The '90s were a veritable festival of guts, explosions, blood, and screams for the gaming world. Developers were even accused by different sectors of promoting violence and satanism... but we gave ourselves over to those games for months on end. And now comes STRAFE, a new FPS that in 2015 tries to capture the magical essence of 1996. If we go by its extraordinary trailer, I think it succeeds.
The Golden Age of Violent Shooters
Wolfenstein 3D debuted in 1992. Doom in '93. Doom 2 and Heretic in '94, Hexen in '95, and Quake in '96. Notice the pattern? The '90s offered us some of the best games in history, where we basically had to dismember everything that crossed our path. Shotguns, rocket launchers, grenades, energy cannons, and even a chainsaw were our tools of the trade, which we enjoyed immensely. Those games became the horror of the moment for conservative groups and religious organizations, who tried to impose their morals through prohibition and censorship. Fortunately, their failure was absolute, and those pioneering titles gave way to entire franchises (I want to make a special mention to Serious Sam and his headless kamikazes) that these days seem to have lost a bit of substance. When that happens, it's never wrong to go back to the roots, and on the way we find STRAFE.
A Trailer That Hits All the Right Notes
Oh. My. God. Watching the trailer for the first time, my mind decided to remember, for some strange reason, Evil Dead, the song We're Not Gonna Take It by Twisted Sister, The Lost Boys (the older brother is a clone of Corey Feldman), and many other things that caused immediate nostalgia. The CRT monitor, the Coca-Cola t-shirt worn by the younger brother, the reference to Indiana Jones, and the fact of blowing up a minor's head without fear of the moral crusaders starting their bombing campaign make STRAFE's trailer one of the best I've seen in years. It all starts with a space junkman returning to his mothership (the ICARUS) without having found anything. The coordinates are correct, but there isn't a single trace of ICARUS, except for its teleporter. Our character decides to teleport aboard, and there his hell begins, full of blood, guts, and levels that change in each game thanks to procedural generation, or at least that's what its creators say.
Old-School Toughness and Kickstarter Details
Every drop of blood, every spent cartridge, and every torn limb stays in the level, and since you can't develop maps of the levels, the creators of STRAFE recommend following the trail of death and chaos to return to a previous area. There are no places to take cover, and health doesn't regenerate. In other words, STRAFE will make you lose, and lose a lot.
Its Kickstarter campaign started a couple of days ago, and it has already received almost 50 thousand dollars of the $185,096 it seeks. The game with its soundtrack is priced at $25, and it will be ready in June... of 2016.
For more information, visit the official site.
