Like Hotline Miami, combat is fast and ferocious, though not quite one-hit-kill deadly. But the general scarcity of supplies - ammunition and healing items - means that every little wound is something to worry about. Oh, and Teleglitch subscribes to the permadeath school of game design - if you die before reaching certain (long-term, far away) checkpoints, you'll just have to restart from the very beginning.
Items can be combined to create improvised gear like nailguns and automatic pistols, but using up currently-useful items to create potentially-useful items might be an exercise in folly. Levels are randomly generated but are directed enough to maintain a good sense of flow; the random luck element in terms of finding enemies and items can be alternately maddening and euphoric. Enemies are absolute jerks, comprised mainly of varying forms of raving lunatics who run after you with astounding speed and unpredictable evasion patterns. Without something like Hotline Miami's lock-on, you'll find yourself backpedalling down long corridors trying to be as accurate as humanly possible. Ammo wasted is, well, ammo wasted, but knifing dudes is astoundingly difficult with your limited range.
Teleglitch trailer
There's a wealth of fairly well-written text archives on offer if you care much about the story, and it's kind of cool in a Doom-meets-Aliens way. But the most compelling part of the experience is the sensation it evokes of being lost and alone in a hostile landscape, scavenging and combining items to survive, desperate for a chest of ammunition or explosives and flipping out when you open a door and two dozen raving madmen pour out. There's no music, but the sound design is fantastic - the crunch of being hit or the meaty boom of a shotgun, the shrill cries of the sci-fi reanimated dead or the reality-warping noise of a hole in space-time - all of these contribute to the palpable sense of tension.
In fact, Teleglitch's primary problem might that it is a little too brutal. Not in the sense simply that you'll die a lot - that's, you know, expected of these kinds of games - but simply that playthroughs might end up lasting an hour or more. It's all desperately earned progress, but you can't save your game - not even in a form that deletes the save file after you load it again. Slog on until the checkpoints, we suppose, and pray for a merciful God/Random Number Generator (cross out whichever is inappropriate).
Developer: Tael Brothers
Publisher: Tael Brothers
Price: $13
Web: teleglitch.com
