Do you miss a nitty-gritty top-down shooter like Hotline Miami or Mr. Shifty? OTXO by Lateralis Heavy Industries may be the game to satisfy your high-intensity, bloodthirsty itch. By watching your ammo count, dodging enemy bullets, and manipulating time, knee-jerk strategy may be the only way you can survive this action shooter.
OTXO likes to keep the story vague and mysterious. At some point in your life, while on the train with a person important to you, you decide to put on a white mask that was laying on the ground. After doing so, all you can remember afterwards is waking up on an island with no way to escape. There are few other members of the island, all trapped in an endless loop of time taking care of a large mansion in the center. It has been deemed that once you reach the end of the mazes of the mansion then you will be subject to the passing of time and possibly save your loved one. When wearing the mask, every time you die you restart washed up on the beach, having to make the trek in the mansion all over again.
OTXO is probably best played with a mouse and keyboard, though none of my controllers would work for the game anyways. The controls are standard to most other shooters: point the mouse to aim, WASD to move, and left click to fire. The only moves that take adjusting to are the dropping and picking up weapons using the right mouse button, kicking in doors with the mouse wheel, and slowing time (using Focus) by pressing Shift. At first it can be difficult to manage all the controls as bullets are blazing around you, but after a few deaths it starts to make sense.
Starting every series of rooms in OTXO there is a bar where you can purchase drinks to give yourself powers to improve your fighting. A lot of the drinks are mundane and not worth their egregious prices, but others can be lifesavers. After leaving the bar area you must journey through a series of challenging areas to kill all the enemies before moving onto the next. The areas are randomized in order of appearance, but you start to slightly remember the layouts. Enemy positions are also randomized, as well as the weapons that they wield. A unique aspect of OTXO is that you can determine what weapons will appear in the mansion. This may benefit you, as you may get attached to a certain kind of play style, but it may also be a hindrance as all the enemies have these weapons as well. Each weapon comes with another magazine, but in the heat of battle it takes too long to reload, so it’s best to swap guns with the enemies you killed often.
I can’t decide if OTXO is really a roguelike, rogue-lite, or any kind of rogue game. Sure, you have to start all the way over and you get little upgrades as you progress, so I guess we can call this a rogue-lite, but the amount in which you progress is very slim. OTXO throws you immediately in the fray and it takes a few deaths to finally start understanding how the game works. The big problem with the lack of progression is the sense of accomplishment the gameplay is devoid of. I spent a lot of coins to unlock a new drink, but I won’t actually see this drink stocked at the bar any time soon (and as I said earlier, the upgrades are bland and uninteresting). With the drinks the only thing that improves your character past your own skills you start to hit a difficulty wall pretty quickly. Right when you think you got the hang of the game, you get stuck on a corner of a couch and get blasted.
What causes the problem of difficulty in OTXO is the amount of randomness it has. Every layout is different, it takes a different number of rooms to get to the level boss each time (it needs some kind of tracker to help guide it), powerups are always random, as well as enemy placement, and the list goes on. There are too many changed variables and nothing to plan for. Because of the randomness, the pacing of the level is all over the place and there is no strategy to the game besides trying not to get hit. Winning becomes luck-based. Ironically, area bosses are not randomized, so after defeating the same boss over and over again (who is also proportionally easier than the areas you waded through) it all becomes monotonous.
The art in OTXO is plain black and white, with accents of red splattering the ground. Probably the most troublesome art is the furniture and lighting choices. The furniture looks dull as if you can walk through it, but it all gets in your way. Multiple times I’ve died not realizing I was stuck trying to move around a chair before it was too late. The UI has a thin line around the edges, assuming to make it not blend in with the rest of the black and white, but it ultimately makes it look tacky and unpleasant to look at. There is some work put into making all the drink powerup choices satisfying as the screen and bar shakes slightly as the bottle lands on the counter, liquid bobbing up and down.
Audio in OTXO is fine. There are a lot of UI navigation that is missing sounds for feedback, but other times the sound fits the animation to make for satisfying thunks. Until you start battling enemies, the game is pretty quiet, peaceful even. I understand that the developer wanted the actual gameplay to be intense, but blasting the dark synthwave when you enter an area makes for a jarring surprise. Some kind of fade in would have been appreciated. The battle music is so much louder that I have to turn everything down. While the music is fun and fits the theme, there are only a few tracks it shuffles through. It would have been better if there were tracks connected to the different rooms, but that would mean the game would’ve needed to be more planned out than it is.
In summary: Intense gameplay that can be enjoyable at times, poorly randomized level design, plain art, and poorly mixed (but exciting) audio.
Jordan played OTXO on PC with a code provided by the developer.
