VIDEOGAMESVIDEOGAMESVIDEOGAMESVIDEOGAMES

A retro roguelike FPS built on a system of movement I'm just now learning is called "6 degrees of freedom", refering to the motion and rotation along all 3 dimentional axes. Although the term is new, I'm familiar with the movement system itself; I've logged many hours in Elite Dangerous and Outer Wilds, one of many reasons being the flexibility and freedom of motion during spaceflight. Desecrators gives you this freedom and puts you in sprawling but narrow corridors, armed with enough weaponry and munitions to live up to the game's title.

This game has immensely satisfying game feel. Movement meshes surprisingly well with the environment, allowing for smooth traversal with little to no effort. Every motion carries enough momentum for the player vessle to feel heavy, but not enough to be tedious. In particular during the occasional water segment, when movement feels sluggish in the best way possible. This shines the brighest during escape sequences on meltdown type missions, analogous to a Wario Land 4's escape segments. The exhilaration of slicing through the maze-like structure at breakneck speed, dodging the converging milita as the on-screen timer punctuates your escape.

All weaponry has unique characteristic that suggests select equipment counters certain enemy types. The game provides a thorough encyclopedia of all combatants, but nothing that suggests which weapons best counter them. This has me thinking the selection of armaments is primarity situational, and this combined with the capacity for spacial awareness is what makes up the skill ceiling for this game.

The essense of the DRG formula is perserved to great effect. The game is visually faithful to its forebearer, with many creative adaptations to better accomodate the new perspective. Terrain mining is a critical for obtaining currency and kiting hordes, justifying its presence beyond simply honoring DRG proper. Many of the archetypical enemy traits seen in the genre are creatively adapted from the familiar glyphids and macteras genera, and the intensity of a large horde encroaching is as intimidating as ever. And while I only ever unlocked the M1000 for the starting scout class, I imagine a good variety of the classic weapons are represented in unique ways. In other words, the game triumphs as a DRG spin-off. How does it measure up as a survivor-like?

Take away the engaging gunplay, environmental traversal, and all cooporative elements of DRG and you're left with a large gap to fill. Survivor-likes' biggest strength often lies in the buildcrafting, of all the ways various upgrade paths have drastic consequences for the way a run unfolds. DRG Survivor lacks interesting upgrades, and consecutive runs have very little individuality to them. Because of this, it's unable to suppliment the foundation for an engaging gameplay experience. The flavor of a run is primarily dictated by which 4 weapons you pick for your loadout, but any subsequent variance is exclusivly damage/fire rate/reload speed upgrades. I've yet to encounter any interplay, synergies or cascading consequences of any upgrade paths, and find each run ending with much of the visual flair it started with. That is to say, very little.

My survivor-like of choice is 20 Minutes Till Dawn, a game with its own flaws but enough visual flair to set a personal gold standard. Build variety may tend towards two archetypes but most the time, a new upgrade path means drastic changes to the way you interact with the horde. The realization of powerful, or potentially gamebreaking, synergies is the greatest reward the game can bestow. Even meta-progression has upgrades that cater towards certain build preferences. All this is abscent from DRG Survivors, and what is there feels like a shallow attempt at a viral genre without an appreciation for what makes it tick.

The game is certainly visually atmospheric, but the audio design leaves much to be desired. The CRT monitor effect that permeates the audiovisual experience mutes and flattens all SFX drastically, which created a barrier for immersing myself in the environment. No suspense was ever felt, therefor investment in the player character was never experienced. This combined with the methodical approach demanded by the game lended itself to an overall unengaging experience.

Poor audiovisual design can however often be salvaged by good game feel, something I also felt was lacking. Gunplay was moderately satisfying, along with sprinting and dodging. Melee combat came with some frustrations, but the biggest gripe is the UI and menu navigation design. A brief monitor effect playing whenever opening the inventory or map was a source of major frustration for every play session. This was accompanied with awkward keybindings that were ill-suited the conventional WASD-Mouse hand placements.

Last year I became very intrigued with a puzzle archetype I'd encountered many times over the years. The puzzle boils down to a number of inputs and outputs, of which one input maps to one or more outputs. Upon activating an input, any associated output will change state, be it a cyclical binary state or more complex. The objective of such a puzzle is usually achieving spesific configuration, i.e. lighting all lamps or aligning all platforms.

My facinations for these puzzles was sparked by the realization that linear algebra may be applied to solve such puzzles computationally. Binary puzzles were simple enough, each switch could be viewed as a binary string, which would be XOR'ed with the state upon activation. Any desired configuration could then be viewed as a linear combination of these binary strings, given it was within the "span" of the "basis". This line of logic suggested that more complex puzzles could be modeled with more complex algebraic and, more importantly, matrical operations.

At the time, I spent about a week looking into games with similar puzzles, doing back-of-the-napkin calculations and scripting small simulations to guide my reasoning along. While certain that similar work had already been done by folks more adept than me, the realization of "practical" applications for abstract mathematics is always a satisfying puzzle onto itself. Ultimately, as interest waned and external research turned out to be un-searchable, my facination settled.