ABANDONED: Thanatos Insignia
May. 6th, 2017 06:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kjorteoOops, I swear none of this Megazeux stuff was supposed to happen. I just got a couple of the top rated games on DigitalMZX along with Megazeux itself in case I ever wanted to learn/get into Megazeux someday and reverse-engineer anything at that point. Then I went through the ones I downloaded with the intention of peeking at them just long enough to establish what kind of games they even are, before filing them away somewhere for the far distant future. Somehow that led to me accidentally beating Caverns of Zeux and briefly being sucked into this one. It ultimately wasn't my thing and I'm not going to finish it, but technically I spent longer on it before reaching that decision than I did on MANOS, so I guess it deserves a write-up too.
So Thanatos Insignia is an overhead action game that plays kind of like someone made Operation Logic Bomb in Megazeux, paired with single-screen narrations between each level about someone in the hospital trying to use some fancy computing system to model human behavior and solve why violence exists, slowly becoming more obsessed with using the system and becoming more antisocial themselves in the process. Also the levels have random and really unfitting J-pop music, I guess in case you want to feel like you're shooting aliens while playing DDR.
I wasn't really feeling the gameplay, but the story segments interested me enough to keep going... right until I got stomped by the boss of level 12 (who fights to the tune of GIGA PUDDING for some reason.) I forgot to save and I really didn't want to go through the first twelve levels again, so I poked around the data files until I found where it was storing the story bits, read through those, and called it good.
I was wondering if this game was eventually heading toward some sort of point with juxtaposing the narrative of questioning the human nature toward violence in between levels of pure "gun down every bad guy that moves" but if it did, I didn't get that far and it wasn't in the story files.
Oh, well.
Still a technically and visually impressive, well-made game if this genre speaks to you.
So Thanatos Insignia is an overhead action game that plays kind of like someone made Operation Logic Bomb in Megazeux, paired with single-screen narrations between each level about someone in the hospital trying to use some fancy computing system to model human behavior and solve why violence exists, slowly becoming more obsessed with using the system and becoming more antisocial themselves in the process. Also the levels have random and really unfitting J-pop music, I guess in case you want to feel like you're shooting aliens while playing DDR.
I wasn't really feeling the gameplay, but the story segments interested me enough to keep going... right until I got stomped by the boss of level 12 (who fights to the tune of GIGA PUDDING for some reason.) I forgot to save and I really didn't want to go through the first twelve levels again, so I poked around the data files until I found where it was storing the story bits, read through those, and called it good.
I was wondering if this game was eventually heading toward some sort of point with juxtaposing the narrative of questioning the human nature toward violence in between levels of pure "gun down every bad guy that moves" but if it did, I didn't get that far and it wasn't in the story files.
Oh, well.
Still a technically and visually impressive, well-made game if this genre speaks to you.