“WHAT IS IT ABOUT VIDEOGAME DOGS THAT MAKES THEM EITHER THE BEST OR THE VERY WORST?”
I’d forget about it a bit longer until they said ‘Yeah, we’ve got him. He’s in.’ So that was fantastic!”
As you explore each randomised room in
Purgatory (Wyoming), unknown horrors lurk in every poorly lit corner. If you can get to a lantern, you can light things up with r, temporarily stunning nearby monsters. Pelting towards a dim lantern, glimpsing a ripple of sinew in the dark, we experience the magical moment the art style is aimed at evoking. During our hands-on, lighting lanterns becomes a reflex, as getting caught by the ghoulies is a hard lesson that only bears repeating a handful of times.
Langridge says, “Something that we want to do is pull people into the centre of a room even if it looks scary, so that they can get surrounded a little bit more, rather than […] take pot shots from the corner […] and the lanterns turned out to be quite a nice way of doing that. So you’ll see this scary dark room and there’s a bit of bait in the middle […] [The light stunning] the creatures gives you a bit of a chance to think and then you can start shooting.”
Going in with a vague plan is helpful, but the ability to improvise is key to survival. Enemies can destroy cover, which regenerates after a while. You’ll need to hunker down to speed up your automatic reload but you can’t just sit and wait either. Facing off against the first boss, seeing him diving in and out of cover, lobbing explosives, not to mention all the other ways he draws from the same intelligent bag of tricks as us, drives home the point that it doesn’t hurt to be adaptable.
RUN AND GUN
Your two guns are assigned to i and p, aiding the fantasy of dual-wielding. Abilities, of which you can also equip two at a time, can be popped off via u and o. Swarmed by enemies en route to the next lantern, we hurl a grenade at the approaching horde before diving over cover and making a break for the next passageway. Most average grunts won’t give chase but we encounter some especially beefy boys towards the end of our hands-on that are slow but always steadily advancing.
Now, this is a roguelike so you can’t carry over pickups like guns and abilities – of which there are a lot – between runs. Throughout Purgatory, there are places where you can channel the life force of enemies you’ve blasted into next week into stat upgrades. Reaching the end of a level finalises these changes so you can carry forward, say, your obscene amount of health into future runs. Let’s just say as we go from slow-moving zombies to dogs, we’re glad to have that cushion of hit points.
(What is it about videogame dogs that makes them either the best or the absolute worst?)
Anyway, after peeking into a room only to see three dogs sniffing around, we decide to explore a different, procedurally generated path – and try to ignore the developers standing behind us, chortling. Our reason for turning back isn’t just cowardice (though that’s definitely part of it). We’re also regretting our specialised shotgun loadout. While every bit as powerful as you’d expect, shotguns are slow and necessitate close-quarters combat that we’d rather avoid for the time being. It’s worth exploring, but we’d rather make our escape before becoming demonic Fido’s new chew toy.