No Longer Human – an upcoming fast-paced slash-em-up and the debut launch of indie developer 0801 LLC – is likely one of the most interesting examples of pure sensory overload that I’ve ever had the privilege of taking part in. I moved and attacked at speeds that felt inconceivable, to a soundtrack that’s so agressive and distorted its virtually indescribable, whereas watching geysers of pixellated blood erupt from my foes. The sport has the aesthetic of vector-traced arcade cupboards of the olden days, if these video games have been made at present and came about in a rave. It’s a one-of-a-kind expertise that completely deserves to be on the radar of motion recreation followers.
Earlier than we get into this, please take thirty seconds and watch this trailer (until you’re delicate to flashing lights during which case it’s best to completely NOT watch this trailer).
No Longer Human is a recreation that’s , above seemingly all else, in making the participant really feel like an unstoppable cyber-combatant who relentlessly slaughters foes in a digital world. On this recreation, you may slash by a complete row of enemeies in a single minimize, then leap into the air and fireplace a large rifle that may eviscerate them from a distance. You’re not invincible, however you are feeling unstoppable. If you die, you generally respawn into the fight encounter as an enormous casket falls into the sector, crushing something beneath it in an eplosion of low-fi gore.
In line with writer PM Studios, who’ve expanded considerably into publishing all kinds of indie video games over the previous few years, No Longer Human takes place in a close to future the place folks’s brains are intertwined with computer systems, permitting them to totally immerse themselves and reside in a digital world. The character you play as – a “vocaloid idol turned cyberdemon” – is actually on a killing spree on this realm, making an attempt to take it over for causes we don’t perceive at first. The sport is organising her up doubtlessly as a relentless villain, which is fascinating, and a very correct reflection of the brutality of her actions.
You get the sense, whereas taking part in, that protagonist Tsunono has by some means even eclipsed the principles of the digital world. She skates down slopes at blistering speeds between fight encounters, and fires her weapon to launch herself between grapple factors in a way that resembles flying greater than the rest. To cease transferring feels fallacious; the cadence at which she strikes feels virtually intrinsic to who she is.
The sport is damaged up into levels, rating you in your efficacy and creativity in your slaughter. The rating dominates the appropriate facet of the display screen, at all times looming over you, as if taunting you to push more durable, battle quicker, kill extra creatively. On the identical time, your imaginative and prescient is being pummeled with particle results out of your assaults and the ambient glow of the retrowave digital world you’re in. It glitches round you – deliberately, as aesthetic flavoring – in a means that seems like the sport’s world is disintegrating as you’re sprinting by it. Your ears are being obliterated by what I can solely describe as EDM – which on this case I’m abbreviating as “digital dying metallic,” which is each driving and intimidating. The stakes really feel excessive within the sense that the strain of all the recreation’s parts is is at all times at a peak. It’s a really robust first impression, a lot in order that it’s exhausting to fathom how the sport will have the ability to maintain such a momentum with out exhausting itself.
Whereas No Longer Human hasn’t been formally confirmed for Swap but, I used to be invited to demo the sport at PAX on behalf of Nintendo Every little thing, so there are very robust indicators that this recreation will finally come to the platform (plus retailer listings all however affirm it). Within the meantime, I’ll be dreaming about how unimaginable this recreation will really feel to play on my Swap OLED, in a darkish room with a superb pair of headphones.