Subaeria Preview

From Herobyclicking

F-33. F-33. F-33. That flashes through my mind as I race through to Cube F-33. My father is there. F-33 is about to be sacrificed and I feel helpless. But I am not alone, my neighbors encourage, urge me, force me to do something. I race through our shanty town. A town that is submerged in the deep, dark depths. For 350 years we have lived like this with robots, the Cleaners, taking tasks we deem menial. It leaves to the mercy of efficiency. It leaves me to make a choice about today. Do I stay? Do allow our government to destroy my home cube? Or do I resist?

How do I fight? How do I get to F-33? My drone. I cannot fight or destroy the Cleaners and sentries myself, but I can manipulate them with my drone. It can work. It has to work. For my father. For us all.

Subaeria from developer iLLOGIKA, is an action, skill based puzzle game with demanding roguelike aspects firmly in place. The game places you deep underwater in an installation where you and the better part of humanity now reside. The water has risen and as we descended into the these underwater shelters we began to give up freedoms and neglected our reliance on the machines. It’s always the machines, isn’t? Humans just can’t help themselves. As I navigated Styx, one of four characters you can play in Subaeria I could tell in this early build of the game that this was going to be something different, something beautiful and something very, very challenging.

The vibrant color languishes underneath the shadowed and dusty sadness of each area. Perhaps when the underwater citadel was constructed they were mindful of the power of color on the denizens of the depths. Though color cannot contain the fear and and anguish. My character has no weapon per se. I have a drone that hovers alongside her which I can use to collect and install applications. Applications to control or deactivate the Cleaners, to confuse them with a hologram image of myself, make them go berserk or to turn my character invisible. Though only one application can be installed at time, making your style of play shift accordingly. If you manage to survive, you can pick up enhancements to increase your health, range of control of your drone and area of effect of your drone’s powers. Get these, you will need them.

http://i.imgur.com/P5gVDXW....

Each level has randomly generated puzzles pulling from set of pre-existing challenges. The levels are spread out over rooms in which you must cause the destruction of the colored Cleaners in order to progress. After discovering the transit room you can exit your current level and move onto the next. But not so fast. The Cleaners will try to stop you. They will often succeed. They will chop, stab, slice, shoot and crush you. You will fall into to electric fences or be blown to bits. You will die. You will die and start over. You will have to get it right; to jump instead of dodge, to avoid instead of engaging. Your home cube is counting you, don’t screw this up.

Avoiding and misdirecting the enemy had me grinning during my time with Subaeria. I could take control of a bot with an application causing it to crash into another, destroying the target. As I waited to for the application to recharge I taunted a sentry bot to fire a shot, though it’s recoil pushed it into an electric field, frying it’s circuits and causing it to explode. Level cleared and not a shot fired. You also gain a momentum as you play and die. You become adept at some of the puzzles and can afford to improvise. The rhythm is intoxicating and exciting and offsets the disappointment of defeat.

Subaeria teases with its attractive art direction and smooth gameplay. It’s serious about making you earn success. Be ready to fume, shout and kick. Be ready shout and relish in the Cleaner’s defeat. Be ready to start over, and do it again, and enjoy doing it.

http://i.imgur.com/2zHqHKQ....

Subaeria is a part of the Steam Greenlight program and will be available this September.

Day 10 | iLLOGIKA