SAMOLIOTIK

I want to be honest with you the way I would be honest about a zine someone photocopied and left in a coffee shop: there is charm here, but you have to squint for it. SAMOLIOTIK is a vertical scrolling shooter from Volens Nolens Games, released in March 2016, and it commits fully to a particular strain of early Steam indie irreverence. You pilot a small plane upward through colour-shifted eras, shooting down waves of enemies and the occasional absurdist boss. The roster of opponents includes a parody dictator, the Illuminati as a literal boss encounter, and assorted weird creatures. The premise is its own punchline, and the game knows that. The mechanics are stripped to the bone. You move with the mouse, fire with the left button, and enemies descend in patterns that ask for avoidance more than aggression. Power-ups appear periodically and shift the tempo slightly. Colour palettes swap between stages to signal era changes, which is a small but considered visual touch. The soundtrack, described by players as energetic Russian techno, loops on a single track but fits the lo-fi carnival atmosphere better than you might expect. It is not a deep audio experience, but it has personality, and I will always defend personality over polish when the price reflects honesty about what the thing is. What it is not: a challenging shmup. Enemy projectiles are largely absent. Collision with airplanes is your main threat, and the game can be completed in well under two hours. There is no score persistence after a run ends, no options menu to speak of, and the content is genuinely thin. Critics outside the Steam ecosystem have been blunt about this, and they are not wrong. The 89 percent positive Steam rating tells a different story, but that audience largely bought in knowing they were getting a bite-sized achievement farm with a comedic wrapper, and on those terms SAMOLIOTIK delivers exactly what it promises. Who is this for, then? Achievement hunters who want a low-friction unlock session. People who have a soft spot for the scrappy, weird corner of early Steam Greenlight-era releases. Anyone who finds the phrase "Adolf Gutler" funny enough to sustain ninety minutes of light shooting. If you have ever kept a shoebox of odd cassette singles because the cover art was too strange to throw away, you already know whether you want this.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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