Ammossum Key Art
Image: West Glade & Yahaha Games

Some action roguelikes are all about mastering their combat through experience and reflexes. Others want you to tear their world apart through the power of unhinged mathematics and recursive explosionmancy. Ammossum, out now, is unquestionably the latter. A defensive roguelike shooter where you are an opossum with a revolver, protecting your train from wandering monsters at each stop through the wastelands.

This one, see, is all about buildcrafting. It doesn't make that much of a first impression - just a slow-paced shooter where you click on monsters to shoot them. But before long, you're keeping up with huge swarms of enemies with a shotgun revolver that fires bullets that explode into a cloud of arrows, which also, in turn, explode into a cloud of arrows. And that's barely ten minutes into a run.

This game fully encourages spiralling excess. The more money you have, the more cars you can buy for your train, effectively increasing its health. But some of those cars might generate gold teeth, which can be fed into the furnace to generate more money and level up your guns and gear. Some types of bullets might spawn other bullets on a hit or crit, allowing you to slot another projectile into the secondary projectile slot, which might then chain into another projectile. And then you start getting armed train-cars that need their own bullets.

And before I know it, a single click is causing a supernova fractal explosion and an erupting cloud of damage numbers that spreads across the entire screen. The math... is satisfying. It kinda has to be, as from the little I've played (not unlocked any of the other nine playable characters or any greater difficulties), the music and bullet sounds themselves are a bit underwhelming. I get the feeling that this is a game where the mechanics spiralled out of control until they took up all the developer's headspace. Which ain't bad, by any means, just one style of design.

It makes for a compelling game when I'm in the middle of it and a bit forgettable once I've drifted onto something else. Still, nothing that can't be tweaked and tuned with a few patches. As it stands, I'm curious to see just how far this one can carry me, because my heart calls for something more potent than numbers going up.

Ammossum is out now on Steam for £8.79/$13 (a good deal for UK folks), with a 21% launch discount running until October 12th. While not listed on Steam, a demo version can also be found on Itch. Thanks to West Glade for the early key for this.