The inciting incident of the game. You are about to fall down a deep hole very soon.
A Metroidvania-style freeware platformer created for a 2010 indie game competition known as Indie Kombat. It was partly inspired by Spelunky, and game's readme file thanks its creator Derek Yu for making that game and sharing many important resources.This particular game starts off with the player playing a black-silhouetted angel slaughtering an entire village of people, attracting the ire of his fellow angels who descend on him. After a brief fight, the head angel appears and paralyzes the black angel, stripping him of his sword, his wings and all his health before dumping him in the underworld. The rest of the game revolves around the black angel regaining his former strength (and then some) to escape from the underworld and get revenge on the head angel.
Download it here.
A flash port of the game can be played here.
This game is an example of:
- Absurdly Sharp Blade: Your sword cuts through thick boulders in several strokes, but is powerless against much thinner shields wielded by your enemies in the dungeons. Justified, since it's clearly supernatural, and the shields may as well be supernatural too (them being pure white in color, along with their wielders, while both you and the sword are black).
- Airborne Mook: There are small winged white blobs in the cave that shoot energy projectiles at you. Those projectiles also go through the walls, and do not dissipate once they hit you, so it's technically possible to get damaged by one several times, if you are particularly unlucky.
- There are also small cherub-looking archers a little later on. However, they are barely a step up over their predecessor, since both possess similar health and rate of fire (if anything, cherubim have a slightly longer charge-up time), and deal the same damage with their projectiles.
- A Taste of Power: The brief moment of gameplay before you end up in the underworld sees you with your sword, wings and all health upgrades. Afterwards, though, you're depowered to the point where the black angel can barely jump more than a few inches off the ground.
- But Thou Must!: In order to even start the game, you must personally slaughter the inhabitants of the village.
- Charged Attack: The upgraded sword is capable of this. It involves using Beam Spam like the angels in the beginning can.
- Collision Damage: The enemies in the caves inflict this on you.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Essentially everything white in color is immediately lethal to your black angel.
- Convection, Schmonvection: Touching lava is an instant kill. Hovering just a foot above it, though, poses no problem.
- Cool Sword: Doesn't take you long to get your hands on your old sword again. Later on, you get an upgrade that can Beam Spam like the angels can.
- Easy Levels, Hard Bosses: There is only one boss in the game, but he is far harder than anything in the actual levels.
- Energy Ball: Angels drop a ton of large ones down the cave opening early on in an attempt to kill you. Small winged creatures fire similarly small ones that will go through the walls.
- Fallen Angel: The main character, who has a fully black sprite with a white outline.
- Flash of Pain: Which also flashes white whenever it gets hit, but survives said hit.
- The Goomba: There are short round-bodied two-legged white creatures in the cave that are at most knee-high to your character, and seem to lack either arms or mouths to attack with. Nevertheless, touching them is still a One-Hit Kill at first. You do not get a Goomba Stomp either, so just jump over them...until you find your sword, which happens pretty quickly. Then, you can cut them all to pieces without breaking a sweat.
- Healing Checkpoint: Played straight.
- Heartbeat Soundtrack: Parts of the final boss theme utilize this.
- Heart Container: There are dark violet orbs that add on an extra circle of HP when picked up.
- Hopeless Boss Fight: The initial fight with the angels. It's possible to kill them all before you run out of health, but the angel leader will still appear and instantly paralyze you.
- Infinity Jump: The wings essentially let you jump infinitely.
- It's the Only Way to Be Sure: The angels tried hard to do that. Soon after you fall into the cave, they'll begin a lenghty bombardment from above with explosive energy spheres, and will seal off that hole with an energy barrier afterwards. Once you manage to dodge all of those spheres, however, a jump upgrade will be left behind, which allows you to jump over the very short that kept you confined in the bombardment area, and start exploring the underworld.
- No Name Given: Nothing in the game ever gets officially named. See Rule of Symbolism below, however.
- One-Hit-Point Wonder: The black angel starts out as this, but throughout the course of the game eventually turns into an Implacable Man.
- Over Penetration: The sword can easily cut through multiple enemies.
- Pink Mist: The enemies you kill are reduced to a cloud of red drops.
- Roaring Rampage of Revenge: What it's assumed the game is all about.
- Rule of Symbolism: Though it's never outright stated, it's probably safe to assume that the protagonist is Lucifer and the head angel is Michael.
- Shield-Bearing Mook: These appear soon after you get the sword. They require two strikes to defeat, and obviously have to be hit from behind. Given that they are slow and defeating them provides you with nothing, it's often faster to just jump over them, since they'll continue travelling back and forth, rather than turning to chase you.
- Sound of No Damage: A metallic "ding", heard when your sword bounces off the shield of the shield bearing enemies. A similar sound is heard when your sword collides with that of the sword-wielding enemies when they swing it in an arc, which the game counts as a parry.
- Spikes of Doom: Short white spikes that are set in very wide beds to compensate, and will instantly kill the fallen angel in spite of their size. They are often placed in such a manner that you'll hit them if entering an area too quickly, especially if you have backtracked for whatever reason.
- Spin Attack: Sword-wielding enemies in the caves will spin their sword vertically around themselves. This move is both offensive and defensive, as your own sword will be blocked if it collides with theirs during that move.
- A Storm Is Coming: After you defeat the head angel, ominous storm clouds start to appear in the background before the game fades to black.
- Sword Beam: All the angels except the black one can use these. And so can he, once you get the proper upgrade.
- Turns Red: The Final Boss will use progressively stronger attacks the lower his health gets.
- Villain Protagonist: If the black angel really is Lucifer, this is probably in effect as well. The fact that you start off the game massacring a village full of helpless humans doesn't actually help with that image.
