There are plenty of things you might expect to find after killing a boss in a roguelike. A new weapon, some gold, maybe a particularly nice pair of boots. In today’s rogue discovery, Deathstate: Abyssal Edition gives you organs.
Developed by Bread Machine Games, Deathstate is a single-stick bullet hell roguelike that first launched back in 2015, before later expanding into the Abyssal Edition. It’s currently sitting on a Very Positive rating on Steam, despite being the sort of game that could quite easily disappear among the thousands of roguelikes that have arrived in the decade since.
The story begins with Professor Elinberg, who made the always sensible decision to open a portal to the void and promptly disappeared. Finding out what happened to him means entering the Deathstate yourself, using deep astral projection to visit dimensions that probably would have been better left unexplored.
Don’t Worry About Shooting, Just Try Not to Die
Deathstate calls itself a single-stick shooter, and that’s because it takes one fairly major responsibility off your hands. Your character attacks automatically.
Instead of worrying about aiming at everything currently trying to kill you, you’re free to concentrate on weaving between enemies, avoiding incoming projectiles, grabbing loot, and deciding exactly how much danger you’re willing to put yourself in for whatever is sitting on the other side of the room.
That doesn’t mean you can switch your brain off. The worlds are procedurally generated and packed with nightmarish creatures, while surviving relies on learning how enemies behave and reacting when several different threats inevitably decide to arrive at once.
There are also multiple characters to unlock across repeated runs, each bringing unique abilities and a different starting build into the Deathstate. Finding them gives you more options for future attempts and another excuse to head back through the portal after the last trip ended badly.
Yes, You Can Have That Monster’s Organs
Loot in Deathstate includes arcane grimoires, ritual blades, burial masks, strange relics, gem-encrusted idols and plenty of other weird and wonderful things. The best stuff, however, is inside the monsters.
Elite enemies and bosses can drop organs, which can be collected to gain supernatural powers. Some alter your firing patterns, while the wider selection of items and abilities can turn runs in very different directions as you pile increasingly strange powers onto your character.
It’s disgusting, and also considerably more interesting than finding another slightly better sword.
Things Get Weirder the Deeper You Go
The game takes place across a deliberately strange collection of dimensions presented through 16-bit-inspired pixel art mixed with modern shader effects. Environments, enemies, and bosses, can warp and shift as the influence of the void starts messing with what you’re seeing.
The Abyssal Edition also added an Endless Mode alongside more organs, improved animations, updated effects and other changes, giving anyone who survives the main adventure somewhere else to test just how ridiculous their builds can become.
Deathstate may have been around for more than a decade, but its combination of automatic attacks, bullet hell dodging, dimensional Lovecraftian weirdness, unlockable characters, and organ harvesting still gives it an identity of its own.
Any roguelike that lets you defeat a horrible interdimensional creature and immediately start wondering which bits of it you should keep is worth a look.