Developer: Byte Barrel
Steam Deck Compatibility?: Verified
Rrp: £20.99 (Gog.com, Humble, Steam and Epic)
I wasn’t expecting this game to get a sequel, not because it didn’t deserve one but because indie games don’t tend to get sequels. As should be expected the sequel continues with the Lovecraftian theme the first had, many of the enemies you face are the same as those you found in the first game but a lot new ones have been added that really spice things up.
Sadly the most interesting aspect of the first game is now gone, or rather replaced with a much more simplified system. In the last game killing enemies gave XP that allowed you to upgrade your weapons and doing so caused one branch to become locked off. In this one you can find tokens in the world, these tokens can be spent to buy a new variant of a weapon. You can still swap back to the original weapon if you want and the variants aren’t always a direct upgrade sometimes trading range for more damage etc.
You do gain madness tokens too, these are earned at the end of each level from killing enemies. These tokens can be spent to unlock pages for your Dark Tome. You can have two passive pages active and one active one. The active page will have some kind of effect (depending on the page selected) like making you resistant to damage or gaining life on a kill. The passive pages vary in ability like increasing melee damage or having a chance of not using ammo when shooting.
If you liked the first give this a go (or if you like a good shooter), I’m a bit disappointed in the weapon upgrade system being changed. Then again I like my ‘crunchy’ RPG’s, so that may be a factor.
