Extraneum demo playthroughs (trailer shown at Realms Deep 2022)
3This is one of the super-low-res cube-based FPSes shown off during Realms Deep 2022. Games of this style tend to be a hard sell to me, but having scrutinized Extraneum's trailer, it seemed to have satisfying gunplay and more impressive / less annoying visuals than some others I've seen or played. The developer announced plans for a 50% off sale starting November 22 (the game is in early access containing 1 of 3 episodes), so I figured I ought to give its demo a try.
The gunplay does indeed feel pretty solid, and I like the texture designs (although the weapon model designs could stand to look more distinct from one another). The map overlay also seems pretty useful and I like the inclusion of a minimap mode. The environment (and sometimes the map) sometimes subtly hint at secrets, though other times you seemingly have to cluelessly nudge walls with a certain texture (i.e. there's no subtle texture differences to point them out that I could tell).
Unfortunately, the demo shows one extremely glaring flaw: poor resource balancing. Even on the medium difficulty setting, the game seems to outright _require_ you to find most or all secrets just to find enough resources (especially ammo) to survive the level. This is NOT good game design - secrets should not be required, otherwise they are no longer secrets, they're needlessly obscure progression.
While the game does allow you to respawn on some difficulties, respawning is arguably worse than restarting a level completely. You don't respawn at full health, so you need to either further scavenge for resources or spend additional credits on top of the cost of respawning just to heal up.
Even worse is if your reason for dying was ammo starvation (as happened to me) - if you exhaust the level of ammo drops, you're basically screwed. At least on the lowest difficulty you can respawn infinitely, but if you're dry on ammo that would reduce the game to a mind-numblingly unsatisfying loop of rushing at enemies with your knife, dying again, and repeating.
In its current state, the only way to really enjoy the demo is to play on one of the lowest two difficulties, which multiply your damage output, thus making your weapons more ammo-efficient (especially the starting SMG, which feels entirely too weak to be as limited on ammo as it is at 1x damage).
Other Videos By CnEY
Other Statistics
Extraneum Statistics For CnEY
Currently, CnEY has 43 views for Extraneum across 1 video. His channel published less than an hour of Extraneum content, less than 0.03% of the total video content that CnEY has uploaded to YouTube.