the strongest part of the game, I love how many tracks there are and how good some of them are. Saddly, the game had some crashes, mostly when playing till the wall and starting a new run. The characters are pretty fun, but the story is not very deep and the characters don’t really evolve too much. It’s more of a getting to know them with a gradual guiding of the direction they go.
As always, here are the best of Screenshots on imgur and you can find the entire set of screenshots on my Steam profile here https://steamcommunity.com/id/Thecell/screenshots/?appid=1466640&sort=oldestfirst&browsefilter=myfiles&view=imagewall.
I played an early demo of this game during Gamescom 2019 while I was a booth volunteer and I remember talking to Phi Dinh about the game. I was following him for quite some time before that and the game felt great already. A couple of days ago, I was finally able to play the finished game. They upgraded the graphics pipeline and the game looks just mindblowing.
About the mechanics: The game is a combination of platforming, shooting, puzzles, and searching for the next part to play and unlock. The most fun for me is definitely the platforming. You start out pretty weak and upgrade yourself with new modules like jumping, double jumping, dash, and so on. You are playing as a virus, recovering a system and installing yourself on it. That’s why you start out so weak at first.
A couple of words about the most unique part of the game: The freaking ASCII overlay! Never have I seen a more beautiful ASCII overlay in a game. As far as I remember, they wrote a shader that allowed them to render perfectly crisp ASCII symbols all over the screen and animate them however they like.
As always, here are the best of Screenshots on imgur and you can find the entire set of screenshots on my Steam profile here https://steamcommunity.com/id/Thecell/screenshots/?appid=986310&sort=oldestfirst&browsefilter=myfiles&view=imagewall.