DYSTORIA

My first pass at DYSTORIA lasted about forty minutes before I had to stop and reorient myself - not because the controls failed me, but because wrapping your brain around a map where walls, floors, and ceilings are genuinely interchangeable takes a few attempts. That disorientation, once conquered, is the entire point. Tri-Coastal Games - a two-person studio - built something genuinely uncommon here: a six-axis arcade shooter where your craft adheres to every surface regardless of orientation, borrowing conceptual DNA from Descent and Super Mario Galaxy but arriving at something that feels distinct from both. The comparison critics reach for most often is Descent, but DYSTORIA plays slower and more deliberately, closer to a spatial puzzle with a laser cannon bolted on. The core loop across all 29 levels asks you to locate three orbs and reach the exit portal, with some stages swapping that objective for full enemy clearance. Scrap collected from defeated enemies feeds back into a hub-area upgrade shop where you can buy new ships with improved shield stats and reduced cannon cooldown times - so there is a light progression skeleton underneath the arcade surface. Combat rewards patience over aggression: your shields are fragile, checkpoints are sparse (one per level), and the dominant tactic reviewers converge on is finding the longest sight-line to an enemy and drawing a laser down it before they can close distance. Positioning beats firepower almost every time, which suits the puzzle-brain crowd more than the reflex-shooter crowd. Where the game shows its two-person budget most clearly is variety. The enemy roster is thin - you have seen the full bestiary within the first few stages - and the mission structure never meaningfully diversifies beyond orb collection and kill-all objectives. The difficulty curve is also erratic: some levels demand repeated attempts while others are over in under two minutes. A particular category of airborne bug enemies draws consistent criticism because their off-axis laser fire can be impossible to return given the lack of vertical aiming. The in-game map is nearly useless for tracking your position, so spatial memory does a lot of heavy lifting. Keyboard controls are widely described as a poor fit; a gamepad is effectively mandatory. The audiovisual layer is where DYSTORIA genuinely earns respect. The neon-wire geometry levels, galactic skyboxes, and synthwave soundtrack pull off an 80s retrofuturist aesthetic without leaning on pixel art or chiptune shortcuts - the developers pulled musical inspiration from sources like Depeche Mode and New Order rather than the usual indie chiptune toolkit. The presentation is polished enough that some reviewers call it the strongest argument for buying in. The story - you are a human abducted by aliens and fed into a flight school simulation with increasingly sinister overtones - draws comparisons to Ender's Game and carries more weight than you would expect from a small arcade title. Hidden secrets and collectibles across the 29 levels give completionists a reason to replay stages after the campaign wraps, though overall play time is short enough that some players will finish and want more. DYSTORIA sits at 72 on Metacritic, which tracks with its actual quality profile: a clever, visually confident concept that lands somewhere between fully realised and tantalisingly incomplete. If you have a gamepad, an appetite for spatial problem-solving, and a tolerance for thin enemy variety, there is a genuinely unusual few hours here that most shooters will not give you. Come in expecting Descent-speed chaos and you will leave disappointed. Come in treating it as a geometry puzzle with a shooting mechanic attached and the 29-level runtime feels about right. Diego, Scout Team

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