Beyond Sunset

I have a soft spot for small teams who pick up an old engine and wring something genuinely new out of it, and Beyond Sunset earns that admiration in the first twenty minutes. Built on GZDoom -- yes, the Doom II engine lineage -- Metacorp / Vaporware has pushed the technology far past anything it was designed to handle: tall dystopian megabuildings, double jumps, wall-skimming dashes, and pixel-art sprite enemies that read as both retro and intentional rather than cheap. The result is a five-episode campaign set in Sunset City, a plague-ridden neon sprawl that feels like someone distilled Blade Runner, Akira, and early Deus Ex into a single ZIP file and lit it on fire. At the centre of it all is Lucy, a street samurai pulled from cryostasis with no memory and apparently limitless lethality. The moment-to-moment combat is built around what the game calls "gun jutsu" -- a rhythm of dashing, sliding, and closing distance to put your katana through something expensive-looking. The katana can deflect incoming bullets, which changes how you read engagements at range. Alongside it sits a loadout that grows over the campaign: energy pistol, shotgun, assault rifle, each with an alternate fire mode that adds genuine tactical flexibility. The "powerkill" mechanic ties it all together; burning a special bar for an instant kill that refills health and ammo keeps the pace punishing but never unfair, since infinite respawns and freely placeable saves mean death is a cost, not a catastrophe. Combat on higher difficulties is legitimately demanding -- learning to dodge, block, and manage resources against yakuza, zombies, and robotic bosses requires actual attention. The RPG layer is lighter than the marketing implies, but it is real. Upgrade machines dot the levels, NPCs offer side work, and lore seeps in through terminal readouts and scattered notes. The open, vertically complex maps are a genuine source of pride and occasional frustration -- some players will spend real time getting lost, and the absence of any waypoint or quest marker is a deliberate old-school call that not everyone will forgive. There is also a cyberspace hacking mode that surfaces whenever Lucy jacks into a network terminal: the aesthetic shifts into something more surreal and colorful, the weapons strip away, and the mechanics change to a simpler beam-combat against antivirus entities. Community opinion is split on this. Some find it a clever palate cleanser with appropriate visual contrast. Others find it convoluted, especially when the hacking sequences require items collected back in the physical level to progress. It is mandatory, and if it breaks your rhythm, it will bother you more than once across the full campaign. What nobody argues about is the soundtrack. Karl Vincent's synthwave score is the kind of music that makes a neon cityscape feel like it has weather. The low-poly aesthetic -- retro-fitted, high-contrast, stuffed with signage and graffiti -- gives the world a texture that a lot of better-funded cyberpunk games fumble. Post-launch feedback also flagged a chunky HUD and some settings menu oddities, including the bafflingly buried Y-axis invert option. These are real quality-of-life grievances, not dealbreakers, but worth knowing before you sit down. Performance on the older engine can also stutter on complex maps, though mid-range hardware generally handles it without drama. The full campaign runs roughly six to seven hours on a straight playthrough, with multiple difficulty tiers and full mod support for anyone who wants more.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on Beyond Sunset.