The Dork Quadrant: Death Ray Manta

Games keep piling up, regardless of how fast I finish them or mark them undesirable in my ever bloating steam games list. I haven't quite topped a thousand, yet, but it is only a matter of time. In an effort to pick through a couple more games this month, I decided to set up a grouping of games - forgetting I'm supposed to play scary games this month, derp - with the intent of mining them for cards. And then forgetting to actually pick games with cards.

First up in this series of four space shooty ship games is the surreal neonfuture experience of Death Ray Manta, which is ... Perhaps one of the simplest games I've ever played, but also an excellent model for what a lot of games do not successfully do.

DRM is basically an extremely stripped down, colorful twin stick shooter. And I do mean colorful. You will be full of colors watching it. You move with one stick, shoot with the other, and as best I can tell gameplay does not really change on your end at any point. You accomplish three goals - not dying, shooting all the enemies you're supposed to, and picking up gems - and you finish each level when all the enemies are dead. The game flashes a lot of words and colors at you while jazzy music plays, but because it is so simple, you don't really get distracted.

The game is ... That's it. That's the entire game. What makes the experience good, besides the hyper trippy visuals and solid music, is that it does everything with a sense of brisk. It loads quickly, it runs quickly and it makes no comment about your beginning or ending. It isn't concerned with that you died or with making snarky passive-aggressive remarks. It just throws you back into the action, and it is easy to get in the groove and played for a couple minutes with a smile on your face.

A lot of games get this wrong. Loading times are always going to be an issue, of course, but DRM also just doesn't wander from the point. The story is that the manta has lasers in his head, so he blew up his house and lives in space instead.

Problem is, the game is just too simple and the difficulty is pretty flat. You die in one hit, and although the game doesn't move that fast, the screen is utterly swarmed with nonsense in no time flat. So you're going to die, often and a lot. It doesn't mean anything to you, and you just go again, but the problem does seep in - there's one track, and there's one track through the levels.

I don't think adding a lot of complexity would aid the game overmuch, but I do think it could do with perhaps a different path through the levels determined by some element you don't recognize quickly and then maybe another music track or two. The game repeats through cycles rapidly, and while it is fun in little chunks, there isn't enough to keep it from getting repetitive.

I let my sister - who is definitely more of a casual gamer - give DRM a try. Unsurprisingly, she found it really enjoyable, and claimed it was "the game they would have made in the 80s, if they could have". So for a casual gamer, I think it's a fun little trip, and for me it was a decent enough aside.