Back in January, I wrote about From the Top, a roguelike designed for those of us who had experienced the unparalleled childhood thrill of detonating your older brother’s Beyblade with an imported Japanese Driger V2 that your parents had given you earlier that day on Christmas morning of 2003. (Many such cases.) From the Top was a promising omen: a sign that a subgenre precision-targeted at a specific vintage of millennials might soon emerge.
Today, I am pleased to report that the dream of the burgeoning Beyblade-like space is alive and well in Slayblade, a top-battling roguelike with a demo in this month’s Next Fest.
Compared to From the Top’s darker vibe, Slayblade is leaning even harder into Y2K nostalgia. It’s all airy Toonami-core soundtrack and pixelated overworld sprites, and the designs of its pseudo-Beyblades are right in line with the era’s chunky, gratuitous plastic molding sensibilities. Except you might end up with a Wu Tang logo as one of your battle top components. Don’t worry about it. It’s for the children.
You play as a nameless Slayblade battler, aiming to secure the Slayblade World Championship title—an achievement which will, obviously, allow you to discover why your father disappeared after inventing perpetual motion Slayblade technology “that would have solved the energy crisis.” To get there, you’ll have to complete a days-long run of skating between cash prize Slayblade battles, exchanging your winnings for top parts and tournament entries.
You can also use your Slayblade to mow lawns for extra money and experience if you want. Or you can partake in “illegal,” high-risk Slayblade battles. I don’t know what would render a battle top match illegal, but I do know I’m too afraid to ask.
As you’d expect, each of the available Slayblade parts—divided between top heads, bodies, and tips—have their own attributes and effects. In addition to a weight stat that affects the Slayblade’s impact, handling, and momentum, each part has an active effect that’ll trigger if you fling your top into a “power up cube” during a match.
The combinations can be pretty potent. For example, that Wu Tang logo I mentioned will halve the time until the next power up cube appears when triggered. On its own, that might not seem like much—but pair it with a Buster body that summons a spin-draining ghost to chase your opponent when you collect a cube, and you could flood the Slayblade arena with vampiric phantoms that can quickly leave the other top lifeless.
In one of my runs, I matched a Slayblade body that placed a landmine in the arena with a “Flat Earth” tip that flattened the typically bowl-shaped arena into a level plane: When my opponents slid into my explosives, there was nothing keeping them from immediately skittering out of bounds, earning me an easy victory.
Slayblade’s Next Fest demo is fairly short and rough around the edges: The available part selection isn’t particularly deep, each run will abruptly cut off at the point you’d enter your initial Slayblade tournament, and there’s a healthy amount of placeholder art and menu text waiting for another pass. But as an early playtest, it’s another promising take on a proof of concept that I’m pleased to see.
Slayblade doesn’t have a release date, but the demo is available on Steam now.
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