#satryn

Instead of modern analog movement and aiming, Satryn uses strictly digital 8 way movement and shooting. It goes against the assumptions of the modern twin stick shooter, but what it loses in finesse it gains in precision and readability. A similar philosophy drives the visuals. Backgrounds are stark black fields, with enemies coming in high contrast colors and silhouettes, making it simple to discern them at a glance. Each enemy has a distinct behavior, and a smart player will quickly learn which ones to prioritize.

Dotted among the hazards and enemies are Friends, small smiling creatures who you’re here to save from their banishment. Each friend saved gives a small boost to your score multiplier, which becomes important not only for scoring, but survival, since a random powerup will be generated at certain score intervals. These range in usefulness, from bursts that push enemies away, to adding directional coverage, fire speed, or giving you a shield that allows you to take an extra hit. 

Satryn demands a certain amount of adaptability, since powerups, hazard and enemy placements are randomized every run, keeping you from memorizing stages or developing repeat strategies. It generally works in the game’s favor, since the score based focus and lack of ending keeps it replayable. It’s only occasionally an issue where the random generation can cause wild swings in difficulty, with certain enemy combinations being overwhelming, or the random nature of shield bonuses essentially giving you an extra life through sheer luck. 

It’s also worth giving special attention to the soundscape. Satryn has no background music, instead the atmosphere is made entirely of the arpeggiated synth sound effects, and cold hum of this prison planet. There’s a surprisingly detailed use of directional audio, too, with the sounds of enemies and explosions tracking across stereo channels, adding to paranoia with a sense of danger approaching on all sides. 

This reaches a crescendo after you’ve lasted a few waves, where the diamond shaped Wardens that have previously watched from the game marquee enter the playing field. An audio countdown is initiated, before they burst from the sidelines and drop into the arena, approaching with their intimidating size and multiple layers of armor that need to be dismantled before attacking their core. It’s a terrifying reversal of expectations that suddenly projects another layer of uneasiness into future runs. What you previously believed to be a decorative element were actually sentient beings, observing you and deciding when they need to step in. 

Taken with the background fiction and enemy profiles gradually unlocked in the in-game manual, it provides an interesting subtext to the story, especially when compared to the fiction set up by the original Robotron. Robotron had you playing as a superhuman, the result of a genetic engineering error, saving members of the last surviving human families from an army of robots whose calculations have shown that humanity is its own greatest threat, with the only way to protect humanity being its destruction. The last human family has distinct roles of father, mother and child that mirror a stereotypical nuclear family.

By contrast Satryn’s protagonist, the Former, and the friends you save are considered Invalids, tossed onto the prison planet of Satryn to be disposed of by the creatures in its ecosystem. While Robotron draws on sci fi works like 1984, and fears of technology making human life obsolete, and disrupting the nuclear family, there’s an almost queer subtext to Satryn. Robotron’s menace is artificial, cold and calculating, while Satryn’s enemies are very much organic, splattering into streaks of color with each shot, reproducing and leaving traces of themselves in the arena’s aftermath. 

There’s malice in Satryn’s fiction, where extinction comes not from machine logic, but systematic exile and extermination. Satryn’s Wardens have sent you and your friends to this planet to watch you die, and they step in when they’ve decided it’s taking too long to happen. Intentionally or not, Robotron carries heteronormative assumptions about what the family looks like, with an inherent optimism that the same technological faults that bring upon our destruction can enable us to resist against it. Satryn’s Former is instead exiled by their genetic defects, using the powers granted by it to protect their friends. Even the name feels loaded, with the Former pointing to their status as an ex-human, someone who used to belong to society, or someone who underwent a great change. 

 Maybe that’s projection on my part, but there’s something about the fiction of Satryn that resonates with me. Robotron was painted in the colors of kitsch, the fiction little more than a backdrop for action unfolding. And still it came with assumptions about what the future looked like, and what was worth protecting. Decades later Satryn has provided a companion piece that, intentionally or not, reexamines those assumptions.