Die After Sunset by developer Playstark and publisher PQube Limited—PC preview written by Pierre-Yves with a demo available through Steam.
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
If there’s one thing that we all love to hate it’s a Rogue-like/lite and Playstark with the help of PQube have one on hand that had me hook, line and sinker before even taking out the demo currently available on Steam. Set in a world where being known as Murkor have invaded all while looking adorable and running around with rubber floaties on a beach, they are still super deadly and will send you quickly to your grave if you’re not quick enough on your feet.
Set as a third person shooter with RPG elements, Die After Sunset is a quick and fun experience that could easily avoid the usual traps of overstaying one’s welcome. The reason for this is that Roguelikes and Roguelites have the tendency to make you push ever further until you’ve failed, often accumulating a degree of frustrations as to why you failed. Did you get overzealous? Did you miss your jump? Were things just designed to be so damned hard? The list goes on and on.
So why do I think that Die After Sunset could avoid this pitfall? I think it’s because win or lose, stages are bite sized and on a short timer challenging you to get what you can and pick up whatever gear you can before the boss shows up. Once the boss hits the ground, you have a short amount of time to make it to them or you lose. Once in the boss fight, it’s literally win or lose. Ten minutes. Next!
So because a whole run takes about ten minutes, it’s easy to plan around, it’s easy to try different things without worry. It’s easy to find yourself saying one more because it’s only ten minutes. With some carry over elements in order to upgrade your base stats, you’ll also want to push at doing one more run as it will only make the other runs easier and let you push further. Basically it’s really rewarding in the long run and the short bursts of time make it easily justifiable.
For the missions themselves, and there’s plenty more to come such as new characters and stages, you spawn into the map and then are often immediately faced with danger. Pistol in hand to defend yourself, you set off against the Murkor that seem to be all over the place. Big, small, rocking floaties to keep from drowning at the beach, there’s going to be plenty of variety to familiarize yourself with as you can quickly be surrounded and need to know which are the bigger threats to your life as those that can shoot at you are much scarier than those that need to be within melee range.
So other than shooting at anything else that moves for ten minutes while waiting for the boss what else is there to do? Well I’m glad you asked! While waiting for the boss known as the Murkraken to show up you can either blast away at anything that moves in order to pick up modules of light that are used to open up locked chests in order to get better gear such as extra armor or that your shield now also protects you from the back. While that’s one way to spend ten minutes, the other possibility is to head towards various mission points that will not only give you this currency by defeating foes and winning but also give you other bonuses to help you in combat.
What all of this does is help you prepare for the boss fight which while isn’t tough per say, can easily end in seconds if you don’t dodge fast enough as they have the power of freight trains and are not afraid to use it. What doing all of this also helps to give you extra opportunities to pick up “mukus” which is what you’ll be using to upgrade your base stats once you’ve accumulated enough of it to buy the upgrades between Murkle invasions. The only issue that I have with the distribution of mukus right now is that it took several missions before finally getting enough for even my first upgrade point and that was while doing several successful missions.
For now that’s pretty much it, but if I had a wishlist, it would be the following. I know that Die After Sunset is being designed as a single player experience so with that part in mind I would like a campaign of sorts that helps to slide you into all of the action and the features that it has to offer as right now the tutorial is simply just a few screenshots. The second, it would be to hopefully have a multiplayer element to this as this is exactly the type of game that’s fun to play with a friend and compete cooperatively to see who did the best before the boss drops to the floor defeated.
Regardless of whether or not I’ll be able to take this for a spin with someone to the side or go about it solo, I’m looking forward to much more Murkle repelling action once more than the current demo is released as I think Die After Sunset has a fair amount of potential.
Score: N/A for previews
