Beacon is an isometric roguelike by Monothetic, the same developers behind Black Snow (Half-Life 2).
Freja Akiyama is not having a good day.
Her corporate ship has crash-landed on a remote planet far from anything resembling home.
The wildlife is out to kill her.
The corporate security robots are out to kill her.
The things those robots were imprisoning are out to kill her.
And worse still, they all have already killed her. Many, many times.
The new Freja Akiyama, fresh from the cloning bay and the only functioning part of the crashed ship, is not having a good day.
But with a host of mutations that do everything from simply hardening her skin to turning her arm into a leech to sap the health of enemies, all the way up to transforming her into a demon from another dimension, she might just get off this rock...
Published on itch.io in 2018 and Steam in 2021.
SEQUENCING TROPES
- Ace Custom: Most weapons have special variants cooked up by previous versions of Freja, usually doing more damage at the cost of a longer reload and/or smaller magazine. They range from extensive bio-modification of organic weaponry to simply turning off the corporate-mandated power limiter.
- And Then John Was a Zombie: Unsurprisingly, taking enough mutations of a certain faction can influence your ending, and if it does happen, they involve becoming something from that faction, like turning into a Tritoraptor.
- Anti-Wastage Features: A "Full" message is given when health pickups are walked over at full health, and the pickup is left on the ground.
- Autosave: Whenever Freja activates a Beacon, the game saves itself. Except for the final beacon, where it doesn't save until after the cloning process has finished. Unlike a usual roguelike, it doesn't prevent quitting and reloading for another try, but with a slightly different Randomly Generated Level
- Ballistic Bone: Several weapons are crafted from the bones of Native lifeforms, and they range from organic buzzsaw launchers to bone-spear launchers.
- Blob Monster: Oozelings, in the Native part of the Bestiary.
- Big Red Devil: Flauros bosses are the size of a fighter jet, flaming red (or yellow), and come from some infernal realm of torment.
- Body Horror: Every mutation, even the most minor one, involves some kind of transformation that's usually painful. These range from Freja's skull elongating and her face clinging to the new skull by shreds, to her jaw sloughing off entirely to be replaced by extradimensional tentacles.
- Clone Angst: While Freja normally doesn't dwell too much on the fact she's continually killed and brought back to life, the blues don't hit until two of the endings when Freja makes it off planet:
- Discovering a way to contact her parents, but their muted surprise makes it clear that they've greeted multiple iterations of their daughter multiple times. She uses this to her advantage by becoming an Unperson as a result, giving her the freedom to explore the galaxy without any ties.
- Second Chance: She doesn't contact anyone but discovers that the cloning bay has been on so long that when one of the Frejas makes it off-planet, she finds it's been centuries.
- Cosmic Horror Story: The Uncharted faction is split between an encroaching pack of demons and Lovecraftian horrors that each have artifacts that PRISM could barely comprehend, let alone Freja. One artifact she finds has her hearing voices she knows are familiar to her and fearing that she'll go insane if she stays near it.
- Cthulhumanoid: The Draining Maw mutation turns the lower half of your face into a squid-like mass of blue tentacles.
- Dem Bones: The Flauros subfaction of the Uncharted are skeletal in nature, ranging from flaming humanoid skulls to creepy goatskull-headed ghost-things. And with the right mutations, you can replace your head with a flaming skull.
- Difficulty Levels: Easy, Default, Hard and Extreme:Easy: Everything still wants to kill you, but they're not going to be as successful. A more relaxed challenge, while maintaining high intensity.
Default: An ideal starting point for new players. Want something more challenging than Easy, but more forgiving than Hard? That's Default in a nutshell.
Hard: Looking for a challenge? Enemies are more numerous, deal more damage, and are less likely to laugh politely at your jokes, even if you look like you need a win.
Extreme: A team of scientists convened to formulate the most unforgiving, relentless difficulty setting known to man. We tried to hear what they were saying through the wall, and came up with this. - Double-Edged Buff: Mutations are changes applied to Freja's body that lasts about 3 lives and can randomly occur when a new clone is made with non-human DNA. For example:
- Gaseous Sack replaces her legs with said sack, exchanging max Hit Points for jump height.
- Shard Cluster, in exchange for 80 Speed, gives 20% resistance and a chance to make a Counter-Attack when damaged.
- Reactive Flesh actually involves status effects. It exchanges 40 Hit Points for 40 Stamina and when damaged, Freja might grow or shrink. Growth gives 100% Resistance, but removes 100 Speed, and Shrinking gives 300 Speed while taking 33% Resistance.
- Fire and Brimstone Hell: It's implied the demon-themed Flauros come from a dimension that heavily resembles stereotypical Christian Hell with their usage of blood-red magic and extradimensional flames... if it's not actually Hell, that is.
- Future Imperfect: Word of God
says that the MGTX Magrail Blaster◊ Flavor Text is an in-universe ad where Shoraiteku (and the rest of the intergalactic community) acts like they've forgotten about the 21st century:Shoraiteku: Tungsten. Some say it was known in ancient Earth mythology as "Metallan av gudarna", or metal of the gods. Experts believe that this rare and precious metal was worshipped for its hard and dense properties.
While we can't begin to understand the mysterious ways of our 21st century ancestors... - Loading Screen: The information presented in its tooltips is part of teaching the player how to play the game, such as what a Jackpot is, which is getting more loot from crates at Luck's chance.
- Kill It with Fire:
- PRISM bots trend towards fire-based weapons, and it's justified in keeping the local wildlife at bay or making sure the flora don't grow onto any PRISM structures.
- A variety of weapons, ranging from a flame-spewing revolver to a flare gun, also exist, and just like the PRISM bots, do far more damage against organic enemies.
- LEGO Genetics: The game's core feature is that skills and modifiers are represented as genetic modifications; perks and armor are also represented as mutations arising from using enough of one faction's DNA.
- Multiple Endings: Determined by what faction bosses are faced and the general performance/character mutation throughout the game.
- Our Demons Are Different: The Flauros, skull-headed "aliens" that are strongly implied to be really just demons. Many of them consist of strange goat-or-horse-like skulls wrapped in cloaks, hurling extradimensional hellfire.
- Outside-Context Problem: In a somewhat grounded Hard Sci Fi universe, the Uncharted faction stick out for bringing near-explicit magic and psionics, with enemies ranging from Succubi and Incubi using Hellfire to tentacled psychic horrors. One artifact you pick up implies the existence of souls.
- Raptor Attack: Tritoraptors, dromeosaur-styled aliens with a similar bodyplan and a penchant for leaping like Jurassic Park raptors onto prey and mauling them to death with a pack. They're feathered, too, albeit with razor-sharp quills. Unlike most raptor-styled aliens, they get bigger as they age, and the adults look like an angry cross between a Megaraptor, T. rex, and a Triceratops. Mutations you can get from them include the ability to leap like they can, and the relevant boss mutation allows you to become one.
- Religious Horror: The Flauros sub-faction of Uncharted are demon-themed things that rely on creepy artifacts, lots of hellfire thematics, and occult-like rituals, and in a sci-fi universe, they stand out for being nearly magic - if they aren't actually magic.
- Shipwreck Start: Interstellar mercenary Freja Akiyama, or rather, her clones, have to deal with having crash landed onto a planet with near-constantly violent factions, and has to fight her way through them to her distress beacon so she can make it call for an extraction.
- Tough Room: Parodied in Hard difficulty's description mentioning enemies having a reduced chance to laugh at your jokes:Hard: Looking for a challenge? Enemies are more numerous, deal more damage, and are less likely to laugh politely at your jokes, even if you look like you need a win.
- T. Rexpy: The older a Tritoraptor gets, the more Tyrannosaurus-like they become, culminating into a Mother Tritoraptor fight against one specimen the size of a small skyscraper.
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