The Citadel

My first thought loading into The Citadel was that nothing quite prepared me for how singular the aesthetic would feel. This is a one-person production from doekuramori, a Japanese developer building a boomer-shooter out of biomechanical horror, 1980s anime OVA energy, and a genuine mechanical meanness that the genre's current revival rarely commits to. The cyberpunk-dystopian setting casts you as the Martyr, a cryogenically preserved human woman woken into a world of rogue cyborg forces, with a dead god to kill and six episodes of corridors standing between you and the ending. It does not hold your hand. At all. The combat system is where things get interesting and occasionally frustrating. All enemies use projectiles - no hitscanners, which is a philosophical stance that rewards patient, read-the-room play over Dusk-style sprint-and-spray. You manage a stamina bar, a blood meter, and an oxygen gauge simultaneously while cycling through up to 14 weapons including pistols, automatic rifles, a rocket launcher, and the wonderfully strange whalegun. Optional toggles deepen the difficulty further: enable weapon condition mode and your automatics can jam mid-fight or permanently break. Enable leaning to peek corners. A bullet-time Reflex Booster upgrade, triggered by overdosing your oxygen meter, adds another layer of resource management that feels almost survival-horror in spirit. Lighter enemies can be kicked into pits or lava, and the Sufferer enemy type will detonate if you shoot it near a cluster of foes. The system has genuine depth once you internalize its logic. The atmosphere is the quiet star. The soundtrack runs royalty-free but you would never guess it: ambient tracks create real dread between firefights, then the music shifts into something mechanical and urgent when combat opens up. Sound design is deliberate too, from the weight of each gunshot to shell casings tinking off metal floors. The visual identity - Giger biomechanics filtered through manga line art and oppressive 2.5D geometry - is genuinely unlike anything else in the boomer-shooter space right now. Level design leans into verticality and negative space in ways that keep the limited tileset from feeling repetitive, though later episodes can become maze-like enough to break the game's otherwise steady pacing. The floaty strafing and imprecise jumping are legitimate complaints that persist across the whole runtime, and alternate fire mechanics plus reload management go largely unexplained, which will cause deaths that feel unfair rather than instructive. The community reception sits at 93 percent positive across over 1,600 Steam reviews, which is remarkable for a game this uncompromising, and a sequel called Beyond Citadel arrived in early 2025 - a sign that the audience doekuramori found is real and growing. The game runs about five to six hours on a first pass. That is the right length. It knows when to end. Critics who wanted something closer to Ion Fury or DUSK will find the slower, stamina-gated pacing alienating; players willing to meet the game on its own strange terms will find something that lingers. The rough edges are real, but they belong to a specific creative vision, not carelessness.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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