Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance of the Slayer

My first thought booting this up was that the title screen alone would have been the coolest thing I'd ever seen at age fourteen. Slayers X is a retro first-person shooter built entirely around a fictional character named Zane, a cringeworthy self-insert edgelord from the Hypnospace Outlaw universe who finished his teenage mod project as an adult and released it to the world. The joke is that this is exactly what that game would look like: stilted CG cutscenes, a Matrix-worship aesthetic complete with trench coats and shades, poop jokes that arrive every ninety seconds, and a protagonist who narrates his own heroism with the unearned confidence of a fifteen-year-old who just discovered Nu Metal. It is, deliberately, kind of terrible. It is also one of the most specific and committed concepts in recent indie history. The shooting itself sits somewhere between Duke Nukem 3D and an enthusiastic amateur mod from 1999 - which is entirely the point. You work through nine main story levels set in mundane Boise, Idaho locations (sewers, a budget shopping mall, a local fair, a convenience store) that Zane has heroically reimagined as a war zone. Your arsenal runs from dual pistols and a glass-shard blaster - loaded by literally smashing mirrors and windows in the environment - up through the Explosive Sludge Launcher, the X100 Rapid Mutilator, the Triple Helix Missile Launcher, and the Hackblood Talisman, a BFG-style power weapon fueled by Hackblood energy dropped by dead Psykos. Matching weapon to enemy type matters at higher difficulties, and the Normal Gamer setting does find a decent difficulty curve by the back half, with rocket-launching werewolves forcing you to actually manage ammo. A dedicated bird-flip button exists. Of course it does. Where Slayers X earns its Metacritic 80 is in the texture of the thing. Levels are dense with Easter eggs, interactive props, and interactable nonsense - one level has a dinky arcade where messing around with skee-ball actually pays off in weapons and achievements. The soundtrack from in-universe bands Seepage and Psyko Syndikate is a pitch-perfect parody of late-90s Linkin Park-adjacent rock that somehow ends up genuinely listenable. And the whole package functions as a surprisingly nuanced character study: the deliberately bad level flow, the pointless dead-end corridors, the ammo placed with the logic of someone who has never had to balance a game - all of it is intentional, portraying exactly the kind of game a self-obsessed teenager would make. Whether that reads as clever or exhausting depends almost entirely on your tolerance for the joke. The honest warnings: this is a short game, well under five hours on a first run, and the novelty does thin toward the end once you've absorbed all the weapons and the toilet humor stops surprising you. Level design can genuinely lose you, not always in the charming way. The humor is aggressively juvenile - if 90s frat-boy-basement-dweller comedy makes you tune out rather than laugh, nothing else here will compensate. And players with no prior knowledge of Hypnospace Outlaw will still have fun, but will miss about half of what makes the whole thing tick. For boomer-shooter fans who have played everything Dusk and Ion Fury have to offer and want something with a completely different personality underneath the pixel sprites, this is the oddball pick of the year it came out. For anyone who lived through that era of edgy FPS mods and recognizes themselves a little too well in Zane, it's something close to cathartic.

Alex · Scout Team

Catch-all

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