Review: Teleglitch Die More Edition

You've been running for a while now. Your legs want to give out but you know you can't stop because to stop is to die. The chattering of the abominations hot on your heels change fight or flight to an act of both. You count three, no, six of them barreling down the hallway. You backpedal, pull out the shotgun slung over your shoulder and fire three successive blasts. Each shot cuts down one, but those that remain continue on to pursue. You could throw the canned meat, that usually slows them down. But you haven't eaten in some time. Or there's the cangun you improvised only moments ago. Rain a hail of hot nails upon your pursuers. But you might just kill yourself in the process.

I shouldn't have eaten that canned meat.

Teleglitch follows a long line of rogue-like games with an attitude that says, "If you die, that's it." It doesn't do anything as drastic as uninstall itself from your computer, but if you die in Teleglitch you just have to restart the game. Its expanded version, subtitled "Die More Edition" emphasizes the brutality of the charmingly simple game and, while mathematically speaking you may die more often in this new edition, you'd still die plenty in the original.

There is a story to the game that reveals itself through various computer terminals and a brief opening interlude. Get this: you're at a space colony and things go south fast. Dark matter swallows hallways and mutants and zombies of all sorts scour the corridors seeking flesh. They've got two items on the menu: canned meat and you.

The game's visuals are a pixelated simple feast. Character models differ just enough that you can tell the difference between you and them, but that's the only distinction you have to worry about. Some enemies are a bit bigger, so you can guess it's going to take a few extra shots (or stabs if you're out of ammo) to bring down. The camera hovers over the landscape like a voyeuristic drone watching a lone survivor narrowly avoid being a main course for a mutant social gathering. It zooms in and rotates depending on how big of a room you enter, which can get dizzying but is able to be turned off in the options. Your map is activated by hitting Tab and the camera zooming all the way out, revealing everything you've explored thus far and obscuring the unknown in a blanket of black. Everything outside the randomized corridors and rooms is that same absolute black, reinforcing a fear of the unknown. While traversing the facility, you might come across a hallway that ends in darkness with a strange colorful ripple on its surface. "Anomalies," they call them. I'll let you guess what happens when you walk into them.

For the average PC shooter fan, the controls are a walk in the park. WASD moves your character swiftly through the claustrophobic environments. Your mouse wheel picks a different item in your inventory like a shotgun or a medkit. Right mouse button aims. Left mouse button shoots. The way the Good Lord intended.

Then there's the C key. By default, this is the "Combine" key that allows you to combine different items in your inventory to make new tools or weapons. Combine a can of meat with some RDX_250 explosive and make the sophisticated "meattrap." Box of nails and some more RDX_250? Nailbomb. It doesn't have the engineering depth of a game like Minecraft, but it does add some survivalist flavor to a game where your second objective to hopping teleportation pads is to survive.

It's no Game of the Year contender, but it's a challenging and simple odyssey that proves it's well worth its cost. You can pick it up on Steam for $3.25, where it normally retails for $12.99.