Tesla Force
Note: Updated after first patch.
I have completed the higher difficulty (game+ cycle 2) on early access. So far so good. Pretty polished EA game. I like the shoot’em up game play. As I progress, there are enough varieties to keep me interested. Basically, there are different objectives for each map. Easy to pick up. But can be a challenge to complete depends on the progression on each encounter. So far, no two games are the same. And previous success doesn’t guarantee future success. I.e. you may find one game rather easy to complete (pro tip: stick with BFG gun) but you may struggle with the next one depending on the guns you use and the perks you have got (and the missions as well).
– Real player with 21.9 hrs in game
Read More: Best Roguelite Procedural Generation Games.
“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.” - Marie Curie
Tesla Force is a gloriously over the top, roguelite twin stick shooter and a tale of Nikola Tesla inadvertently opening a portal at the Wardenclyffe Tower and awakening the cosmic horrors while trying to provide free energy, wireless transmissions and a life of leisure to everyone. In 1916.
Let me just continue with that bonkers story for a second. Before everything goes Cthulhu, a young Marie Curie pops out of a second portal in an almost Ghostbusters uniform and yells at Tesla he kind of goofed. Tesla stoically accepts that, picks up a shotgun and one of his inventions and proceeds mowing down cosmic monstrosities and closing down portals in a tutorial mission that ends with him flying off in a mech. Now if that doesn’t sound like electric currents of fun and escapism at its finest, I don’t know what does.
– Real player with 17.9 hrs in game
That Abysmal Place
From Black Void Media comes a horror experience like never before - a nightmarish 2D roguelite that will leave you questioning your sanity. Choose a character and guide them through increasingly twisted procedurally generated levels as you try to discover the secrets of That Abysmal Place.
Key Features
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Explore the dark tunnels to unlock characters and equipment for future playthroughs
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Encounter nightmarish enemies and merciless bossfights
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Keep your Terror in check or risk losing your sanity altogether
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Hand-crafted areas in procedurally generated levels mean no two playthroughs will be the same
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Play with your friends in coop mode or challenge your enemies to a brutal deathmatch
WARNING
This game is not for the faint-hearted or weak-willed.
It will not be a fair experience, nor will it be a pleasant one.
You will get lost. You will get frustrated. You will be forced to encounter uncomfortable things.
You will die. A lot.
We recommend playing with the lights down and the volume up.
Read More: Best Roguelite Exploration Games.
The Consuming Shadow
Shoggoth’s Scenic Driving Tour of England
Reviewer’s Note: Over 50 Hours with Humble Bundle Copy
“It’s late. At least, I think it’s late. Keeping track of time isn’t a priority - wherever I am now… like a purple nimbus cloud crackling with electricity. What’s important is that I’ve saved the world, and no one will be any the wiser.
…
“Not that I did this for recognition, no! I’m not vainglorious or anything. This was all honestly just a happy byproduct of my pursuit of arcane knowledge, of the Eldritch Truth. I was laughed out of the academy, and the very men and women who found my research so amusing now owe me their insignificant lives. If they had seen what I’ve seen, fought what I’ve fought, learned what I’ve learned, they’d still be laughing - restrained in padded cells, or worse.
– Real player with 55.0 hrs in game
Read More: Best Roguelite 2D Games.
I’ve already put quite a bit of time into the Humble Store version of this game and I have just recently claimed my Steam Key; so I am checking out all the new features, but I will bring you up to speed on what I already know about this game.
The Consuming Shadow is a roguelike RPG much in the vein of FTL, with the overall goal of the game being stopping a Cthulhu-esque entity (simply called ‘the Ancient’) from invading our world. This is done in both of the primary ‘game modes’ The Consuming Shadow features. The first is the overworld map, where you pick a town on your GPS and drive there via your very slow car to look for clues. Various ‘text-only’ events can happen both here and in the towns, where you will have to make a choice. These choices like FTL, can give you bonuses to your cash or equipment, or screw you over royally. There are often pieces of equipment you can use to sway these events in your favor, much like FTL.
– Real player with 21.6 hrs in game
Theatre of Sorrows
OUR STORY BEGINS…
When a dark cult abducts his sibling, there’s nothing else Killian can do but to comply with their demands. In order to save his sister he travels to the mysterious island of Esha - a place forgotten by even gods themselves, where the unspeakable ritual is about to take place.
Join Killian and Eileen in a deadly journey through Esha and dive into dark secrets of its inhabitants; try to navigate your way through the unknown territory with only a handful of hints that might lead you to a dangerous discovery about things that should have probably been consigned to oblivion…
Because there’s something dark and unspeakable, hidden in Esha’s stormy waves.
EVER-CHANGING ISLAND
Esha will always be a bit different; procedurally-generated map, randomized events and branching narrative will allow you to experience something new in each run.
SURVIVAL THROUGH RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
Explore different locations, gather things that might help you survive and be mindful of your own limits. Be careful, though, because every time you walk into an abandoned house, it might not be as abandoned as it would seem…
WIDE VARIETY OF MONSTERS
Sometimes the evil will take particular forms, straight from your worst nightmares… Encounter 20 unique monsters that will remind you of creatures from lovecraftian horrors and try to defend yourself from their attacks.
CUSTOMIZABLE CHARACTERS
You may not be able to fight, but that doesn’t mean you’re defenceless. Find and change your outfits, craft and equip talismans, learn about enemies’ vulnerabilities - all in order to survive.
MULTIPLE ENDINGS
Will you find the way out, or will you succumb to the darkness of Esha? The choices you make throughout the game will lead you to one of the five main endings.
UNIQUE SENSORY EXPERIENCE
Feel the despair of the main characters and the desolation of Esha through the combination of atmospheric graphics, music and narrative, inspired by the works of Lovecraft and other works of the cosmic horror genre.
Source of Madness
I’ve finished all of the current content, so I think I’m in a good position to critique the game as it is currently. Overall, this game is a real gem. I’m a fan of Lovecraftian-styled games along with rogues and sidescrollers, so this game is perfect for me. The character movement and combat starts out sluggish, but once you unlock some more dashes the pace becomes faster. The developers have already addressed this in an update today that bumped up the character movement, among other improvements. However it’s still a game that favors defense, and the bullet-sponge nature of the enemies is my biggest criticism. At times it can borderline on ridiculous. Also, the second level of Act 1 feels way too long, and in my opinion, doesn’t earn its length.
– Real player with 17.4 hrs in game
Right now, I’m coming off of a sugar rush like feeling after playing 5 hours of this game. In its current state the game is fantastic.
The game checks off all the boxes for a wide variety of gamers.
SoulsLike - Check
Metroidvania - Check
Action / RPG - Check
Platformer - Check
Gorgeous Game - Check
Horror - Check
True Lovecraft Monsters - Check
Just a geek that needs to collect a game with very unique design mechanics - Check
I could go on. I’m a huge fan of SoulsLike and Metroidvania games. Throw in the Roguelite concept where both the environment and your enemies are never the same is fantastic. The use of neural network AI to create the enemies is mind bendingly genius.
– Real player with 16.4 hrs in game
We Need To Go Deeper
1. Amazing soundtrack that fits the atmosphere of the game completely. Which counts for battle and management of the ship into starting and or in between a adventure.
2. Anything game-breaking is immediately fixed usually by the awesome developers who spend so much of their time burning their eyes on the screen just to hear everyones suggestions and reports out.
3. Active developers in the community speaking and having conversation with the community in which they take ideas on from. (not that they need to, they’re not obligated to always respond or do work for everyone)
– Real player with 392.3 hrs in game
This game is so much fun. When you have even one other human to play it with, it is a comedy of errors as you try to manipulate your ship (which steers like a cow at the best of times, and a rock most of the time) into the depths of the Living Infinite, discovering all sorts of crazy new weapons and costumes along the way.
When you have even one other human.
It SAYS it’s playable single player, but that’s absolutely laughable. You can fill your submarine with a crew of bots that will nominally do things like slam their weakest wrenches against the holes in your ship or fire at every small enemy on your screen (even if it’s something you SHOULDN’T BE FIRING AT, like the totem that will spawn a ghost if you shoot at it but is perfectly safe if you steam gently past it)… but they won’t help you if you want a turn on the shooty shooty guns and want someone else to steer your yellow submarine. Nor will they help you bust through walls in your caving adventures if you happened to be holding an item that does not damage walls (like the chemistry set).
– Real player with 214.0 hrs in game
Lovecraft’s Untold Stories
Honestly the fact that people constantly have to try and figure out what item’s hidden properties are well past the 1 year mark of the developers saying they would provide a guide to tell us just that is sad. The fact they are releasing a sequel and still can’t manage to do what they said they would is just pathetic. The fact that when asked again to do what they already said they would, while even explaining WHY you don’t want to go to user made guides due to the lack of information in them, and still having the developers point you to exactly what you said you didn’t want to use as it is NOT useful, is just astounding. At this point I can’t really recommend it.
– Real player with 35.8 hrs in game
This is a reluctant thumbs up, because Untold Stories is good–-it just tries extremely hard to block its own shot.
To start, every element in Untold’s design conflicts. It’s a twin-stick shooter, but you’ll spend more time puzzling and backtracking than in combat. Walk speed is slow, and movement options are limited, and everything feels heavy, but enemies are fast. You need to use your weapons' rate of fire to achieve good spacing, and you need to expect to get hit. Traps are practically a blanket over the map, and you’ll constantly be spending resources to top up your paltry health and cancel out status effects. You won’t necessarily know what anything does until you experiment with it, because this game tells you very little, and this is a recurring theme: being punished super hard for not knowing better.
– Real player with 34.7 hrs in game
WORLD OF HORROR
Go through the lives of a bunch of Japanese Boomers In a Boomer town full of Boomer Monsters that were summoned by Boomer cultists with a Boomer DOS aesthetic and Boomer chiptune music
This is a reminder that all your waifus in this game are boomers, and would be in their 60’s in current year. You’re welcome. (2 Reason Damage)
– Real player with 134.6 hrs in game
The game’s pretty great and gets really fun with its art/style. The modding community’s pretty alright as well! I had almost gotten to most of the in-game achievements but recently had to restart due to replacing a hard drive, still going to play through it again! Love this game.
P.S. OH BABY YEAH WE HEARD FROM THE DEV!
– Real player with 38.0 hrs in game
Deathstate: Abyssal Edition
Deathstate is what you get when you take Binding of Isaac, add some “bullet hell” mechanics, and put it in a colorful 16-bit H.P. Lovecraft universe. It’s a relatively simple game: Steer one of a growing cast of unlockable characters through a series of procedurally-generated worlds, gobbling up unlockable guts–monstrous hearts, eyes, brains, lungs, etc.–and equipping arcane tools that modify your stats and offensive capabilities.
And I quite literally mean “steer”: As a single stick shooter, you don’t have direct control over when or where you shoot. Instead, your character automatically targets and shoots enemies when they come into range, leaving you to focus entirely on movement and dodging. This unusual choice may turn off some players because it sounds like a dumbed-down twin stick shooter. It doesn’t help that the first map (called a “layer”) is frequently pretty easy, leaving many to assume you can simply sleepwalk through the game while your character does all the work.
– Real player with 148.5 hrs in game
Do you want a game which can fill up your time with good content and challenge? Do you like to mix element from danmaku (bullet curtain) and rogue-like? Then you have your game : Deathstate.
This review has been made after clearing the full game at version 1.13, which means 100% achievement and the hardest possible run.
For which player ?
Thanks to a scaled difficulty the game can be played by both novice to danmaku and experts. However, as it is now this can has some flashy effect that may pose a problem for color-blind people along with those having photo-sensibility.
– Real player with 38.4 hrs in game
Eldritch Reanimated
Eldritch is a randomly generated roguelike FPS populated by H. P. Lovecraft’s creations.
You start off in a library hub (a safe zone which is not randomly generated), from where you can go to different worlds: Dagon. Nyarlathotep, and R’lyeh. Each progressively more challenging. In each world your main goal is to descend 3 levels until you retrieve an orb, and then return to the library. In the library, you can place each orb on a pedestal, and unlock the final world, “The Endless Library”. Reaching the end of this world, completes the game, and unlocks New Game+ for future runs.
– Real player with 24.7 hrs in game
Do you like stoning fish-men to death with big rocks? I know I do! But if you’re like me, it’s a private pleasure and no one must know. So you creep out at night, ducking behind cover, keeping low to the ground, slowly rotating your irregular bit of rock (sedimentary perhaps), finding the grip to put the perfect english on it, listening for the hop-hop sounds of the fish-man as you slowly peak out, glancing briefly to see that his dopey face is turned away revealing his moist, tender cranium…
– Real player with 24.6 hrs in game