Beware those monsters, mutants, robots and a gone-crazy AI.
In the future, Mega Corporations have transcended governments, and control whole planets for their research. On the planet Medusa 1-C, military development corporation Militech has been conducting experiments in necrotic tissue reactivation and "nonhuman combatants", as well as a side-line in teleportation physics. Needless to say, this goes horribly wrong in all the ways you'd expect, and the player is the sole survivor. In order to escape, you now have to fight your way through 10 (randomly generated) zones of the base, while fighting off the suborned shells of your former colleagues, and the released experiments they were developing.
Teleglitch is a top-down Shoot 'Em Up mixed with a Roguelike, and heavily inspired by id Software's "Quake" First Person Shooters. There are also elements of Survival Horror, generally invoked via ammo scarcity and the Item Crafting mechanic, which allows you to create useful "enhanced" items by combining scarce components, all of which are consumed on use. Some items relevant for construction are also essential for survival outside of the mechanic, introducing the tension between hoarding, use of items immediately, and use of items to make better items.
Teleglitch provides examples of:
- Action Survivor: The Player Character, a scientist with little to no combat training who is the Sole Survivor of a teleportation experiment Gone Horribly Wrong.
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The Base AI is apparently a tiny bit unstable, and has brought back all of your ex-colleagues as killer zombies.
- Apocalyptic Log: Some of the data entries you can read in computers spread all across the levels are this.
- Badass Bookworm: The Player Character may be one of these, as he's explicitly the sole survivor of the events before the game, and is a scientist (which is presumably how he's so good at sticking items together to make improvised devices).
- Changing Clothes Is a Free Action: Making and donning armor is as fast as selecting it from the crafting menu and clicking.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Items' names are colored depending on their category: white for weapons, red for explosives, blue for healing items, green for crafting items, orange for passive items, and tan for ammo.
- Common Place Rare: A few of the random loadouts that come with the Guns and Tunes DLC come with a box of chocolates, which is described as being the last box on the entire planet.
- Slightly less impressive given that it's a Death World with no intelligent life. Still pretty nice though.
- Deadly Dodging: The Teleglitch anomaly kills everything it touches, including monsters. You can save a lot of ammo by luring monsters into it - there is even an achievement for doing so.
- Dead Man's Switch: One item you can craft is a teleporter device that activates automatically the moment your HP reaches zero, taking you to the beginning of the level with 50 HP.
- Death World: The planet where the game takes place, Medusa 1-C, is this. It has poisonous atmosphere, extreme high temperatures, lethal levels of radiation, and indigenous lifeforms that think of humans as a nice snack.
- Emergency Weapon: You are armed with a knife, which deals about the same damage as a pistol, but is pretty difficult to use without getting hit.
- Gadgeteer Genius: The crafting system's more advanced options, including a teleporter, imply that the player character is one of these, considering the items are all improvised from junk you collect.
- Gatling Good: Combining a motor with four assault rifles rewards you with your own makeshift minigun. As expected, it makes short work of everything, but eats ammo like there's no tomorrow.
- Gone Horribly Wrong: Teleportation experiments in videogames always seem to end in catastrophe. This is no exception.
- Have a Nice Death: The game displays a random one or two liner everytime you die. Some encourage you to try again. Others mock you for your failure.
- Hyperspace Arsenal: While the inventory system has a limited (although large) number of slots for items, the player can carry an unlimited supply of ammunition, all sorted by type.
- Item Crafting: Including the sticking explosives into empty cans (one of the first things you'll do) to make improvised grenades.
- Ludicrous Gibs: Any enemy killed from full health in a single shot (such as using one of the higher-damage rifles on a normal zombie, or firing a nailgun5 at point-blank range into a guard) will explode into little bits, instead of being knocked down to the floor.
- Meaningful Name: The Procedural Generation, as well as a few other elements of gameplay, are explained to have been caused by a teleporter glitch.
- MegaCorp: Militech, the amoral corporation that funded the teleportation and humanoid weapons technologies that go horribly wrong is one of these.
- Nail 'Em: One of the computer logs mentions scientists in the weapons sector who were frivolously experimenting with nailguns because they make funny sounds when they shoot. The player can also craft their own nailgun and nailammo to make a gun that's alright against unarmored enemies at close range, but is worse at long range due to a large spread and severe damage fall-off. They can also add tubes to upgrade the nailgun to nailgun2 through nailgun5, which shoot more nails at a time.
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Nintendo Hard: Yup. To the point the updated version is named "Die More Edition". - Our Zombies Are Different: They were used by an unscrupulous MegaCorp as slave labor, for one. After everything goes to hell and they start attacking everything on sight, the first thing you'll notice is that they're fast.
- Permadeath: Like most Roguelike inspired games, when you die, you die and go right back to the first level. Getting more than 50% through the game mitigates this a bit, though, allowing you to start a few levels in.
- With the new levels added in Die More Edition, progressing far enough lets you start even further in.
- Procedural Generation: Each level is made up of a fixed supply of rooms and hallways which are connected in a random network each time you play.
- Retraux: The game's art style is deliberately lo-fi and pixellated (but, of course, is accomplished via modern GPU techniques).
- Rewarding Vandalism: Certain walls in the levels may be replaced with destructible barriers — blasting a hole in one of these will reveal a secret chamber with goodies in it.
- Standard FPS Guns: You start with the knife and pistol, tend to quickly find the shotgun, midway through the game you get the revolver, automatic assault rifle and whatever rocket launchers you can make, and by the end of the game you'll be firing the almighty lasers, tesla coils, railguns or gatling guns.
- Teleporter Accident: As in "Doom" and "Quake", it's the reason for everything's going to hell before the game starts. The teleglitch is also responsible for the black blobs jutting out from the walls that will instantly kill anything that touches them. This is explained away as another side effect of the "teleporter glitch".
- With This Herring: A few of the load-outs you can start with if you have the Guns and Tunes DLC are a tad odd, like starting with nothing but a taser. The more ridiculous ones tend to also include a box of chocolates.
