Graham: I dont care what day it is, this is the best game of the year.
Its Ids early aesthetic (eg. skulls) boiled down into an arena shooter. Its also cribbed Ids early weapon design (shotgun and lightning gun, specifically), merging them together into the players hand, which sprays red death at a growing mob of enemies (eg. skulls) that are chasing after you and the strange obelisks that birth them.
An interesting novelty, short on content, or so I keep reading. But I went back and back and back and I started to survive longer, because I started to notice its nuances. How you can turbocharge the sprayed projectiles from your hand using red gems dropped by those obelisks, for example, and how timing the moment of that turbocharge can help you to reach further which in turn prompts you to let those obelisks live for longer. How there are more enemies to be discovered than I initially realised, once I could live long enough to meet them, and how each disrupts my established movement patterns and forces me to re-jig my enemy priority list again and
I love everything about it. The way it looks, the way it feels, the way it sounds. The sound! I dont normally much notice or care about audio, but the worble of your sprayed projectiles, the tinny tinkling when you hit an enemy, the splorch when you pop them, the low discordant hum which underscores the entire game, the chittering of those giant arena-adjacent bugs, the way everything seems to be screaming
