OTXO

Hotline Miami, SUPERHOT or even Project: Downfall are some of the names that will come to mind when playing OTXO. It's a twin stick shooter with an overhead view that will make you fall in love with it from the very first moment. The title from Lateralis Heavy Industries (a single developer studio) and with the help of its publisher, Super Rare Games, brings us yet another game where you can smash enemies and bust doors.

The essence of OTXO is based on the adrenaline generated by its "dungeons". Does the name John Wick sound familiar? The truth is that the character played by Keanu Reaves has never had a game that does him justice. If we remember, in the past, the release of John Wick 3: Operation Parabellum saw the birth of John Wick Hex, a kind of X-COM with the bogeyman as the protagonist.

Well, in OTXO we don't play John Wick (although we kind of do), but we take control of OTXO, a rabid, violent and helpless beast. In the search for our beloved, we will have to face all kinds of evils that we find in the changing mansion. We don't remember our name, we don't even know how we got to the mansion and when we die our story will restart and we will be back on the beach in front of the gates of the luminous mansion that has trapped our girl. The plot is simple, but soon secondary characters will appear and slowly unravel the story as we progress through its hundreds of rooms.

This is a Roguelite, a genre that tends to have two very important values: the first is permanent death and the second is the procedural generation of levels. But the truth is that OTXO is much more than that, as from the beginning we can customise our experience, deciding which weapons to use and even makes use of a classic soul system. Killing will generate coins that will be used to buy cocktails or power up your character.

Our character has an ability that gives him the advantage in combat, concentration, a kind of bullet time that will slow down the action allowing him to avoid bullets and make more accurate shots. Weapons have limited ammunition, so it is important to constantly change weapons. Sometimes they even have an extra charge but rarely rent reloads so it’s better to take weapons from defeated enemies. This serial-killer-like clearing of areas will allow us to earn a small increase in coins that will be great to spend in the rest rooms, where we can unlock new cocktails or even spend them on pachinkos.

The game is simple and although it is based on repetition, our character has another peculiarity in that we can use the environment to our advantage, because when we are jumping over a piece of furniture, we will not receive any damage.

It is curious to see how OTXO, starting from a zenithal view that will remind us of the Hotline Miami saga from the first moment, manages to differentiate itself so much.

Visually, the black & white touch is perfect to achieve such a pure and raw finish with so few tones. In this respect OTXO may remind us of 12 is Better than 6, the Hypertrain title which, like OTXO, decided to go for a promising hand-drawn design that works like a charm even when the screen is dyed red.