Uriel’s Chasm 3: Gelshock Reviews

pretty weird ngl

One of rail slave's most stylish games, I love the extraneous HUDs and what I remember of the story. Like most rail slave games it is short and highly experimental with strange mechanics. Raw.

Gelshock is, as with all Rail Slave games, an endearing mess of sloppily melded genres and ambitious, deliberately obtuse design and writing. Unfortunately, it falls short of the high marks of prior games, and seems to lack confidence in its alienating tone by making the game easier to complete and more RNG dependent than most of Rail Slave's earlier titles. The main mode of play is as a tile-based dungeon crawler through four levels you can freely move between, completing objectives and grinding out battles with other slimes to earn enough resources to keep yourself alive and construct the limbs needed to progress. Unfortunately, the turn-based combat seems completely arbitrary and luck-based, and the sole player-guided intervention being dodging fireballs that move in real-time rather than tile by tile. The game displays player and enemy combat rolls each turn, but as far as I could tell, those only represented the rolls for the turn you just made, and when you move to attack the enemy it rolls again anyway, so seeing them doesn't lend any more strategy or thought than just mashing through basic attacks in any JRPG would. The only real trick is to save [which you can do in combat] and load every time you take damage yourself. You can technically throw one of your hard earned limbs at an enemy, but it doesn't seem to do any more damage than just bumping into them, and anyway the rewards for killing a single enemy can't possibly compensate for the resources spent on getting the limb in the first place. The other mode of play is a vertical shmup, but these segments are few and far between, acting only as boss fights, and your only method of attack is to graze enemy projectiles until three bars fill up, which automatically activates a counterattack. For the most part this part of the game is just too easy, especially because you can never actually die during these fights, getting hit just resets your current bar, and at worst you have to start grazing from empty, not even the boss's health gets reset. The final fight is the sole difficulty spike and I wound up just abusing a spot on the boss's sprite that allowed me to graze nearly constantly because I wasn't good enough at dodging the extremely fast and dense patterns. Gelshock might be worth it for devoted Rail Slave fans but for anyone else, there are far better entry points into their catalog, and this entry probably won't be topping anyone's lists. I'll still recommend it as it's a Rail Slave game you can actually conceivably complete without being a bullethell shmup obsessive and for the fantastic UI and ending art.

The sequel to the sequel to the worst game on Steam, EVER!!!!!!!1, if reviews are to be believed, but I haven't actually played the other Uriel's Chasm games, nor any other games by Rail Slave. I like Gelshock. It's short and strange, and has the same feeling as a horror short story, a vignette of a frightening world rather than a complete narrative set within it. I'm not too sure what to think about the gameplay. It's clunky and unconventional in ways that feel too intentional to just be a lack of development skill or polish, but not obviously relevant to the narrative either. Experimental for the sake of being experimental, perhaps?

Just like all past Rail Slave Games, this is an experience more than a game. Although this has far more game play than RSG's other entries, the true value of this one come after the credits when you have to think about the meaning, and what you just witnessed. Not for everyone, but if your are curious about a "game as art," just like RSG's other games, you cannot go wrong here.

A bad game or a misunderstood artist? I thought that this developer was just terrible at making games, but I am starting to see some consistency with his vision across multiple titles. Perhaps making a good game was never the goal, maybe it's just a trick to further subvert my expectations. However, I wonder if the strange narrative in this game could be told without damaging the gameplay mechanics, and in my opinion the answer is yes. If its 2 mini-games were actually fun to play, I don't think that it would change my perspective on the story. As it stands, the bullet-hell bosses and arena fighting in this game are just objectively bad, intentionally or not. It takes about 60 to 90 minutes to beat, leaving you with a $5 worth of experimental narrative. To be fair, I think I enjoyed this experience just because it shows complete disregard for anything that one could consider a good game design. I personally love ambient atmosphere so I liked its lack of coherency and strange soundtrack. But to be honest, just like the last time I played a game by this developer, I am mostly confused...