Mala Petaka demo playthrough
4I'd seen screenshots/clips of this game a few times, and the art style certainly seemed to stand out, so I've wanted to give it a look for a while. Apparently it's had a demo for over a year and I somehow never noticed?
This is another indie GZDoom-based FPS, developed by Sanditio Bayu, with 8-bit inspired graphics/sound and chiptune music. It vaguely reminds me of games like Chex Quest, Commander Keen, and perhaps the Mega Man NES series in terms of environment aesthetics.
The demo feels like it practically defines the term "run-and-gun". Maps are much more about always having something to shoot at (and with) than they are about exploration. There are various arena setups, some of which have multiple phases where they open up progressively in Dead-Simple-esque fashion. The game also features ammo recharge pads at various points so you don't have to worry about running out, although I worry that it might do this too often in lieu of properly balancing resources - at some points it feels like the game might as well just give infinite ammo and ditch ammo limits entirely.
A couple of areas have a lot of linearly-progressing rooms where a group of enemies shows up and once you've destroyed them all, another area opens immediately where another (and sometimes very similar) group spawns. This particular pattern can get to feel stale extremely fast, so I do hope that the map design evolves into more interesting and less blatantly repetitive patterns in the full game.
The weapons seem pretty decent, and most are somewhat parallel to vanilla Doom counterparts. Each weapon has an alt-fire to add something interesting to the mix. The machinegun is surprisingly the most baffling to me, as it seems to be _extremely_ accurate and literally doubles as a sniper due to the alt-fire being a scope with multiple zoom levels. This feels like an extremely odd choice that would be better off as 2 separate weapons; I wonder if there's any possibility of that in the final product, since it's expected to have more weapons.
Visuals seem pretty clear for the most part, though in a few spots they can get extremely busy to the point where enemies can become hard to spot against their backdrop. One unfortunate issue with the demo is that the screen-shake slider doesn't appear to actually work, at least with regard to weapon-fire-induced shake (which some weapons trigger far more severely than others).
At any rate, if you enjoy 8-bit aesthetics and blasting lots of things without much thought, you'll probably enjoy this. The demo is available both on Steam and Itch.