Anomalous is an Indie Retraux First-Person Shooter by South African one-man developer Byron Dunwoody on the Unreal engine. The game was released on Steam Early Access on Jan 11th, 2022. The full 15-level campaign was released on March 23, 2023, although the game remains in Early Access while the developer polishes the levels.
Partially inspired by the dark imagery of the beta version of Half-Life 2, the game looks and feels like someone made Half Life 2 in the original Quake engine (or at least an updated version of that engine akin to the 2021 Night Dive Studios remaster). It has the fast-paced run-and-gun gameplay of 90's FPS games, with dystopian environments and imagery akin to Half Life 2.
Players take the role of an unknown protagonist in the city of Kosolov, a totalitarian society that seems to have recently been overrun by hordes of mutated half-human, half-mechanical monstrosities known as Anomalies.
Tropes
- Bag of Spilling: Your health is reset to 100 and your armor to 0 at the start of each mission. This can be beneficial as you don't have to worry about ending a level with low health.
- BFG: The game's BFG is, perhaps unexpectedly, the humble-seeming sniper rifle, which does about twice as much damage as a direct hit from the rocket launcher, and can kill even the boss-like Obelisk in just 10 or so shots.
- Bottomless Magazines: In keeping with the retro gameplay, guns don't need to be reloaded and can be fired indefinitely until you run out of ammo.
- Downer Ending: The game ends with the protagonist detonating the city's nuclear warheads in their silos, to stop Kosolov from continuing to rain down nukes upon the rest of the world. You do this well inside the blast radius, and the last thing you see before the screen fades away is a massive mushroom cloud.
- Dual Wielding: Pistols, shotguns, and assault rifles can be dual-wielded for double the rate of fire.
- Excuse Plot: There is a backstory to the game told through collectibles you can find in the levels, and the final level does have an extended narrative experience sequence and decisive ending, but overall the plot isn't gone into in detail and the game is much more about running through the environments blasting enemies.
- Expy: Among the enemy roster are small, medium-speed crawling creatures which are essentially slightly faster headcrabs with the
Serial Numbers Filed Off, and fireball-throwing humanoids similar to the Imps from Doom. - For the Evulz: It's never explained why the leaders of Kosolov isolated the city from the rest of the world, forcibly converted their entire population into mutant cyborg troops, and then started raining nukes down upon the entire world to cleanse it of life, other than the clear fact they're an insane totalitarian regime. Lore entries make mention of the city's leaders uploading their minds into a rocket that was launched into space, and about making contact with some sort of entities on the other side of a dimensional portal that promised them power, but these plot points are never elaborated on and just seem to be there to add to the game's overall creepy vibe.
- Glass Cannon: Human soldiers armed with pistols or assault rifles have average health, but they fire much more rapidly than the plasma-rifle wielding Stub Anomalies and their bullets travel much faster than the energy balls shot by Anomalies and are very difficult to dodge. They can shred your health in seconds, and it's often a good idea to just quickly pop a rocket or grenade at them and dodge into cover rather than trying to out-DPS them in a standing fight.
- Human Resources: The Anomalies are the citizens of Kosolov (seemingly the entire population besides a battalion or two of soldiers to maintain order) forcibly converted into mutant war cyborgs for purposes of waging a war of extermination against the rest of the world.
- Industrialized Evil: The central vibe of the game seems to be this.
- Meat Moss: Can be found growing in certain areas of the game's levels.
- Mêlée à Trois: Averted; the Anomaly creatures and the human military units of the Kosolov regime generally aren't encountered in the same area, but if they do cross paths they don't fight each other. This is because they're all on the same side.
- Mundane Utility: At the end of the 10th level, you jump into a dimensional portal created by Kosolov that was originally supposed to take you to the moon when the game was in Early Access and from which the Kosolov elite apparently made contact with some sort of extra-dimensional entities that promised them power. However in the final version of the game the portal's destination is much less exotic as it just takes you to a military training factory just outside the city's outskirts (likely due to the game being cut from 30 to 15 levels), making the big fancy dimensional portal just a glorified high-speed rail.
- Standard FPS Guns: You have a fireaxe, a pistol, a shotgun, a double-barreled shotgun, an assault rifle, a rocket launcher, a grenade launcher, a crossbow, a sniper rifle, and a plasma-firing pulse rifle.
- Stone Wall: Brutes, Giant Mook enemies at least twice your size, are below-average speed and limited to melee attacks, but are quite tanky and can take about several dozen assault rifle rounds to bring down. They appear in the last 1/3rd of the game.
- Unique Enemy:
- You only fight a single pair of Displacers, human-shaped purple energy beings that Teleport Spam and throw fireballs, in the second-to-last level guarding the red key card. They can take quite a lot of damage and can be considered a Mini-Boss fight.
- There are only two Obelisks, giant flying enemies with a barrage of ranged energy attacks, in the entire game, one fought about halfway through the game and one fought near the beginning of the second-to-last level. They're extremely durable and are about the closest thing the game has to boss fights, although they appear without any real fanfare.
- Whole-Plot Reference: The basic idea of the story, about a city going mad, cutting itself off from the outside world, and converting its entire population into savage killing machines to wage war on the rest of the world, is also the premise of the Warhammer 40,000 novel Necropolis of the Gaunt's Ghosts series.
