I Played This Indie Game and You Should Too!

[geggis]

So for posterity, and because this thread was locked when I posted my impressions up on the other indie games thread, I’m collecting those thoughts up here and adding a few more:

@geggis

Ecstatic is magnificent. I mean, just look at it:

Délicieux indeed!

So you’ve got a carrot-on-a-stick cursor that your spider follows when you left click, then a mouse-over lock-on, right click fire-and-forget shooting system. It feels weird at first but there’s this tension and rhythm between mousing over to lock-on and mousing away to move. It’s amazing how smooth it feels when you’ve got the hang of it. What’s more: when you lock-on to several targets, your spider does a burst dash on release which feels very satisfying and counteracts the stationary time to do all the locking-on. That’s a really smart touch. The heart of the game is in the pick-up/levelling system though.

Each level will periodically spawn a randomised pick-up. There’s blast (missile blast radius), drill (expands arena and speeds up lock-ons), hsink (reduces cooldown between salvos), speed (spidey speed), build (rate at which you store missiles), fangs (bite enemies on collision), freez [sic] (time slows down when you stop—this makes the game feel turn-based when levelled) and store (how many missiles you can store). Getting the right balance is key so not enough store and you run out missiles. Not enough hsink and you’re waiting too long between salvos. Not enough speed and it’s harder to dodge. But, hey geggis, I thought you said they were randomised? Well you can lock-on to pick-ups to cycle them!

There are three levels, each with their own music and BPM (and an editor that you can bung your own music into but I’ve not looked at that), each with four difficulties (easy, normal, hard, ecstatic) and a bunch of challenges or achievements to do for each one. I’ve done each level on easy but it’s getting really tough on normal. I daren’t think what hard or ecstatic are like. Restarts are lightning fast and as such I’ve found it very difficult to stop playing. It’s so easy to just have another go…

@geggis

I’ve got about 7 hours on Ecstatic now, somehow, god, it’s addictive (just completed normal), but for how ‘quickly’ it was made it’s absurdly good, as a very polished, tight and mechanically interesting shooter that’s holding my attention. The soundtrack is also great:

Onslaught

Anyway it took me about 20 hours in total to beat all levels on all difficulties and the hardest difficulty (Ecstatic) is intense. TLDR: anyone who’s a fan of bite-sized play session arcade shoot 'em ups (with a twist) should absolutely check this gem out. Some post-game general thoughts:

I love the horizontal and vertical axes on the crosshair so it’s super easy to find your pointer. I love the dash ability and how it gets stronger with each successive lock-on (great with fangs upgraded for an aggressive dash bite). The dash is a really smart way of offsetting standing still to target enemies and feels great. I love the glowing abdomen when a bullet is nearby (it also shows what part of your spider is the bit to watch out for). I love the clarity of the bullets to avoid. The sound and visual cues on enemies like the mage flying or the sniper zaps, and of course the pick-up barks (‘heat sink!’ ‘freeze!’) go so far in helping you prioritise targets. I love the colour grading on pick-ups and how they slowly gravitate towards you. I love the craters in the background. I love how the different enemies counteract different upgrade weightings. I’m amazed how ‘drill’ expanding the arena makes it feel like a very different experience: zero drill is a dogfight in a cupboard whereas max drill feels like outer space bullet hell. Freez is so satisfying, particularly with the audio slowing down (the explosions sound so crunchy). The music and visuals are, of course, fantastic. I initially found that the click-hold movement fatigued my hand but I think that muscle built up fast and I quickly forgot about it! The mouse movement and aiming is a revelation though and I love the friction between the two. The result is an incredibly fluid almost gestural system that made me feel like a bullet hell wizard. So good. My only real criticism is the tooltip roll overs in-game can obscure the action when you’ve upgraded drill. I feel like that should be in the pause menu or tutorial only. Also the spider is rad and crawls around beautifully.