Convinced it’s a psyops by some developers to suck off your energy and brain cells. First it pulls you in with its polished presentation and promise of captivating shmup gameplay. Then as you take control, you are suddenly burdened by its piss ass controls, insultingly easy difficulty and inoffensive, bland, stale environments and setting. As varied in taste as a raw block of tofu, the game jinglies its keys in front of you with its bobbing and pop-ins of wonderfully polished vfx and pixel animations, but that alone cant help the fact that this game just feels so weirdly sterile - as it it was concocted in a lab with multiple focus groups to create a generalization of a genre onto mobile devices, sprinkled with enough currencies, scrires and menus to husk ur soul away.

Der "etwas andere" Space-Shooter
Schwarzer Humor pur!
-The german tagline of the game.

One shy evening while I was being grilled alive at 35°C in my room, fellow gamers (non-derogatory) @'d me on discord to go and play "Killer Baby" under the pretense of "I know German so this should be fun".

Intrigued as I was, I couldn't find a game DL of it for the life of me. Aside from this very humble game cover, there was no info to be found about it on the vast interwebz.
I did however find out that Amazon was selling it a discount of 100% off, FOR A WHOPPING 0.01 CENTS

After 8.01€ spent (8 Euros on shipping, capitalism smh) and also getting an external cd playa for my puter, it arrived

Now I could finally answer this burning question that was lingering inside me:
Is this an actual game, or is this just malware?

.
.
.
It's fucking boring, that's what it is.

Here some gameplay I recorded to see for yourself. For archiving purposes, I put the zip of the CD-ROM and the game (and the games front and back of the packaging) on Archive.org so that you too can play mid.

Hellishly mesmerizing, like peering through a microscope into a pulsating, "glow-in-the-dark" party for bugs. Psychedelic, kinetic and exhilarating through and through. Akin to Thumper and Post Void with it's antagonizing vibes and visual obstruction used as difficulty. Gotta be honest, Barely know what the hell is going on 80% of the time. A layer of esoteric rules and game design that leave me confused; like, when do I actually die? Does my health regenerate? What exactly do the power-ups do?
Highly recommend to not listen to the lies and deceits (recommended to play with gamepad) and just play with keyboard and mouse. Felt like my brain split into two while with a gamepad and I genuinely started to get headaches after 20 minutes. Worth it doe, these shapes and colors be POPPIN!!!

https://gmtk.itch.io/platformer-toolkit
I really recommend everyone, who enjoys game design I suppose, to play this 10-15 minute long game. This is a brilliant piece of gamified education. A playful peek behind the design curtains and efforts of designing a 2D platformer character, without diving too deep into the technical merits of one.

I know people have "varying opinions" on Mark Brown and GMTK, but I definitely am happy to see him manage to use the knowledge gained from his Developing Series and turn it into something educational and really exciting like this!

It kept popping around the backloggd sphere. Given the title, I thought it was some random meme game. (I guess everyone assumed that)

It's a 3 minute "experience" made in bitsy. It's a super personal piece to the point that relating and/or understanding it is impossible for me (thats not a bad thing really lmao). Given the use of bitsy, I persume this was made in the rush of the moment - very quickly and just trying to get the feelings/idea across while it is still fresh in their mind without having to commit to building a lot of system and tech beforehand. While minimal in its tech and execution, it still creates a strong sense of nostalgia for me - even though I never played Cave Story nor relate to the stuff said in the game.

In the end, I don't get why this got so much traction. I guess the title got some heads turnin'.