Image: TrueWorld Studios

It's no secret that AlteredBlood+ was one of my favorite demos of the recent Next Fest. Undeniably inspired by indie mega-hit ULTRAKILL, it's a game about blasting your way through semi-abstract arenas, chaining movement tech and kills to keep a score multiplier high, as while precision is enough to get you to the end of a level, doing so with grace earns you bragging rights on the leaderboard. But despite superficial similarities and a focus on bathing in the blood of your foes, I reckon it does enough different to stand proudly alongside its still-evolving inspiration.

For starters, rather than fall back on demons, hell and allusions to Dante's Inferno and House of Leaves, AB+ (very good acronym, no notes) takes a hard sci-fi angle. The entire game is set within Mother, a self-replicating, sapient megastructure that has, over the course of trillions of years, devoured the entire universe. Some humans still survive as parasites within Mother's guts. But rather than play as a human, you're some kind of sexy cybernetic lizard-person. Lithe, of indistinct gender and sporting a cool fur-lined jacket and swinging a straight razor. Created solely to slurp up all of Mother's stolen blood, and return it.

And that blood is the hinge of all the game's mechanics. When you walk through it, you enter an 'Altered' state that allows you to squish through gratings as if you were made of liquid, move faster, and attack more rapidly with your knife. Walking through fire also doesn't harm you, but makes you angrier and more aggressive, empowering your guns. You can also slide through blood to soak it into your body and recover health, making it wise to leave it in the arena as a resource until you need to consume.

There's a surprisingly complex combo-based combat loop here that probably won't make sense unless you try the demo for yourself. But a huge part of the game is being able to air-dash and slice through enemies while deflecting projectiles. You can only do this once every few seconds, unless you hit a recharge power-up dropped by killing enemies with guns while Altered. So, kill one group of enemies, lure the next into position, and then melee-combo the whole lot of them in a frenzy of self-sustaining knife violence. It never stops feeling cool.

Plus, the whole setting is cool. The characters are cool (or hot, or both, depending on who you ask), and the weird psychic orders you get bombarded with from Mother (PURGE HUMANS, LICK BLOOD) are creepy but also kinda sick (positive) at the same time, often accompanied by kinetic typography, diagrams, and esoteric iconography. There's just a lot of exciting vibes here, and having a game set in one of these nightmare megastructures where you are on the side of the nightmare is just fun, too.

It seems that the success of the AlteredBlood+ demo and its setting was a surprise even to the developers, Singapore-based Trueworld Studios (previously of the boss-rush FPS Unyielder), explaining in their launch roadmap post that they underestimated how excited people would be for the game's story and sexy cyber-lizards. As well as the remaining levels, they've promised to fill in the earlier chapters and the hub zone with additional secrets (including whole levels), lore, and narrative stuff.

As it stands, the current version of the game is at an early access discount, and contains the first six of a planned 18+ stages, plus the first round of endless survival mode stages. Not a huge chunk of game, but designed to be replayable top to bottom, which should tide people over until the rest arrives.

AlteredBlood+ is out in early access now, and costs £9/$10, with a 15% launch discount running until November 11th. Right now, it's a third of the finished product, with the remaining two chapters to be accompanied by price increases as and when they arrive. The demo is also still available.