The fifth episode of a short series on games I discovered at EGX Rezzed 2017.

beacon_rezzed

I played Monothetic’s Beacon at Rezzed in 2015, where it was one of the additions to the Leftfield Collection. While the aesthetic was pleasing to the eye, what was on offer was a sort of pot boiler run-and-gun shooter. There was no reason to suspect Beacon would be any more than the its aesthetic.

Two years later, Beacon is back at Rezzed, but this time exhibiting in the Tentacle Collective room rather than as one of the Leftfield. (While I’m here, let me explain that the Tentacle Collective is the brainchild of the team behind Terra Tech, Payload Studios. They buy up a large space and then invite indies to share it with them at cheaper rates than it typically costs to be part of the bustling Indie Room plus they get great support from Payload who get the hardware up and running. I had assumed Tentacle Collective was about a publishing relationship but its purely an exhibiting one.)

The latest version of Beacon has much better execution and feels like something I want to play. It’s a sci-fi roguelike, where you’re stranded on an alien planet after a crash landing which, er, killed you. There’s the usual mix of finding weapons and powers to support your mission plus a funky metagame I completely missed where you can splice the genes of fallen enemies into your new “clone” at the start of the next attempt.

The aesthetic reminds me of Flashback although Beacon‘s graphical fidelity is more sophisticated. I enjoyed its simple blasty nonsense and now very much looking forward to a public release of Beacon.

You can find out more from the Beacon site.

Interested in other games I’ve dabbled with? Check out the series index!

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