Bytes ‘n’ Blurts: A Post-Nuke Texas, Lo-Fi Carnage, and Deadly Job Offers
Wondering what the Paste Games team has been playing lately? Don’t have time to read new game reviews, and prefer something quick and direct? Just looking for 1000 words to eat up a couple of minutes of your wait at the doctor’s office or airport lobby? Bytes ‘n’ Blurts offers a quick look at what games editor Garrett Martin and assistant games editor Elijah Gonzalez have been playing over the last week—from the latest releases to whatever classic or forgotten obscurity is taking up our free time. This time around, we muse on a new visual novel set in post-apocalyptic Dallas, a brutally fast twin-stick shooter, and the most violent job recruitment attempt ever.
Interstate 35
Year: 2024
Platform: PC
When Jesus talks in the Bible his words are red. The words you click on in the new visual novel Interstate 35 are also red. Set deep in the Bible Belt, near a post-apocalyptic Dallas scraping by after getting hit by a stray nuke, Interstate 35 elevates your choices to the words of our lord and savior (well, somebody’s lord and savior), with clickable chains of red letters stabbing through paragraphs of white serving as the bridge to the next passage, the next turn of the tale. It underscores both the existential scope of this story as well as the pointlessness of religion after a nuclear holocaust; as one character asks early on, “I’m just wondering when we’ll realize we’re living through an epilogue,” and what are Heaven and Hell to believers but epilogues? There’s no better time to be your own personal Jesus than after the bomb drops. The debut game from Julie Muncy, a longtime games critic and journalist from Austin who is a friend of Paste’s games section, explores the power and transience of memory within a time of industrial scale loss, with Texas and its all-encompassing Texasness rooting the story in a very real, very weird, very recognizable place. Like recent faves Norco and Kentucky Route Zero, Interstate 35 plumbs an almost mystical south for both an uncomfortable weirdness and a stark evocation of the sadness and degradation inherent to modern life, from the viewpoint of a local who knows the score and is better suited to interrogate it than any outsider ever could. —Garrett Martin
Kill Knight
Year: 2024
Platforms: PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One
Kill Knight will make your eyes bleed, and I mean that as a compliment. You play as a banished knight doomed to fight wave after wave of creeping monsters in the Abyss, all in order to find the Last Angel and slay them. Basically, it’s a metal album cover in ludic form where you shoot and slash via arcade-style twin-stick gameplay that heavily borrows from DOOM (2016). The core loop is all about brutalizing demons while managing resources to ensure maximum-efficiency bloodletting; you need to kill with your sword to get ammo for your heavy-hitting weapons, absorb blood crystals to charge your special attack, and use said special attack to recover health. It sounds simple enough, but when the screen is filled with laser beams, saw blades, and insects from the ninth layer of hell, it can be a little tricky to keep everything straight. While each of these five levels is unforgiving and fast-paced, thankfully, the controls are silky smooth, mostly giving you the tools to overcome these torments while carving out a killer high score. While I haven’t gotten through all these arenas yet, at its best, I’ve found myself completely engrossed in white-knuckled leaderboard chasing as I tried to maintain my combo and composure.
If I have a main complaint, though, it’s that some of these levels feel less thoughtfully designed than others (I hate the third one!) because they can be filled with traps that are hard to parse amidst the screen full of guys who really, really want to kill you. Another grating detail is that to unlock new weapons and armor, you’re encouraged to complete arbitrary optional objectives that mostly feel like a chore (you can also buy these via an in-game currency, but this takes forever). Basically, getting at least some of these extra weapons seems pretty important for competing on the leaderboard, but doing so can feel like a grind, and I honestly would have preferred it if all the stages and items had just been unlocked from the jump to make it easier to get to the good part. Still, while it can be a tad frustrating in some ways, Kill Knight is a must-play for high-score chasers who want to test their reflexes or see alarming amounts of lo-fi carnage.—Elijah Gonzalez
I Am Your Beast
Year: 2024
Platform: PC
I don’t know if there’s ever a good reason to kill somebody, much less endless waves of somebodies, but I Am Your Beast has maybe presented us with one. In this lightning-fast spree-shooter from Strange Scaffold (aka Xalavier Nelson Jr., the prolific designer behind games like Hypnospace Outlaw, Clickholding, and El Paso, Elsewhere, as well as bespoke arcade games for the arts collective Meow Wolf) you play as a former pro soldier molded into an almost superhuman killing machine by the government. You’re supposed to be out, hard stop, and have retired to a large, rambling plot of untamed nature where you aim to escape from the world you’ve spent a lifetime slaughtering your way through. Uncle Sam has other ideas, though, and tries to force you back into service at the business end of a machine gun; if you don’t say yes the only other answer is your own death. The only thing you can do in that situation, of course, is kill as many of these soldiers as possible as quickly as possible, trying to accomplish the destructive goals of each level in the allotted time. I Am Your Beast doesn’t give you time to prepare or scope out the map of each mission; it’s go-go-go from the jump as you sprint through these wooded hills, trying to meet specific goals on each level before escaping through the underground tunnel system you built and whose layout is known only by you. On some levels you’ll have to kill every enemy; on others you’ll have to disrupt their satellite communications or collect a certain number of intel reports. No matter the mission you’ll be tearing ass as fast as you can while dodging bullets and bombs and laying waste to the goons trying to ruin your peace and quiet. The whole game is built for speed, and the faster you finish a level the better you’ll be rewarded. The non-stop rush can be dizzying in an exciting way, and the design of each map fits its specific goal like a hand in a glove. As riveting as its action can be, I Am Your Beast’s greatest strength is unsurprisingly its writing and voice-acting; Strange Scaffold’s games are tremendous at both, and that remains the case here, with an incisive story about how militaries dehumanize their soldiers and have no use or respect for them outside of their job. Nelson’s one of the best we’ve got, and I Am Your Beast is just more proof.—Garrett Martin