Jump, Flip And Shoot Without Aiming In Seraph, Out Now
Sidescrolling gun-fu
Seraph [official site] is described as an acrobatic shooter "without aiming", which means you can jump, double-jump, wall-jump and otherwise focus on movement while pressing the shoot button causes your bullets to always hit one of the enemies skittering nearby. This is good, because I am bad at aiming in games even while standing perfectly still. There are other neat ideas in the game I like as well, though - including dynamic difficulty. It's just left early access and is out now.
Here's the original announcement trailer, which still gives a good sense of it now:
Aside from your character doing flips with every forward and backward jump, eliminating aiming makes movement important to combat in other slightly unusual ways. For example, aside from your guns, your character has the ability to attack using a kind of short-distance pulse. Some enemies can only be hurt with this ability, and it means you need to dash close to them and release it quickly. That'd be much harder to do reliably if you were having to aim at the smaller beasties at the same time. I had fun zipping about in the game for the thirty minutes I played.
I should explain that "pulse" more. Seraph, as the name suggests, is an angel, and her powers are violent miracles, blessings, oaths and transformations. The pulse is a type of miracle, essentially a spell, while blessings are passive abilities, oaths are unlocked via skill tree, and transformations are things you craft.
I find it particularly interesting that one of the game's listed features is essentially that it's not a roguelike; dying in Seraph costs you a portion of your max health, but you'll respawn nearby, you'll keep most of your skill progress, and the game will lower its difficulty automatically if you're continually struggling. Smart.
Seraph is £6.49/8,44€/$8.44 on Steam and Humble, including a launch discount.
It's by the same folks who made Ironcast, a "turn-based match-3 roguelite steampunk resource-management RPG" which John reviewed last year.