Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengeance of the Slayer is the rare game that opts for two colons in its title, and that excess is intentional. The FPS, which recently launched on 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Xbox Game Pass, is (as the in-game explanation goes) the product of the same person, two🎶 decades apart; started by its developer while in high school as ideas in a notebook, then picked up and finished when he was in his late 30s.
That bonus subtitle🌊 is a nod to childish excess. It’s the kind of title a teen would absentmindedly scrawl in their notebook and fall in love with because of how badass it sounds to their Boondock Saints-loving ears. It’s also, like the rest of the game, an homage to late ‘90s and early ‘00s edginess.
Other Boomer shooters are specific nods to the first-person shooters of the decade of Doom. But Slayers X attempts to capture a broader swath of ‘90s culture. There is Matrix-style kung fu in an early cutscene. The protagonist’s speech is a mixture of Duke Nukem and Beavis and Butthead. He looks like the frontman for a nu metal band, with❀ bleach blonde hair and a matching soul patch. There are enemies that look like miniature versions of the turd monster from Dogma. There may be two colons in the title, but there are 202 colons worth of these little fuckers.
Whether or not you can stomach those corn-hurling grotesques is a solid indicator of whether you’ll be able to put up with the game’s off putting (purposely so, but still) sense of humor. There are more ‘your mom’ jokes in Slayers X than I’ve heard since middle school, and the tone is aiming for a retro juvenilia throughout. Interact with a washing machine and your character will either say, "Do laundry? Why? It's not like I pooped my pants,” or declare that he doesn’t need to do laundry because his mom does it for him. He has the emotional range of obscene doodles in a bathroom stall, and that can be a strange frequency to tune into.
The locations you shoot through feel emblematic of ‘90s culture, too. In one level you emerge from the woods and into a backyard barbecue (where there's a bizarre effigy of your character). Head inside and you’ll find thick green carpet, wood paneling on the walls, stucco ceilings, and a chunky white washer dryer combo. In that house’s living room, there’s a huge CRT — the height of luxury circa 2001 — and in one of the bedrooms there’s a big silver boombox. You find an even bigger CRT in another house in the neighborhood, this one almost the same size as the wall it’s resting against. In that same level, you find the enemies’ secret base, which is located in a hidden corridor with chrome walls and neon purple highlights. Other rooms in the base are bathed in slime green light. It’s more Y2K than any game actually produced in 1999.
This game feels extremely nostalgic, but in a wart꧂s and all way that’s rare for a retro throwback. The early 2000s were a special time for me because I was a kid then, but they were, looking back, as obnoxious a time as mainst🃏ream American culture has ever endured. Slayer X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengeance of the Slayer manages to capture that. I really do mean that as a compliment.