Way back in forgotten history, gods were about relevant concerns. A god of storms makes sense when a random typhoon blows through, destroying crops and cattle and leading to a lean, hungry winter. Gods of sun, childbirth, war, the sea, invention and any other trait all needed a bit of love and attention to put a thumb on the scales of survival, tipping it towards their worshipers. If something good happened then the sacrifices were accepted and worthy, while bad things meant the gods just weren’t impressed. It’s not like the ancient people could divide reality into two and perform a double-blind experiment on gods/no gods, after all, so they prayed and hoped and lived with the results. Then a few millennia passed and the gods of history became far less obviously relevant to the forces shaping people’s lives than they used to be.
Hunting Gods And Synergies In Equal Measure
In the firstNeon Abyss, the old gods sent a champion into the underworld labyrinth to put upstarts like the god of mobile videos or goddess of makeup in their place. New eras breed new deities, but someone’s got to keep them from running rampant all over the world. Run and gun through a randomized death-maze constructed from hand-built rooms, with its features getting more intricate the more you play using a good variety of champions with unique abilities, and every run could be a very different experience.Neon Abyss 2is more of the same but bigger and more intricate, and it’s running a playtest now for feedback on all the changes.
Blasting Through the Depths of the Neon Abyss Demo
As a playtest, though, it’s worth noting this is a more simplified experience than the original game, in that the progression mechanics found between runs aren’t available yet. The one character available comes with a gun capable of clearing the first floor of the dungeon, basically a glorified popgun that usually shoots bullets unless it’s randomly a laser, but money drops frequently enough that earning a better one once you find the shop found in each level of the dungeon isn’t too hard, and there are dozens of weapons that may show up.
The first one I ran across was a tennis racket that comes with three balls orbiting the player and attacking serves one across the screen. The racket is also a melee weapon, but its real power is that each time a ball bounces back you can hit it again and it grows bigger and more powerful. You can control the direction the ball flies away towards using standard twin-stick controls and after a few hits aim doesn’t really matter because the ball is huge. Assuming you can keep the volley going while dodging enemy fire, of course.
Run and gun through a randomized death-maze constructed from hand-built rooms, with its features getting more intricate the more you play using a good variety of champions with unique abilities;Neon Abyss 2is more of the same but bigger and more intricate.
The tennis racket is just one of many, many types of weapons tagged as either ranged, melee, or mixed, each with its own quirks and oddities. “Shoots lots of bullets” or “hits real hard” are never a weapon’s only features and they tend to have variations effecting their abilities as well. Toss in weapon ranking, which looks like it’s replacing the player weapon perks that applied to all weapons equally in the original game, and learning how to play offense can be its own challenge on most runs. A gun that temporarily consumes coins to generate an electric bolt (the coins come back when you let up on the trigger) plays very differently from a sword that does decent damage with a quick short-range strike, but charging it consumes wisps for an extra-long slice that generates damaging homing butterflies after hitting an enemy.
Adding to the character-build complexity are a number of relics, artifacts and other items that can have major effects on how a run is played. Artifacts that let you find more keys, bombs and crystals are nice, but when your gun is powered up by having a long string of mini-monster eggs following along in your wake, it might be a good idea not to collect an item that makes them hatch more quickly. Or maybe it’s better to look for something else even if it’s of a lower tier, because the helper-monsters that hatch from the eggs are nice to have around. Every rule is changeable and every system can synergize with the others with the right upgrades. And when those upgrades don’t turn up, the trick is to adapt the play-style to the ones that do.
Granted, this is easier said than done, and like a lot of action roguelikes survival is frequently a result of decent luck on the first stage or two. Even so,Neon Abyss 2is shaping up to be an excellent upgrade from the first game even in the playtest’s stripped-down state. The pixel art is more detailed, weapons and items now have descriptions before you pick them up rather than leaving you guessing, money is easier to get leading to a lot more purchases of new weapons, artifacts and support items at the store, and in general all the systems feel like they’ve been given more flexibility to play and experiment with. There are also more than a few places where bits that are clearly going to be in the Early Access release aren’t included, such as the between-run dance club having multiple floors with nobody in them, so it should be a lot of fun to see how everything fits together when it launches later this year. The current plan is to start Early Access as a bigger game than the original and refine from there, and if the playtest is anything to go by,Neon Abyss 2will be a run and gun roguelike where each new run is a chance to try something different from the last.
