Straimium Immortaly is an quirky mesh of the shoot-em-up and rogue-lite genre. With any rogue-lite, each fresh run plunks players into a procedurally-generated map with rooms that full of treacherous traps, twinkling treasures, or shady shops. It’s a familiar formula to anyone tracking the low budget 2D indie game scene, and its execution on the premise is unique, to say the least.
At a first glance, Straimium Immortaly appears to have been soaked in acid as the entire game drips with psychoactive visuals. It also has its’s fair share of pulsing beats that honestly left me feeling dizzy. The only thing that doesn’t seem to be drug-induced is the bog-standard shooting gameplay, which caught me off guard with how difficult it ended up being. But more on that later. Let’s take a closer look at the design elements first.
Straimium Immortaly is quite the spectacle to behold – which seems to be the game’s most prominent feature. Developer Anthony Case, appears to have fallen in love with a strange and dark pixel art-style which makes for a great combination with the game’s slightly creepy baby-like writing. It’s not just in the dialogue, but in the menu screens, tutorials, and title as well. Take the item description for Hotshot Ammo for example: “Boosty powa makes bigga gunnic booma.” If that’s your thing – great. Personally I don’t really enjoy having to decipher what power-ups and tutorials are trying to tell me.
Most of the room designs are reminiscent of late-game classic Contra levels, with disgusting doorways made of lumpy flesh and random bones. The 16-Bit pixel art-style is splashed with a dark vapor-wave color palette with 80’s-inspired pinks and blues, mixed with a dash of slimy greens. All the…’furnishings‘ seem to be half-alive, either having randomly-placed faces or seemingly composed of giant single-celled amoebas. It’s a strong visual style that I think is polarizing and I ,unfortunately, fall into the camp of ‘this is gross and just hard to look at.’
The gameplay should immediately be accessible to anyone who has played the likes of The Binding of Isaac or Rogue Legacy. The difference lies in the combat mechanics. Straimium Immortaly replaces the top-down shooting of Binding of Isaac with side-scrolling shoot-em-up style gameplay. Imagine Gradius, but taking place in a small room where you can move and face left AND right. Like many of the games I’ve just name-dropped, Straimium Immortaly . And to be very frank I’ll be frank. I didn’t–and couldn’t–get very far in the meta progression of this game. This includes “mutations” that affect gameplay as well as “classes” that change the way your player character operates.
It wasn’t just the punishing bullet-dodging gameplay that did me in, it was also baked-in design decisions that I frankly didn’t find very enjoyable. The backgrounds beat with activity and the color palette make seeing projectiles difficult. In certain challenge rooms, the “challenge” is added via an overlay or filter over the whole screen that moves and pulses, as if you are looking at the game through a pool of toxic waste. This makes it hard to see everything, and simultaneously decoding the filter and dodging bullets is mentally taxing. Then the game will hit you with an incomprehensible line of dialogue that floats and bounces and flashes different colors.
This is one of those games that’s pretty niche, and if it sounds like your bag, it’s definitely your bag. To everyone else, I’d stay far away. The game is lovingly crafted and cheaply made by a developer with a vision so strong it’s overwhelming. I respect the artistry that went into Straimium Immortaly but playing it felt like a bad psychedelic trip. If you are willing to dive into to this wacky world, I would at least wait until it was on sale.
