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Savage Vessels looks like Teleglitch with spaceships

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Savage Vessels is a top-down roguelike shooter with "physics and hard survival", in which you fight hostile robot spaceships and scavenge parts to improve your own vessel.

It looks rather promising, as you can see in the below trailer.

Watch on YouTube

Full disclosure: I misread the title as "Salvage" and got excited because salvage games are one of my favourite things that basically don't exist. This may not scratch that exact itch, but I am intrigued nonetheless.

Unsurprisingly, developers KPas name Teleglitch as an inspiration, even going so far as to call their work a "spiritual successor". That's rather bold, and a high bar, although there are a few obvious parallels to Test3 Projects' 2012 survival horror roguelike. That game was a case of nervously inching through creepy bases hoping to find a tin can you could turn into a makeshift nailbomb before one of its skittering undead horrors appeared to rip your legs off. It was great but not to my taste, and very stressful and difficult even to its fans, as former RPS perpetrator Jim Rossignol reported. He and his accomplice John Walker went into some detail about it in 2013.

Judging by the trailer, Savage Vessels' inertia-heavy controls and slower pace will make it a less frantic and harrowing experience, more about patrolling waypoints and shooting than about crying and running away. That's a definite plus to me. KPas mention that its levels are made of "handmade regions which are procedurally combined", and starting a game at later levels will be an unlockable option to keep the repetition down. I like the plinky planging sounds when you fire big metal spears into the robots, and the saw blades and strange tentacular missile thing.

Savage Vessels is expected to come to Steam on the 2nd of March. According to its forum it will cost "about $10 to $15". A much earlier, outdated demo is available on Itch.

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