Penance
Genre: Oldskool FPS
Bundle: Racial Justice
Sabe's rating: 😈😈😈
This game is metal. So metal. The metaliest of metal. It's so metal, magnets stick to its unborn grandchildren. The spine is tapped out, motherfucker.
Penance wants you to speedrun. To sprint through the rivers of blood, guns blazing, screaming at the top of your lungs. There's no differentiation between walking and running, no way to crouch; you're either standing still, or you're burning rubber. Maybe you've got balls enough to run through the campaign deathless? (Just don't try a pacifist run, because fuck that noise.) The soundtrack seeks no greater achievement than to have some blogger describe it as "pulse-pounding".
Oddly, though--with the exception of the final boss battle--the mechanics and level design don't actually reward that playstyle. Aggroing a group of monsters all at once is a surefire way to go from 200 health to zero in moments, and if you're trying to dash and circle-strafe around the map you're all but guaranteed to dive down a bottomless pit. Instead, the usual best strategy is to figure out how many bullets it takes to kill each of the five enemy types, then poke your head around each corner and fire exactly that many shots from across the map with your weirdly accurate pistol and assault rifle.
Piss-taking accomplished, though, this game is actually quite solid! If you're nostalgic for early Quake, with chunky low-poly monsters, canned death animations, zoomzoomy movement, and breadcrumb trails of powerups leading you through nonsensical dungeons, you could do far worse than to pick up and try Penance. There's even an endless mode to mess around with once you've memorized the campaign levels!
Genre: Oldskool FPS
Bundle: Racial Justice
Sabe's rating: 😈😈😈
This game is metal. So metal. The metaliest of metal. It's so metal, magnets stick to its unborn grandchildren. The spine is tapped out, motherfucker.
Penance wants you to speedrun. To sprint through the rivers of blood, guns blazing, screaming at the top of your lungs. There's no differentiation between walking and running, no way to crouch; you're either standing still, or you're burning rubber. Maybe you've got balls enough to run through the campaign deathless? (Just don't try a pacifist run, because fuck that noise.) The soundtrack seeks no greater achievement than to have some blogger describe it as "pulse-pounding".
Oddly, though--with the exception of the final boss battle--the mechanics and level design don't actually reward that playstyle. Aggroing a group of monsters all at once is a surefire way to go from 200 health to zero in moments, and if you're trying to dash and circle-strafe around the map you're all but guaranteed to dive down a bottomless pit. Instead, the usual best strategy is to figure out how many bullets it takes to kill each of the five enemy types, then poke your head around each corner and fire exactly that many shots from across the map with your weirdly accurate pistol and assault rifle.
Piss-taking accomplished, though, this game is actually quite solid! If you're nostalgic for early Quake, with chunky low-poly monsters, canned death animations, zoomzoomy movement, and breadcrumb trails of powerups leading you through nonsensical dungeons, you could do far worse than to pick up and try Penance. There's even an endless mode to mess around with once you've memorized the campaign levels!