The premise behind side-scrolling roguelite Katanaut, from Voidmaw, is pretty bonkers on paper. Imagine a rescue crew responding to an horrific deep space event like in Dead Space, but instead of sending in a team of researchers or soldiers, they send a single dude with a katana. I mean, sure, it’s not practical at all, but it’s much cooler than a bunch of boring hazmat suits.
But for a game with such an outwardly silly concept, Katanaut plays it surprisingly straight. With a fairly streamlined build system, your main goal here is to slice your way through shambling hordes of mutated horrors, boosting your stats with different syringes that last for the duration of a run.
Some of the animation and certainly the atmosphere reminded me of The Devil Within: Satgat. Different blades confer different starting abilities, such as a parry, and within a few runs you’ll start adding new abilities and buffs to the pool of randomised pickups in each subsequent run. Ultimately your build will come down to which two passive or active abilities you equip, which sword you’re using, and which perks you acquire in a run. Oh, and you have a powerful ranged weapon that comes in handy, but is restricted to stop you abusing it. It can get you out of a pinch, but you can’t always rely on it.
There’s a definite air of body horror about the whole experience, with enemies that burst out of ruptured bodies in showers of pixelated gore, but despite the buckets of viscera painting the walls, it’s more frantic than scary. Survival requires fast reflexes, and you can be easily overwhelmed by the number of enemies. As with many side-scrolling action games, there’s an occasional issue where monsters will sync with one another and you won’t know how many are actually hitting you at a given time.
In many ways, Katanaut is a very simple example of the genre. There’s little story to contend with, and it does nothing particularly clever between runs with its narrative. You die, you respawn, and you try again, with some procedural generation adding variety to your run each time. Boss fights add much needed excitement in between repeated forays into the space station, and some of them will test your skill and patience, but this isn’t some huge epic adventure that will take you weeks to see through. It’s much more bite-sized and restrained than that.
Katanaut is fast-paced, good-looking, and pretty fun despite its overall sci-fi horror tone. While it presents as a Metroidvania, it’s not really that, focusing on fairly linear but randomised runs rather than exploration. The build variety will be enough to keep genre fans in the loop for hours, but don’t come here looking for anything new or ground-breaking in terms of design or narrative. Slick combat and some impressive pixel-art visuals are the main draws, but for fans of side-scrolling roguelikes, it does more than enough.