Video Game / Laika: Aged Through Blood

Laika and her daughter, Puppy

Jakob: In the end, death puts everyone in the same place.
Laika: Not me.

— Intro Cutscene

Laika: Aged Through Blood is a 2D self-proclaimed "Motorvania" developed by Brainwash Gang, and published by Thunderful Publishing. The game was officially released on October 19, 2023, and it's Steam page is located here.

Laika is a mother coyote whose matriarchal bloodline is cursed with Resurrective Immortality. Using this ability and a Cool Bike that reconstructs itself every time she dies, Laika roams across the desolate Wasteland fighting the evil onslaught of the Bird Army at the behest of her village elders.

But all is not well. After the Birds mercilessly kill a child named Poochie and string him up by his own guts in their base, Laika is ordered to wage all-out war on the Birds to ensure the safety of her home. Thus, Laika must defeat the Birds while continuing to be a mother to her only remaining child, Puppy, and trying not to lose what little humanity she has left from the never-ending carnage she leaves in her wake.

The gameplay can be summarily described as a cross between fast-paced Rocket-Tag Gameplay similar to Hotline Miami or Katana ZERO and a physics-based motorbike flash game. Combat and exploration takes place upon a motorbike, with frontflips refreshing your ability to parry and backflips refreshing your gun's ammunition. Thus, much of the game's challenge arises from trying to shoot enemies while controlling your bike simultanously, making for some Stylish Action once you have mastered the game's mechanics.

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Tropes:

• Action Mom: Laika, gunslinging Badass Biker, and mother of Puppy.
• After the End: The game takes place during a post-apocalypse, with many of the locations hinting at some tragedy occurring in the past, having names like "Where All Was Lost", "Where Doom Fell", and "Where the Earth Bleeds".
• Always Chaotic Evil: Subverted. All of the birds you encounter throughout the game are nameless mooks and bosses you shoot and kill. That is, until you venture to the Undernest and discover that their home is just as dreary as the rest of the world. It's also revealed that many birds in the military hate the war they were forced to participate in and will let themselves be killed by their enemies as a form of protest. The final stretch of the game even has Laika working alongside Pluck, a rebel leader who wants to stop the Two-Beak God from destroying the entire planet below the Floating City.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: The Rocket Launcher can be used to kill heavy machine gunner Birds through their otherwise impenetrable turret shields.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Shooting an enemy will cause their weapon to fly out of their hands. You can then shoot the weapon while it’s airborne, making it discharge and potentially kill another enemy. If you play your cards right, this little trick allows you to land shots from some impressive angles, not to mention looking exceptionally cool while doing so. However, getting the timing and positioning right is really difficult, to the point where you'd be better off just shooting your enemies directly.
• Baby Factory: Since Laika's family curse is only inherited if the current curse holder's daughter is able to survive a debilitating fever which kills them if they fail, the women of Laika's bloodline are essentially forced by Where We Live's leadership to have as many children as possible until one of them survives the fever and inherits the curse, ensuring the village will always have a protector. The amount of psychological trauma that forcing them to watch large numbers of their own children die over many years inflicts upon them is readily apparent.
• Barred from the Afterlife: Without the proper funerary rites a spirit is unable to move on, which is why everyone in the village takes great care with handling the ashes of the deceased. Some people, however, decide to forgo a funeral so they can become bound to a place that is significant to them.
• Betting Minigame: Laika can choose to play good old-fashioned Blackjack either with Chip Where We Forget at nighttime or with the gamblers Where Other People Forget, where she can make larger bets of Viscera. Having a decent grasp of basic Blackjack strategy is one heck of an easier way to turn 200 Viscera into 2000 compared to slaughtering Birds.
• Bittersweet Ending: Laika manages to destroy The Egg but does so just as Puppy takes over her powers thus dying in the subsequent nuclear blast. While the wasteland and Where We Live is presumably saved from the encroachment of the birds, Puppy is left with her grandmother Maya who is aging (and implied to be developing Alzheimers). Furthermore, due to her immortality, people will likely try to use her as a pawn in their power games.
• Boom, Headshot!: How Laika executes Herman, Beicoli, and Trook.
• Boring, but Practical: The starting revolver is already a respectable weapon on it's own, but once upgraded it can handle almost every single situation thrown at you. It's fairly accurate, specially with bullet time, and can shoot four times before reloading. While it lacks a gimmick like the other weapons, it also lacks any weaknesses that may come from one^note The shotgun can mess up your momentum, the machine gun needs to fire everything in one go otherwise all the bullets are lost, the crossbow needs to be reloaded several times and the rocket launcher can kill you with the splash damage.
• Botanical Abomination: The Woodcrawler is a worm-like creature made of trees and skeletons. It bleeds when Laika gives it the final blow via a shot in its mouth.
• Bullet Time: Aiming your gun automatically slows down time.
• Burying a Substitute: While Laika is able to bring back Jakob's body for cremation, something else got Poochie's crucified body before she came back for it. The second mission is to find a special flower to make a memorial wreath for Poochie.
• City with No Name: None of the locations have proper names, with everyone (including the map) just referring to their purpose, such as Laika's village being listed as "Where We Live", Laika's house as "Where We Dream", the village's bar as "Where We Forget", and the grove where they bury their dead as "Where Our Ancestors Rest".
• Cooking Mechanics: Several different ingredients can be found around the wasteland or bought at shops, and can be combined into recipes that give you useful buffs.
• Crapsack World: The entire land was destroyed by a cataclysmic event (highly implied to be a nuclear war), leaving only small settlements that try to eke out a living of whatever is left. Then came the birds, a brutal expansionist empire that conquers land and resources as they see fit, and massacre anyone that gets in their way. It's quite telling how bad things are when most people you meet envy the dead.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: As if Poochie being crucified by his own entrails wasn't enough to qualify for this trope, Jakob later describes that they tortured him first.
• Cruel Coyotes: While living in the Wasteland would make anybody surly and antisocial, Laika and her coyote family take this to another level due to the callousness towards life they incur from being cursed with Resurrective Immortality. Laika herself has very few moments across the game where she's not grumpy or confrontational, and Maya is even worse, being a parent whose Tough Love bordered on physical and emotional abuse. The only one of them to avert this is Puppy due to her just being a kid, but even then she displays a disturbing eagerness for Laika or even herself to go out and slaughter the Birds to take revenge for them killing Poochie.
• The Cuckoo Lander Was Right:
  • Not only was Alfredo's ramblings about a traitor correct, but he was also spot on regarding the "ugly hat" part. Then again, considering his accusations were based of a comic book, it was probably just a coincidence.
  • One of Petey's predictions is that a nuclear bomb will destroy everything.
• Damaged Soul: Laika ponders to her mother if their Resurrective Immortality really comes with no strings attached, or whether they lose a small part of themselves each time they come back.
  Laika: Mother? Remember when I was a kid and I fell head-first into that pile of manure? And you laughed your ass off while you wiped my face, and I got mad?
  Maya: What kind of question is that?
  Laika: I can't remember you ever laughing again after that day.
  Maya: Now that is a pile of horseshit.
  Laika: I don't know. It's like every time I come back, there's a piece of me that doesn't make it. The more I die...The more I kill...
• Death by Cameo: Beicoli is voiced by Beícoli, a real-life singer who helped Brainwash Gang develop most of the music for the game. She shows up briefly to sing "The Hero," a song the real Beícoli also sang for the game, and is immediately murdered by Laika.
• Death of a Child: The game's tone is set immediately when the first thing heard over Laika's walkie-talkie is how a boy named Poochie was killed by militant birds and crucified with his own entrails. Shortly after, you actually find Poochie, and see it wasn't hyperbole.
• Desecrating the Dead: The second main quest has Laika vising the grove where her tribe buries the remains of their dead, only to see that the militant birds that killed Poochie and Jakob have invaded with their tanks and are tearing down the trees to use them as weapon materials.
• The Dictatorship: Birds' society during the game is a militaristic dictatorship with a smattering of capitalism. During a side-quest it is revealed that they were once peaceful before a series of generals plunged the nation ever deeper into militarism.
• Disappeared Dad: We never get a mention of who Puppy or Laika's fathers are nor what happened to them, nor who fathered any of Laika's progeny.
• A Dog Named "Dog": Laika's daughter is a coyote pup simply named "Puppy", Poochie was also some sort of canid.
• Downer Beginning: In the first quest of the game, Laika finds the corpse of a child, learns that the boy's protector Jakob has made a suicide charge to avenge him, and has their village hold a funeral during which the village elder declares they'll have to now go to war against the killers despite being hopelessly outgunned.
• The Dreaded: Laika is known as "The Grim Rider" among the birds.
• Exact Words:
  • When Laika is talking to Herman, after she found out that he was involved with the kidnapping of her daughter, she threatens him with torture to get information on the whereabouts of Puppy, questioning him at the gunpoint. Once he gives up the information and begs her not to torture him, she promises not to torture him... And fulfills the promise right away, by shooting him in the head with her revolver, naturally disqualifying Herman from ever being tortured in his life.
  • Later on, while following the trail using the information Laika got from Herman, she finds Beicoli performing in a bar. After Laika shoots her in the liver, promising death from exsanguination, she ends up having Beicoli give up the location of Puppy. With the interrogation complete, Beicoli begs Laika to not let her bleed out, to which she agrees, and instead, like in Herman's case, shoots her right away, preventing a slower death from blood loss.
• Expospeak Gag: Shaza encourages Laika to carefully memorize her cover story before approaching the Lighthouse, but she winds up dropping it for Roy when it goes over his head and puts it in simpler terms for him, especially since it essentially means the same thing.
  Laika: I'm the Lighthouse's new Advanced Electromagnetic Radiocommunications Maintenance Technician.
  Roy: A...what?
  Laika: ...I'm the radio guy. Here to check the radios.
• Eye Scream:
  • While describing how the birds tortured Poochie before crucifying him, Jakob mentions how they pulled out Poochie's nails and then stuck them into Poochie's eyes.
  • One of the things Laika threatens Herman with is tearing his eye out and forcing him to eat it.
• "Facing the Bullets" One-Liner: The last thing Laika says to Puppy before embracing her certain and final death stopping the Egg:
  Puppy: You gotta come home! Now!
  Laika: ...Love you, Puppy.
• Fantastic Racism: Birds refer to other species as "non-bird scum" and kill them on the spot. Those that are useful to their regime are just barely tolerated.
• Feathered Fiend: The Bird People are nasty pieces of work. The very first of their atrocities you see the aftermath of is a child crucified by their entrails, and this is after they tortured him by pulling out his nails and sticking them into his eyes.
• Gaia's Lament: The world has mostly been reduced to an arid wasteland due to a bomb the Birds dropped Where Doom Fell that happened decades prior and the one place that still has lush forests is being cut down by the Birds.
• Giant Enemy Crab: A Gargantuan Swimcrab is a massive crab-turned-mecha being piloted by a bird.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: Almost nobody in the game is a clear-cut villain or hero (with the two exceptions being Trook and the Two-Beak God). Most of the side characters are bystanders who have grown apathetic to their desolate world and the sheer amount of death and decay around them, but they themselves are not inherently malicious. Both Maya and the Elder "forced" Laika to become pregnant after she already lost two children simply so she can carry on her legacy. Laika herself is an Unscrupulous Hero who threatens to execute people who have wronged her in cold blood. Meanwhile, the birds, as first, come across as one-note homicidal maniacs, but it's later revealed that a lot of them are Just Following Orders, and those who don't are killed for desertion or refusing to fight. Even Captain Kidgutter, the young soldier who mutilated Poochie, is revealed to have murdered Poochie simply so his fellow comrades would take him more seriously and promote him. When he confesses to what he did, he's so wracked with guilt that he begs Laika to just kill him and get it done with since he knows he deserves it.
• Hereditary Curse:
  • Laika claims that her powers come from a curse that afflicts one woman of her bloodline at a time, transferring from mother to daughter when the daughter has her first period. Which Puppy has just before the birds drop a nuke, meaning that Laika is mortal as she dives after it.
  • Petey, the town's doomsayer, is also afflicted by a curse. According to Laika, all males in his family eventually lose their minds and develop something akin to a multiple personality disorder.
• Heroic Sacrifice: After defeating The Two-Beak God, the Egg is dropped onto the Wastelands, and Puppy inherits Laika's Resurrective Immortality. Laika then dives out of the Floating City to destroy the Egg, but is caught in the mid-air explosion with no coming back.
• I Am X, Son of Y: Laika states Puppy’s full name as “Puppy, daughter of Laika, daughter of Mynah.”
• I Ate WHAT?!: One quest involves searching for the remains of dead sea creatures, because the bones of their prey inside their stomachs are coated with important vitamins. Once you bring the bones back the cook will reveal that they belong to your ancestors, who were often the prey of the sea creatures. Laika is understandably disturbed by this.
• Immortal Life Is Cheap: Justified and incorporated into gameplay as part of Laika's Resurrective Immortality. Since she's a One-Hit-Point Wonder who dies from a dust molecule landing on her shoulder, the game outright encourages you to brute-force your way through sections of the game with Trial-and-Error Gameplay until you acquire a level of finesse with the controls.
• Inexplicably Tailless: Despite taking place in a World of Funny Animals, none of the anthropomorphized characters have tails.
• I See Dead People: After the first mission, it turns out that Laika can talk to the dead, as evidenced by her having a conversation with the already-departed Jakob while taking his corpse back to their village for his funeral.
• Item Crafting: Laika can shoot objects like crates and beehives to obtain materials like wood and wax, respectively, which can then be used for crafting items or creating/upgrading guns.
• Large and in Charge: The leader of the Birds, the Two-Beak God, is a massive multi-headed stork. The final battle takes place in a cage that they're holding up that has more than enough space for Laika to maneuver around in.
• Let Them Die Happy:
  • After destroying the bird's lighthouse, Laika keeps her promise to the dying Roy and describes the view, noting how beautiful it is and how there are still whales in the sea. Since we cannot see what she is seeing, whether she's lying or not is left ambiguous.
  • Lewis is afflicted by a terminal, hereditary disease that's killing her slowly. As she feels that her time is coming, her last request it to eat bluelemon berries before she dies. You can find those berries and bring them to her. You then find out that those berries are actually poisonous, and Lewis plans on using them to die peacefully instead of slowly wasting away, making this trope a little more literal.
• Mechanical Abomination:
  • A Hundred Hungry Beaks is a mechanical monstrosity of a vehicle built by the birds and "piloted" using several of their own skulls stuck to it. It's apparently also alive, as it bleeds when the skulls are shot at, and you defeat it by shooting down all its skulls.
  • A Caterpillar Made of Sadness is a gigantic mole rat fused to a train with several weapons haphazardly attached to it. It starts losing layer upon layer of skin and tissue everytime you fight it, until it's nothing but a mess of bone, muscle and machine on the last fight.
• One-Hit-Point Wonder: Laika dies automatically if she gets shot or if she doesn't properly stick her landing.
• Papa Wolf: Jakob goes on a suicidal rampage against the Birds after they kill his son, getting himself killed in the process.
• Parrying Bullets: Laika's motorbike can block bullets, and can also reflect bullets back to hit enemies, but the latter requires charges that must be refilled through doing tricks.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: There are two notable occurrences in the game where you can execute a defenseless enemy without being penalized for it.
  • Regardless of his reasonings and how he felt afterwards, Captain Kidgutter is still responsible for torturing Poochie to death and desecrating his corpse. Laika can murder him if she wants to.
  • Lhey's father is all but stated to have molested his daughter, quite possibly on numerous occasions, which was why she ran away. When Laika confronts him about it, he immediately begs you not to kill him. Like the above example, you can murder the man and suffer no consequences given the severity of his crimes.
• Protagonist Title: "Laika" is the name of the playable protagonist.
• Puberty Superpower: The "Curse" of Laika's bloodline awakens the moment they begin menstruation, with Laika talking about how she first "bled" as it manifested.
• Putting the Band Back Together: An extensive game-spanning Side Quest is built around reuniting the Wastelanders, a band that used to live and play Where We Live before their lead singer Beícoli split the group up for an unknown reason. Each time Laika manages to recruit a Wastelander, they'll show up at Where We Live playing live music, and gradually their instruments will combine to form a whole song. When Laika has reunited all of them they give her a ukulele to give to Puppy as thanks, and it's one of the few moments in the game where Laika is genuinely touched.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: Lhey's father is the only character subtly implied to have been guilty of rape. The victim in question was his innocent and very young daughter, which is what prompted her to run away from home, and is also what led to her death when birds found her and shot her. Laika is so disgusted with the man that the game gives you the option to murder him while he pleads for his life. Should you do so, you won't even get penalized for it.
• Recoil Boost: The shotgun has enough of a kick that it can be used to perform a hop by firing at the ground. However, you can only gain any meaningful boost from it the first time you shoot it after leaving the ground, as any successive shots will barely move you.
• Resurrective Immortality: Whatever "curse" afflicts Laika not only allows her to speak to the dead, but also brings her back whenever she dies. While others see this as an asset, she isn't quite fond of the process.
• Revenge Before Reason: Laika initially sees Jakob’s one-dog rampage against the birds as this and tries to stop him before he gets killed and invites retribution on their village. She changes her mind after he informs her that the birds have already built a war machine for razing the village.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Jakob's raid against the birds leaves dozens of corpses littering the facility you find him in.
• Rocket-Tag Gameplay; Laika dies in one hit to everything. This includes Bird bullets, wiping out on her bike, falling off a cliff, etc. Much of the game's difficult involves trying to kill birds before they can start shooting at you while simultanously landing your bike squarely on a flat surface, and there are frequent checkpoints to help alleviate the amount of times you'll be dying.
• Spotting the Thread: Laika's disguise at the Lighthouse falls apart when the Bird Sergeant manning the second checkpoint notices that Laika's cover story doesn't match up with the information he was given, in a marked contrast to the Corporal at the first checkpoint easily buzzing her and Roy through:
  Laika: I'm the new Advanced Electromagnetic Radiocommunications Maintenance Technician.
  Sergeant: Wait...serious?...It's just...Hm. The new Advanced Electromagnetic Radiocommunications Maintenance Technician sent a message just a couple of minutes ago. He said he won't be here till Tuesday, so I went and checked the calendar. And it turns out today is a non-Tuesday day, you know, non-Bird scum? Which means...KILL THE NON-BIRD SCUM!
• Stealth Pun: In Where Other People Forget, there are a pair of blackjack players who resemble humanoid humpback whales, and are the only ones that Laika can play high-stakes (e.g. bets of 100 Viscera and up) blackjack with. They're whale gamblers.
• Suicidal Pacifism: Not all birds agree with the war. Due to the forced mobilization and harsh punishments for deserting, the only way they can protest is by refusing to fire on their enemies, even if this means their deaths. They can be identified by the white armbands they wear and can be found throughout various locations in the game.
• There Is Another: The stranger in the bar speaking a foreign language reveals how the birds were looking for a girl from his village for her blood. She threw herself off a cliff but they never found her body, implying that Laika's family is not the only one with the "curse".
• To the Pain: Laika graphically describes to Herman what she'll do to him if he doesn't tell her where Puppy is:
  Herman: I'm not afraid to die if this village survives!
  Laika: Then you'll survive. I'll mutilate you, bit by bit, each day. Slowly. Patiently. I'll feed you your own flesh. Your own blood. Your own shit.
  Herman: You're bluffing.
  Laika: You're still in your 30s. And you're fleshy. I bet I can torture you for the next 40 years.
  Herman: ...
  Laika: Now imagine your left eye crushed between your back teeth. The sound. The texture. The aftertaste.
• Unorthodox Reload: Laika reloads her guns by doing backflips, seemingly to eject the casings.
• Urban Hellscape: The Undernest is a gigantic Bird slum covered in trash and seedy advertisements which is also host to all manner of lowlifes and criminals like Trook, who would kill a kid if it paid well.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential:
  • The sidequests involving Lhey's father, Captain Kidgutter, and the Dying Soldier all end with you having the option to execute them, if you choose to. Should you end up killing them, you will receive no punishment for doing so. Granted, given what the three of them have done...
  • There are also certain enemies in the game who will not attack Laika, and there's one secret hideout within a cave filled with renegade soldiers who refuse to partake in the war. You can murder all of these soldiers to get free viscera without affecting the story or getting punished.
• Weird Currency: Shops and traders take Viscera as payment, as in literal guts collected from the bodies of Birds.
• World of Funny Animals: Laika and her family are anthropomorphic coyotes, and the main enemy faction encountered in the game are anthropomorphic Bird People.
• Would Hurt a Child:
  • The very first atrocity committed by the bird people is gutting and crucifying the child Poochie on his own entrails. Poochie's protector Jakob later on mentions how the birds tortured Poochie before that by pulling out his nails and sticking them into his eyes.
    • Poochie's killer can be later found in a quest - and they are a child soldier, who went on to perform such a brutal act to earn approval of their fellow soldiers. Laika has an option to execute them at the end of the quest.
  • Another sidequest has Laika helping an old man find his daughter, Lhey, after she ran away from home. Her corpse can be found about half a mile away. In addition to this, after picking up Lhey's Diary, Laika finds out that Lhey's father physically and/or sexually abused her, which is why she ran away in the first place.
  • Puppy's kidnapper, Trook, intended on draining all her blood in order to gain passage to the bird's "Heaven", and didn't even hesitate on pointing a gun at her once Laika finds him.