You're about to enter the Slime Hub, where a parasitic pink slime mold has taken root — right above God's shiny dome. Your goal: help the slime reach the source of the tastiest thoughts in existence (and give God a lobotomy in the process).
This is the intro that greets you upon starting up the demo for DEEPMESS, and it's an excellent primer for the blasphemous & wacky aesthetic the game oozes from every pore. I'm not going to say too much about the game's lovely almost-not-quite-90s-pre-rendered-3D style, because I think the visuals speak for themselves.
Mechanically we're squarely in the realm of turn-based tactics games, with some traditional roguelite additions: you take turns moving your squad of units around compact grid levels, using abilities to push things around, take out enemies and position yourself favorably. Into the Breach is a good comparison here, and lots of the puzzling feels similar, but with some Slay the Spire-style upgrades that you'll accumulate throughout your randomized run into the cranium of the almighty.
It was some of the fun new ideas DEEPMESS brings to these familiar setups that were responsible for hooking me, and I found myself enjoying the game more and more as I learned about its quirks and their interesting consequences.
Your party of "slags" that you'll be ordering around (a trio of unique robot-like suits animated by the pink slime) have brought with them a hammer and a nail to tunnel into God's skull. Your nail will land somewhere on each floor, and after dealing with some enemies you make the choice of when to pound it in — shattering that level of the cranium and dropping everything down onto the next floor, both allies and enemies alike.
What exactly you're landing on matters: you can crush enemies from above so you'll have fewer to deal with below, or drop them onto hazards like sharp rocks, or even kill two antibodies with one stone and drop them on top of each other. These possibilities, and the way they encourage you to position the whole board just right so you can crash land on the next floor with big advantages, quickly get you thinking about how to best use every tool at your disposal.
You'll notice up above I said "hammer" singular — you only get one, and the need to ricochet and bounce it between your slags after attacks forms another fun piece of the DEEPMESS puzzle. Deciding what order to do things in takes on an extra dimension: "I could use Throw to get this enemy where I want it, but Spike has the hammer right now, and if I Throw then I can't bounce the hammer over to Flat so he can use it..." Once you start adding in some simple upgrades and items, augmenting specific attacks or letting you take two turns in a row, it all starts blending into a pretty satisfying micro-tactics soup.
I was already enamored with the presentation and pitch for DEEPMESS, and after spending some time with the demo and learning that it's also got fun mechanical hooks, I'm really excited for where this funky little game might end up in its finished and polished form. Give me a compact little grid to play on, some refreshingly unique art & music, and I'll stick a nail in any skull you ask me to.
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