Still Not Dead

I have a soft spot for the small, ornery games that slip through the cracks while bigger-budgeted shooters hog the spotlight, and Still Not Dead is exactly that kind of gem. Glove Games essentially asked: what if you took the momentum of Doom, stripped it down to pixel-edged chaos, strung six hellish stages together, and sent Death himself sprinting after you whenever things got too comfortable? The answer is a fast, violent, sometimes terrifying little FPS that earns its Very Positive reception on Steam from people who clearly know the sub-genre. The loop is tight. You push through open stages, mow down massive monster hordes with a pool of 30-plus weapons, ranging from the expected pistol and shotgun to more inventive melee options like an axe and barbwire. Between stages, the blessing and curse system forces a genuine decision: accept a buff that reshapes your playstyle, but absorb a corresponding penalty that can make everything worse. Over forty of these pairings exist, and over repeated runs they start to feel like a vocabulary you're slowly learning to speak. Layered on top are the Skill Skulls, unlockable modifiers that let you dial the challenge up in ways that feel personal rather than arbitrary. Environments are fully destructible, weather shifts mid-stage, and fire spreads organically, which means no two runs feel identical even when the stage layouts start to become familiar. The absence of permanent progression is worth naming plainly. You do not carry upgrades between runs. Some players find that liberating, others find it thin. If you're someone who needs a meta-layer of power accumulation to stay engaged, Still Not Dead will feel shorter than it is. What it does offer instead is the purity of feel, the sensation that the weapons actually hit something, plus those red-screen moments when Death locks on to you and the ambient tone shifts into something close to dread. A critic writing about FPS roguelites placed this one alongside City of Brass and Eldritch as a personal favorite, and singled out how good the weapon feedback feels despite the game lacking vertical aim. That tracks with the community response, which praises the intensity above almost everything else. The rough edges are real. Community bug threads mention audio settings resetting between runs, some environmental texture glitches, and door geometry that doesn't always behave. This is a one-developer production from 2018 that has not received the sustained patch cadence of a studio title, so accept that going in. The aesthetic is lo-fi 2.5D pixel work with a horror tilt, the kind of thing that looks cheap in screenshots but reads as intentional atmosphere once you're actually being hunted through a burning stage at full speed. For the right person, specifically someone who plays roguelites for the run-to-run kinetics rather than the unlock drip, this is an underseen one worth the low asking price. It knows exactly what it wants to be and commits to it with the quiet confidence of a solo dev who had a specific nightmare to share.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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