Schism

what a lot of roguelikes miss out on that games like Isaac nail so flawlessly is the ability to use your brain as the meta currency. schism succeeds at this aspect incredibly well by overwhelming you with information at first. what initially seems like incomprehensible, random nonsense becomes second nature as you go on, and the more you demonstrate your understanding of schism's language, the more it rewards you. check out the demo, and if you like the gameplay, get ready to go down the rabbit hole.

Schism is great, if you like the sort of thing it is. It takes The Binding of Isaac maximalist approach to the roguelike structure, grafts on the Ikaruga color-shifting, and retrofits some extra traditional roguelike mechanics -- most importantly a sprawling religion system that's fairly akin to Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. Each of the 26 gods rewards different behaviors, with some being fairly straightforward and others... well, I don't know why I'd want to play a couple of them. It's interesting, though! The game is really about building up your advantages and scaling. Scrounging all of the value you can get out of each of the rooms and resources that appear on each floor. The bullet hell with Ikaruga gameplay is quite fun when you're scaled similarly to the enemies, but most runs you'll either outscale the enemies before too long or end up well behind and annoyed with how bullet-spongy they seem. I only had a couple of runs where I eeked out a win through clutching out dodges, but that doesn't mean I wasn't always having fun when I figured out some crazy scaling scheme and rained unrelenting waves of bullets across entire rooms. The art and style have this indie-jank weirdo cyberpunk vibe to them, and I dig it. Combined with some of the stranger mechanics, the game really has its own vibe. I play a lot of different games, so I particularly appreciate highly unique styles like this. Schism is some of the most fun I've had in the roguelike twin-stick shooter space in a long long time. It's perfectly up my alley, and an easy recommend -- if you like this sort of thing. It's certainly a strange experience that asks the player to figure out a lot, and, while that's a major plus for me, it certainly isn't for everyone.