Remedium
Last week, Remedium entered Early Access and ESDigital Games was courteous enough to give us a review code for this twin-stick shooter ARPG. The premise alone sounded interesting as "twin-stick shooters" are interesting by themselves. What's not to love about mowing down hordes of aliens while avoiding waves of bullets flying from all eight directions? I rarely come across these classic arcade-inspired treasures, with Wildcat Gun Machine being an example.
On the contrary, "Diablo" style action RPGs where the perspective is top-down and the aesthetic is gritty and gothic have seen a rise in popularity. While I still have yet to play Diablo 4, I do recall Diablo 3 being one of the biggest surprise hits on the Nintendo Switch, specifically in how it handles the gamepad controls. Remedium, as mentioned earlier, uses both the left and right analog sticks to move and aim respectively. While keyboard and mouse are possible, using WASD movement and the mouse to aim in a general direction, it's far more satisfying to use a gamepad as intended.
Remedium is what I call a combination of the two genres except instead of receiving loot like in Diablo, players earn resources that are used for special ammo and to alleviate symptoms. The protagonist is set in a post-apocalyptic world where disease and monsters run amok. As another victim inflicted with this terminal disease, the protagonist will have to fight through mutants and other nefarious beings while trying to find a cure for their predicament.
This disease comes with several in-game caveats. There are at least ten different symptoms that the player can obtain through fighting enemies and mere progression. All of these symptoms affect gameplay in various ways according to the symptom, for example, psychosis will inhibit the player's aim to that of a Stormtrooper at random intervals. Others, like necrophobia, will cause the player to take damage should a live creature die within their vicinity. Upon dying, the symptoms reset but the longer the protagonist continues on a single life, the worse the symptoms will become.
One way to combat this is to find plague seals to alleviate the symptoms. These can be found by going out of your way and looking for treasure that contains these blueprints. The drops from defeated enemies are then used to not only suspend the illness but also give the player a positive buff. A seal for psychosis, for example, may increase the player's crit chance while also eliminating the negative traits of the psychosis. While I hadn't unlocked most of the seals to fully experiment, for reasons I'll get to in the next paragraph, it's an interesting concept to turn a mechanic that's designed to kill you, into a mechanic that benefits.
Remedium gives the player access to several guns, including a machine gun and a repeater, both with unique modifiers depending on the element attached. A fire element attached to a machine gun will turn it into a flamethrower. Likewise, a repeater will turn into a fire shotgun with the fire augment. Killing enemies in a bloody mess is always fun and playing on the "intended difficulty," I feel the challenge was fair. Cooldowns for healing potions and skills, like grenades, are on a generous cooldown. Unfortunately, too many bugs have made it difficult to progress further.
Early, the player will come across a pool of acid that will harm the player. They are told to dash over small gaps to make it across the chasms. This worked for a while, although it took me a moment to get a grasp on the right angle. Later on, there's this seemingly impassable chasm filled with electric clouds of death. If I fell into the chasm, I would die. But the marker is telling me that this is the intended way to go. On the beaten path, there's a path that leads to a seal and once again I'm met with the same predicament.
Dashing across the chasm won't work because I will always fall to my death just before I can clear the gap. When I tried to go across the larger gap, I ended up breaking the game and started "walking out of bounds" until the game reminded me that I crossed a death plane and I died again. There seemed to be an alternate route I could follow if there wasn't an invisible door barring my path. I'm not sure if my game was softlocked here, but this wasn't the only example of a bug I found.
Now, to be fair, this is an Early Access game and the game had just launched for that matter. There are tons of potential to be found in Remedium. I love the disease mechanic, giving it almost a "roguelike" vibe without the penalty of losing all of your progress. If the devs can iron out the bugs and I can finish Act 1, I'll come back to this game with a proper review. Until then, I'd wait for further improvements before taking a plunge into the post-apocalyptic city walls.
Remedium is out now on Early Access via Steam and EGS.