HELL IS NEON COLORED

Descend through a procedurally built underworld drawn in five colours and lit entirely by the things trying to kill you. Every floor is generated the moment you enter it. Every weapon is something you assembled. Every sound you hear the score, the explosions, the sword — is synthesized note by note while you play. There are no audio files in this game.

BUILD THE WEAPON, NOT THE LOADOUT

A weapon here is three decisions.

A powering decides when it may fire and what that costs — an energy pool, a heat sink that locks out when you push it, a magazine, a flywheel you wind up by standing still, a tithe paid in your own health, or a gun that only fires on the beat of the music.

A weapon decides what comes out.

A rider decides what happens next.

Over three hundred authored combinations, and every pairing is balanced by construction: the powerings differ in how they fail, never in how much they pay. Play the one that matches how you move.

FIVE BANDS OF HELL

MORTAL is the base game. Clear it and descend to the HELL difficulties. Difficulty here buys new threats rather than longer health bars: mobs start carrying your own weapons against you, minibosses appear inside ordinary waves, and bosses arrive as formations of linked bodies — a bar that sweeps, a serpent that follows its own head, a pair bound together until the last phase splits them.

A SOUND CHIP, NOT A SOUNDTRACK

Ten chiptune tracks and ninety-nine sound effects run on one emulated eight-voice sound chip, generated sample by sample as you play. The score reads the run: it speeds up when you grab a power-up, sinks into its own low end when you are losing, and audibly thins out when a firefight steals its voices — because on real hardware, it would have.

Unlock the Audio Studio and it is handed to you. Pick the track, drive the tempo, stack a second layer in sync with the first, drag a ten-band EQ, watch a spectrum analyser, and record the result to a .wav file you can open anywhere.

FEATURES

• Three modes — Quick Play (a single descent), Endless (climb until it kills you), and the Gauntlet (a run of levels with a boss at the end)

• Five character slots with an eight-track progress bench

• 223 (95 Steam tied) achievements paying out score, mode unlocks and eighteen cosmetics — trails, a hue-rotated arsenal, and nine followers including three pocket bosses

• Seven enemy affixes and themed packs, each taught once and then remembered forever

• Hunts — a mimic disguised as a wall, a quarry that runs the fight toward you, an assassination target behind a ring of guards

• Full controller support, and every control on both keyboard and pad is rebindable

• Deep video and audio options — bloom, dynamic lighting, wall shadows, screen shake and hit stop each with their own switch and strength. A full EQ panel to tweak sound your way while you play.

• Customizations galore. Pets, trials, costumes, weapon recolors, and others abound.

PHOTOSENSITIVITY

This game uses bright, high-contrast neon visuals, bloom and screen flashes. A photosensitivity warning is shown on every launch, and the effects that cause it — bloom, camera shake, motion effects — can each be turned down or off from the options menu.