Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath Vengence of the Slayer Review
This game kicks ass. It's somehow a companion game to Hypnospace Outlaw as a doom clone made in-universe by one of the hypnospace users that constantly gives you trouble because he's just a silly teenager, except in-universe he is now an adult who has not moved past being a teenager and thinks this doom clone is his ticket out of retail Hell. It's made better by playing Hypnospace Outlaw for context but also entirely stands on it's own as this hilarious loveletter to being a goofy ass kid coming up with ideas for their magnum opus video game you're totally gonna design when you go to college for Viddy Game Making.
For real, plain and simple, this is a game in the style of an early 2000s Doom clone, which is really impressive considering how well this game mimics the Doom engine for not actually being made off of any existing Doom source port. You play as the legendary X Slayer, Zane Lofton, who in reality is a 14 year old kid from Boise, Idaho (At least when he designed the game, it actually got finished when he was 36). It begins with the drug fueled Psykos killing Zane's mom and blowing up his apartment. The psykos are secretly led bby his stepfather and boss, some guy named Mevin. It's a incredibly funny and sad look into what Zane's been stuck to since you first saw his Hypnospace page back in late 1999.
The gameplay is about as Doom as you can get, you have a whole arsenal of deadly weapons with a Zane twist to them to dispatch the army of Psykos. They all have that "this is my first doom mod" flavor with goofy and impractical gimmicks that scream they were made by a teenager. My favorite is the "Glass Blaster" which is this games shotgun equivalent and can only be reloaded by collecting shards of glass (Or "glass sharts" as the game refers to them as) from broken windows or beer bottles. I really love that you can imagine teenage Zane scribbling a sketch and description into his notebook while snickering about how badass it'll be when he gets around to making it.
I think this is what I love the most about Hypnospace Outlaw and Slayers X, they have this profound love for the type of work amateurs produce. And I don't mean "bad" works, I'm more referring to the type of work you see from those inexperienced in their chosen medium. It's very easy to create a piece that's "bad" because if you're a skilled artist or musician, you know exactly what NOT to do, but I wouldn't call the works of the characters in these games "bad". I'd more-so call them "amateur" because you KNOW that all of the Hypnospace pages and this entire Doom clone comes from a genuine place of wanting to make something cool without much experience in the act of Making Cool Things. The devs of these games are absolutely masterclass at this, they know just how to make something that makes you cringe because they can capture the beginner mindset to this stuff so elegantly, and I think that's what makes this pair of games stick with me. Even though there can be a cynical read of Slayers X as a testament to a man stuck in high school, I think there's still a lot of joy and whimsy to be found in the innocent first works of a teenager, even if that teen's head is full of rocks.