Voidigo

Video games are full of good sounds and audio tracks. The distorted explosion of rockets in Quake, the horrifying crack of a headshot in Gears of War, the iconic screams of Mario... These all serve as bait that leads us into the worlds of our favorite games.

Plenty of subtle animations serve this purpose, too: the screen shakes that crop up in Vlambeer's pixel art arcade games, the pauses when hitting, and the harsh audio cues from Hades's combat. All of this enhances each action and infuses each experience with a sense of kinetic energy and reward.

Voidigo combines everything and makes each room resonate and bounce with a cacophony of squawks, screeches, and trills before picking itself up, dusting itself off, and doing it all over again.

Every frame of Semiwork Studio's roguelike is full of movement and activity; reminiscent of Klasky Csupo's jittery, undulating animation, as objects and characters jump and wobble before you send them flying with a shot to the face.

Voidigio is a Roguelike similar to other screen-shaking top-down shooters like Nuclear Throne and Enter the Gungeon. We will play Drash, a little pink bird lady who has no memory of her past, but has been chosen by Antivoid to help fight the Void, an all-consuming evil that has marred reality. To do so, we will have to beat wheel-shaped levels, each with a core in the middle connected to a ring. Each level has a boss, and a large hunter beast corrupted by the warp. When you come across the boss, which can come in any form, such as a giant queen ant to a carnivorous plant with an anglerfish lure, you can start tearing it apart.

The bosses have fairly large health shards and a wide range of telegraphed attacks, hard to avoid. You'll notice pretty quickly that they have a large health bar covered in locks. This is because each map has a set of Void-Corrupted Monoliths that protect the boss. Of course, you'll need to crush them before you can fully defeat the ultimate enemy of the level.

But wait! The monoliths are often locked with a key held by certain variety of minions that can be found in the area surrounding the main hub. So the goal of the game is to find the monoliths, get the key, eliminate it, and hunt the boss. It's not that simple though, because bosses aren't static, they roam the map, haranguing you when they feel brave or running away to hide and heal.

The loop works like a mix of Monster Hunter and Nuclear Throne, a set of micro-objectives that forces you to engage in hellish battles full of aggressive trees, shell-clad thugs, and boisterous pigs, all while searching for new vortexes of loot. to grab weapons, or shops to refill your ammo count (or durability for melee weapons).

Like most roguelikes, you can also get a lot of passive upgrades: gems that shoot lasers, buttons that trigger random environmental effects, upgrades to shoot faster, or make your arms longer...

Combat is hectic and kinetic with projectiles and enemies shooting each other, but you're equipped with some nice movement options, including a sprint, a jump that does double duty as a dodge, and a Mario-style stomp that stuns enemies. As with all great roguelikes, the synergies between weapons and effects allows you to create fun combos.

Voidigo is definitely a game worth trying, so don't let the over-the-top 90s surrealism put you off. There's plenty of scope for an exceptional experience here, and having level-beating bosses to haunt you is something that never gets old. It all feels a bit manic, and that goes hand-in-hand with the dying and retrying approach of a roguelike.