KHEEILNESTEWDIR (wip)

This world was certainly strange, no doubt about that. Right off the bat, there were many things different compared to Pluto. First off, the board had different tiles and new icons, which became the standard from here on out. Secondly, the music was especially different from everything else I’d heard. It was somewhat painful to hear, on par with scratching on a chalkboard, and it also had this reverb hum in the background. I’m guessing whoever made the music there wasn't trying, or they put effort into it, but it ended up pretty bad. The bosses this time were The Visitor, Vagnosaurus, and Garoborg. “The Visitor” seems a bit unoriginal for a name.

The levels consisted of something resembling coral, a city of sorts, a broken clock, and a grid-like structure. I had a feeling this planet wasn’t real (mainly because of the name), but I figured since it was a sci-fi game, it didn’t really matter.

What intrigued me though was an icon of the shrine, which replaced the satellite. I wasn’t sure if I would be given another choice or not but seeing it again was a bit unusual at the time. Although it was nice to see a lot has changed in this world, which made me further believe it was a ROM hack, the doubt in my mind kept growing as I progressed.

So the first level I went through was the coral one. And sure enough, the vegetation there looked like amoebas or coral. The music was unsettlingly upbeat and had this tribal tone to it. Almost as if reciting a ritual.

There was a couple of coral that I could break off, which occasionally gave me health, much like every other obstacle. But as soon as I broke the top of a coral, the hud suddenly changed. This would persist throughout the rest of the game, leading to a domino effect of many stressful situations that I'll elaborate on when the time comes. Anyways, there were only two types of enemies here.

One enemy looked like it used a piece of coral as its shell and didn’t necessarily attack but would keep moving in your direction. There were also these drones that fired bullets. Those were the real threat, as they’d come in schools and move quickly. It was a good thing that they were relatively weak.

The city-level was a little stranger than the coral forests. The metropolis here was at first abandoned, though obviously, there were enemies that resided there. And the music here felt tenser than the coral levels; this ghostly ambiance would have its audio corrupt at some point, while the sound of machinery played very faintly in the background. The enemies here seemed pretty normal, albeit a bit odd-looking for one or two of them. But each time I broke the top of those radar dishes, some of the graphics started to corrupt.

The further the level corrupted once you shot the satellite, the more it felt like the game was going to crash, which worried me a lot. I tried to avoid this, but it was difficult when enemies rampaged their way through.

And in one of these city areas, there was a miniboss of the green floating enemies, which I guess was the hive, because after it was destroyed, there were no more of those little guys again.

It was more or less the same difficulty as those other minibosses from Pluto, but those minions and their projectiles were annoying.