Not sure what compels people to rate a demo so poorly, one in which the main goal is to make a functioning (albeit barebones) FPS in a filesize 20x smaller than og Doom, demonstrating the advantages and prowess of carefully crafted procedural generation not just for 2D levels and such but in asset generation; this demo succeeds at doing so wonderfully and it feels surprisingly snappy (though again, very barebones) in gameplay. Not to mention the graphical effects on display here (mainly the lighting techniques) are still very nice to look at, it's just fun watching your bullets light up sections of hallways and the bumpmaps on the models.

When I've been harsh on other demos, it's because they fail to convey the game in a meaningful manner past a rough guess as to what the rest of the game would be like (Cult of the Lamb, Frogun; the former ending before you even really go out on an actual run, the latter failing to use its main mechanic in literally any capacity that couldn't be replaced with a "grab" button in these demos)

I'd like to see a 3D FPS roguelite with procedural level and asset generation fleshed out into a full game, I doubt the gameplay in a vacuum would be great but conceptually I'd find it far more interesting to see a game like that fit on only a few megabytes. As someone who will look the other way when something like Forza Horizon 5 is 120GB, I'd be lying if I didn't think this was also very admirable and kind of wished more developers would attempt something like it.

Reviewed on Nov 10, 2022


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