I used to play Snake a lot when I was growing up, first on the Nokia my parents owned, later on, my own mobile phone (note: not a smartphone). Snake was also the first game that popped into mind when I booted GORSD. I reminisced about Achtung Die Curve, a line battle game I played in middle school. GORSD is much more than the named titles, though. So let’s crawl in.
GORSD
Born from a womb-eye, you discover a world seething with challenges created by an unknown power. For what purpose were you created? Uncover the truth of the GORSD. There is no real tutorial in GORSD, it just drops you into the strange pixelated world, and off you go. The developers, Springloaded Games, take plenty of inspiration from Singaporean cultures. Many maps take place in and around long lost temples featuring corrupted deities. These deities have eyes that will penetrate deep into your soul when you first encounter them. Sadly the text is also in an unreadable text, which leaves room for interpretation about the historical context.
Adventure Time!
The singleplayer mode features doors, which are found all around the temple, and entering through them will trigger the levels. Beat the levels, and a flame will ignite above the door. Beat all levels in an area, and you will unlock the boss door. By beating bosses, you can then progress further into the temple. Easy as that. It all sounds very straightforward, but it is far from simple. Adventure mode starts itself on the normal difficulty, making you try several times before giving you the option to move down to an easier difficulty. This will happen inevitably for many people, though those pesky deities aren’t afraid to make you feel bad for lowering the difficulty. Start succeeding again, and you can move back to Normal mode, but the gulf between difficulties is a big one.
Your appearance also changes depending on the difficulty; you start as a tentacled being but drop down to easy, and you become a tentacle shuffling around the area. GORSD’s Standard mode requires you to control 100% of the map, but you will find various modes in both single and multiplayer components. Death Match and Kill Count both remove the need to control the map and introduce skill-based gameplay. But Hunter and Domination combine killing and map control elements for interesting variations.
Conclusion
GORSD features a total of 60 levels, which will take approximately seven hours – and no, I did not complete the game before writing this review. I don’t have the reflexes for playing these kinds of games. The first few levels worked fine, but catching bullets, making them go the right way, etc. became harder and harder. Luckily, multiplayer can be done on couch co-op and offer another endless amount of fun. And with Corona still going strong, we could use some couch-co-op distraction.
