Remember the Great Zombie Plague of Heidelberg in 1693? No?
- Freed from the Yoke of imaginary Gods, they are elevated by His truth.
A truth so profound it warps the flesh forever.
And life's tragedy repeats unending.
- "Heidelberg 1693 is a grim, bloody, but satisfying gothic horror action game, one made more tense by giving you such a limited weapon with your musket. It’s a pretty good feeling when you reload it with just enough time to take down the slavering corpse that’s about to bite you!"Indie Game Plus
Heidelberg 1693 is a Hack and Slash / Action platform game by Andrade Games heavily inspired by the classic Castlevania titles. A relatively minor German indie company, the same guys behind SturmFront: The Mutant War, whose modus operandi seems to be cramming as much pixellated gore and carnage as possible into their games.
And it's awesome.
Instead of an arcade-style shooter, however, this time Andrade Games made a Castlevania clone, though one set in the German town of Heidelberg, in 1693 (of course).
You're an unnamed French musketeer, caught in the aftermath of a mysterious zombie outbreak that claimed the entire town of Heidelberg. With the undead and assorted monsters everywhere, you sharpen your rapier, load your musket, and carve a bloody path through Heidelberg to seek the source of the infestation.
The game is available on the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows and Xbox Series X|S.
Oh, Heidelberg. What God buried in Sodom we unearthed here.
- Abnormal Ammo: Whoo boy...
- Plague zombies are usually accompanied by wheelbarrows full of corpses, and they'll throw bodies at you as an attack.
- Zombified prisoners locked in stocks can shoot worm-infested flesh from their exposed, worm-ridden brains.
- The Harlequin zombies can shoot snakes from their arms.
- One of the later power-ups you can obtain; by infusing your trusty musket with whatever curse is currently plaguing Heidelberg, your musket can now shoot severed tentacles with eyeballs. Three at a time. It's actually one of the more useful weapons in the game.
- Airborne Mooks: Some of the zombies are Winged Humanoids, who drops projectiles when you're directly beneath them. They can be taken out by jumping and slashing.
- Always Night: Every single stage is set at dusk or night, for that Gothic Horror atmosphere.
- Attack Its Weak Point: Most of the bosses are larger than you, and have a specific weak spot you need to target. For instance, the first boss, Johann, is vulnerable in his human body, which you need to target via musket.
- Attack of the Monster Appendage:
- One enemy is an octopus-like creature bound on land whose attack is shooting it's tentacle into the ground underneath it - where it suddenly bursts out the floor below you.
- Johann Wilhelm's roots during his boss fight will emerge from the soil to attack you.
- Subverted in the castle level; there's an area filled with tentacles, right below a bridge you start upon. But as you're unable to get off the bridge those tentacles are just Monstrous Scenery.
- Battle Amongst the Flames:
- You fight the second boss, Wallenschwein in an area full of flames. Though the fire is merely background and doesn't hurt you.
- Luther the False Angel is fought inside a burning church.
- The second half of the game spans across the burning ruins of Heidelberg, where you fight zombies left and right amidst the inferno.
- Big Bad: The Moon King, Lord of the Undead, whose army of undead have taken over Heidelberg and converted all of the residents into the undead. He's also the Final Boss of the game.
- Body Horror:
- Most of the zombies are deformed and have their physical bodies twisted to grotesque proportions; special mention goes to the zombie nailed to the stocks whose head has split open (from which dangerous projectiles are expelled from) and the tortured zombies strewn to racks whose ribcages are crawling with snakes.
- Johann Wilhelm is a living person fused to a tree, where his human body seems to be still alive... and integrated into the wood. Ouch.
- Luther the False Angel boss is actually a deformed, blood-soaked humanoid abomination dangling from a hook, with his innards dangling outside his body.
- Bilingual Bonus: Given the setting, the signs on buildings in the background are written in German. Which can actually be translated into coherent words, though they're not plot-relevant.
- Boss-Arena Idiocy:
- Johann Wilhelms' human body would be a lot harder to hit if there isn't two platforms in the area you can climb and aim your musket from.
- Count Tilly's Cavalry of the Dead cavalry is impossible to avoid if the stage is fought on ground-level, but there's a ledge you can climb upon.
- Cavalry of the Dead:
- Count Tilly, one of the last bosses, has an attack where he summons a legion of ghost knights into the area. They cannot be harmed, but the ghosts dissappears as quickly as they appeared.
- The Moon King can summon a ghost knight pulling behind a horse-drawn carriage. Which can One-Hit Kill you.
- Clockworks Area: The interiors of the castle in later stages have gears in the background and foreground, and you risk getting Ground by Gears if you're not careful.
- Continuing is Painful: Upon dying, you respawn with 1 HP and lose whatever gun powerup you had before dying.
- Dead Guy on Display: You'll find hanging corpses of civilians everywhere, dangling from trees, balconies, or any random location. The game doesn't explain if they were executed by the zombies, innocent people who chose to kill themselves to escape the outbreak, or perhaps most likely murdered by rampaging human armies (most likely those of your liege the Sun King). And yes, you can slice them up for points!
- Death by Adaptation: The ending has the Musketeer assassinate and behead Louis XIV not long after his quest in Heidelberg. In reality the Sun King would live for more than two decades after and die in 1715.
- Decapitation Presentation: In the game's aftermath and final cutscene, after you defeat the Moon King, you then return to Versailles with the demon's severed head.
- Earn Your Bad Ending: You can obtain a secret bad ending where the musketeer decides to Screw This, I'm Outta Here if you use the first key on the door behind your starting point, then keep going left. The next section is filled with several enemies akin to late-game. If you manage to survive the hellish mess, then you can take the air transport and get an ending where the musketeer lives a normal life... right up until the Moon King's forces find him.
- Elite Zombie: Besides the usual mindless undead, you also fight musket-carrying zombies, zombie women who repeatedly hurls axes at you, shielded zombies, muscular giant zombies, and the like.
- Evil Gloating: The Moon King will constantly chuckle and gloat at your futile attempt to fight him during his boss fight. What's even better is that his gloating is a lifted sound effect from Dracula's in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night!
- Expressive Health Bar:
- Your onscreen musketeer have an avatar next to his Health Meter on the upper corner of the screen. Who gets increasingly bloody and bruised when you suffer damage. When losing a life your avatar turns into a skull until you respawn.
- A few of the bosses have the date of their birth, the date of their death, and the date of their undeath beside their name on their lifebars. When they're killed, it adds their date of second death.
- Flying Face:
- Floating, disembodied skulls constantly glowing with a ghostly aura with entrails dangling behind are another enemy variety.
- Wallenschwein has a second form he uses when he Turns Red - into a gigantic floating warthog head that spams projectiles at you! Incidentally, his name is a variant spelling for warzenschwein, or "warthog" in German.
- Forced into Evil: Count Tilly is forcefully resurrected like a number of the bosses, but upon defeating him, the cloaked skeletal undead that serves as his cape detaches as Tilly himself gratefully ascends with a halo over his head and disappears, implying that he was good all along. If one looks closely during the fight, Tilly's movements are actually being controlled by the skeletal cloak.
- Giant Mook: The Baron Samedi-lookalike brutes are the largest enemies in-game, and can tank several hits before going down. They're usually immobile given their size.
- Giant Spider: A rather horrifying example; you can fight spider-like monsters as large as you, which appears to be contorted human bodies fused together before being reshaped to resemble a giant arachnid form. If you kill it, the "spider" reverts into a naked and bloodied human corpse.
- Gorn: It's a Castlevania clone that ramps up the onscreen violence and gore off the charts, with every single death accompanied by plenty of pixellated red stuff. And that's not getting into the aftermath of carnage in every area as result of the undead rampage.
- Grievous Harm with a Body: One mid-game enemy is a plague doctor zombie next to a cartful of bodies. It attacks by picking up a body and throwing it at you.
- In a Single Bound: Wallenschwein the Pig Man, whose attacks alternates between trying to hack you with his poleax or jumping in and out an area trying to Goomba Stomp you to paste.
- Instrument of Murder: The violin-playing zombies (!!!) can fire musical notes capable of hurting you from their instruments.
- Light Is Not Good: The Sun King of France is implied to be a bad ruler, considering that the musketeer kills and decapitates him too like with his brother the Moon King.
- Meat Moss: Later stages set indoors tends to have flesh-like growth all over the walls as result of prolonged exposure to the zombie curse.
- Never Bareheaded: You spend the whole game jumping, fighting, kicking undead ass, and somehow your musketeer hat stays on regardless what happens. Even in your death animation where zombies rip you apart.
- No Body Left Behind: Humanoid enemies killed by ranged attacks (including other enemies') will explode on death, but will leave a body behind if killed in melee. This is crucial, since the Moon King's head can appear to resurrect the slain bodies of enemies.
- No Zombie Cannibals: Averted; sometimes when your musketeer is out of range, you can see zombies and monsters actively attacking each other. This applies even if they're the same species; it's unclear whether this was an intentional design choice.
- Mook Maker: The zombified monks have no attacks other than periodically spawning floating skulls.
- The Musketeer: The player is a musketeer who wields a sword and gun, but has to ready and aim his gun (and leave him defenceless in melee) in order to fire.
- Pig Man: The second boss Wallenschwein is a warthog-headed undead wielding a huge poleaxe. The game calls him "hardly a man", and his name is a variant spelling for warzenschwein ("warthog" in German).
- Power Floats:
- Count Tilly, one of the last bosses, floats all over the arena while spamming projectile attacks on you.
- The Moon King, Lord of the Undead and Final Boss, floats all over the place and can only be hit by your musket.
- Proactive Boss: The Moon King actively attempts to harass you throughout almost all the levels by his head floating around and resurrecting enemies that were killed via melee attacks.
- Projectile Kiss: Weaponized version - one of the zombie varieties is an overweight Victorian lady who kisses a mirror, and blows it at you. Which can damage your health when hit.
- Recursive Ammo: The cannonballs fired by the pirate ship as well as the fat lady enemies will explode on hitting the ground into a spread of three shots, which also fall to the ground. If the cannonball hits you directly, it's a One-Hit Kill as you get hit by all the shots. The player can also get a powerup which makes their gun shoot these, although the shrapnel can still harm the player.
- Regicide: In the normal ending, the musketeer kills and decapitates not only the Moon King, but the Sun King as well.
- Respawning Enemies: Like most Metroidvania-type games (especially the original Castlevania which inspired this one), enemies tends to respawn in areas if you didn't leave immediately. Sometimes they even teleport into places you've already cleared of enemies!
- Retraux: The game's graphics emulate Metroidvania-style games from the late 80s and early 90s, despite being released several decades after.
- Royal Rapier: Your default weapon is the musketeer's rapier, which allows you to slice up monsters like no tomorrow.
- Screams Like a Little Girl: The Moon King's death cry upon being killed is that of a young woman's scream, despite him having a deep Evil Laugh during his fight.
- Set a Mook to Kill a Mook: Friendly fire is averted for the enemies, allowing you to use nearby enemies (or their fallen bodies) as cover for more distant ranged enemies.
- Skull for a Head: The Moon King's head is a skull, despite the rest of his body being humanoid. He actually does appear to be a humanoid wearing the skull over his head, however.
- Spikes of Doom: Writhing tentacles on the ground serve as the game's spikes. Unlike the spikes in many games, these can be attacked and destroyed.
- Spread Shot: The blunderbuss-wielding zombies will fire a triple spread of shots at you, making them exceptionally dangerous. Your musketeer can swap their gun with a similar weapon too, allowing them to fire a spread shot of their own.
- Sword and Gun: Like every good musketeer, you carry a musket alongside your rapier which allows you to attack enemies from a distance. The game treats your musket in a realistic manner however - because of the setting, you'll need to reload manually after every shot.
- Taking You with Me: Upon death, the fat lady enemies with blunderbusses will drop a Recursive Ammo cannonball, which can take you out if you're not careful.
- Those Magnificent Flying Machines: Count Tilly's Schwübelflüg, a mechanical war glider-gyrocopter-hot air balloon you pilot in one level in order to soar above the burning city to the next level. It is propelled by pedalling and has a handy projectile launcher for you to deal with those pesky flying enemies everywhere.
- Together in Death: Played with. In the normal ending, the Musketeer decapitates both royal brothers and mortal enemies in the Moon King and the Sun King, with both heads placed next to each other. Judging by the expressions of their decapitated heads, they clearly hate their situation.Two brothers, once separated by blood and hatred.Now united forever in death — the great leveler.
- Transflormation: The first boss Johann Wilhelm is a man who gets fused into a tree, courtesy of the Moon King.
- Villainous Harlequin: Zombies dressed as harlequins (complete with jester hats) are one of the game's recurring enemies, who can create snakes and shoot them at you.
- Weird Moon: In one of the later levels, as a result of the zombie curse the moon now has a skull-like face on it.
- When Trees Attack: Johann Wilhelm, the first boss, is a man fused into a tree and somehow gains the ability to control it. Driven insane by the zombie curse, Johann attacks you on sight, either by controlling the tree's roots to slap at you (Vine Tentacles-style) or shooting projectiles from the bark.
- Zombie Apocalypse: In Germany during the late 17th century, and caused by a curse rather than viral infection.
- My liege; I present to you the Moon King's head. Your will is done.
A flash of steel. A sparkle in fearful eye.
Thus sets France's vainglorious sun...
And Germany's envious moon.
