A breakdancing brute would be one of the more ordinary sights Zortch would ever witness....
You are in a fine mess, human...
— The voice that contacts our heroine throrough the game.
Zortch Maxinum Against the Alien Brainsuckers - more often known as just Zortch - is an Retraux First-Person Shooter developed mostly by a single Hungarian developer Mutantleg, responsible for all of the programming including the custom engine made for the game, released in 2023 for Windows. The game stands out amongside the other indie FPS of its time through its frame of inspiration: While your typical Retraux shooter would use either early to mid ninteties shooters as a basis, Zortch takes a bit after the late 90s shooters, most notably Unreal (through the colorful and large envoriments, weapons featuring crazy Secondary Fires, enemy types that are around as agile as the player and even the look of the protagonist being similar to Unreal's default player character) with slight touches of Turok and an absurdist sense of humor akin to MDK.
Zortch Maxinum is not having a good day. Accepting a vacation to a faraway planet, she finds herself captured by the minions of brain-eating aliens who seek to make her their next meal. With the help of a strange voice guiding her through their complexes - and a shedload of fancy guns - she's determined to get off this rock.
Tropes present in Zortch include:
- Action Girl: The Player Character packs six different guns, a whole lotta explosives, a ridiculous sprinting speed, and a surprisingly effective kick.
- Air-Vent Passageway: Zortch gets to crawl through plenty of vents throrough the course of the game, and some of these tend to contain secret items.
- Artificial Brilliance: Unlike a lot of first-person shooter enemies, the enemies in Zortch tend to play smarter, repositioning themselves to get better shots at Zortch or to make themselves harder to hit. This is best demonstrated by the Pudding People.
- Asteroids Monster: A floating multi-eyed blob creature splits into two when killed up to three times, and Creeps will split into two a variable number of times.
- Attract Mode: In a similar vein of the first two Quake games, a gameplay demo is being played in background for the main menu.
- Bittersweet Ending: Zortch escapes the Brainsuckers' planet safe and sound, but also learns the sad truth behind them and wonders if they, too, are victims. This is all followed by Zortch leaving a negative review on the tourist agency that brought her onto this entire mess.
- Blob Monster: The most common enemies are Pudding People, purple humanoids who are actually amoeba-like blobs in metal exoskeletons that give them their shape. Apparently they've started to believe they're human, too.
- Boring, but Practical:
- The humble double-barreled shotgun is good for most situations in the game, with a decent clip, abundant ammo, and great stopping power - a sizable chunk of the enemy roster goes down in a single double-barrel shot.
- The not-quite-as-humble cute little submachine gun can stunlock particularly tough mid-tier enemies, and its alt-fire is a scope that takes out foes from a distance. This is extremely useful for dealing with Floaters.
- Boss-Only Level: The fourth level of each episode is a short walk to the boss arena.
- Brain Food: The Alien Brainsuckers sure do love themselves some brains. They originally did this out of desperation, but became physically and culturally addicted to human brains.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: A literal version! The normal end-of-level transition has Zortch bring her fist down on the button and shatter the screen to pieces.
- Cap: Played with in that almost all of the caps in the game are softcaps - if you pick up an armor/ammo pickup and your current armor/ammo is under its max, the whole amount is added to your total even if it would go over the max. Health works the same way, but decays over time back down to the max of 200.
- Degraded Boss:
- The first episode's boss is a Brainsucker. They start becoming uncommon enemies by the third episode.
- A (recursively generated) horde of Creeps serve as the fourth episode's boss, but become regular enemies in the next episode.
- Expressive Health Bar: Mainly when powerups are involved. When the Anger power-up is active, Zortch's portrait gains Glowing Eyes of Doom, while the Invisibility Paint power-up has the portrait display just the eyes and the outline of the head. Health state only changes the color of the portrait from green to yellow and red, but shall Zortch die, the portrait would get flipped upside down and gain Wingding Eyes.
- Faceless Eye: Present in energy projectile firing variety as an Airborne Mook.
- Fall Damage: Falling from great highs isn't that damaging but it does knock Zortch down for a while before standing up.
- Flaming Skulls: The game features Lost Soul-like flaming T-800 heads as an Airborne Mook.
- Force-Field Door: The levels often feature these, powered up with a Reactor per level that Zortch has to seek down and destroy in order to progress.
- The Goomba: Shambling corpses are slow, lack a projectile attack, and are easily dispatched.
- Heroic Mime: Outside of grunting when taking damage and hyperventilating when performing a level transition, Zortch is dead silent.
- Hyperactive Metabolism: Outside of first-aid kits and hidden supercharges, Zortch mainly heals herself by chugging sodas and scarfing down hamburgers and ZAMEK Bars.
- Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: The game has 6 difficulty modes, and they go in order: Visitor -> Pushover -> Warrior -> Dominator -> Subjugator -> MAXED.
- Idiot Hero: Zortch, in addition to being comically unemployable, got into this situation in the first place because she fell for a holiday scam.
- Invisibility Cloak: The game has a literal Invisibility Paint power-up that renders Zortch invisible.
- Kill It with Fire: The Flamethrower is good for dealing with fleshy enemies and makes the two splitter enemies way easier to deal with.
- Lightning Gun: The Bloop Gun fires a stream of lightning, with its alt-fire shooting a massive burst that hits everything in a crowd.
- Living Dinosaurs: In a homage to Turok, these show up in few levels as an enemy type.
- Lock and Key Puzzle: Par of the course for an old school shooter. The game is remarkably consistent in color coding the doors, as red key doors always lead to Exit rooms and green key doors are associated with the Reactor rooms.
- Mind Screw: The game has a few moments like these, with E1M2 being a good example. It begins in a basketball court with a really shiny, reflective floor. Turns out this isn't a reflection but rather a transparent floor with a view of an upside down replica of the court Zortch would eventually show up at late in the level, before the exit. And then the level's exit stats are displayed in upside down.
- Mook Medic: A particularly dangerous enemy - a large, floating humanoid torso - can revive non-gibbed enemies. Brainsuckers can do this too outside of the boss encounter.
- Nap-Inducing Speak: The ending involves Zortch falling asleep in a middle of the captain's exposition. She would wake up in a space ship leaving the planet.
- No-Sell: Few enemy types - like Chaingun Pudding People with metal backpacks and Floaters - happen to have metallic bits that seem to rather protect them from bullet based damage when shot at, so Zortch have to aim at fleshy bits (or use explosive weapons) to damage them.
- Protagonist Title: You play as Zortch Maxinum, not the Alien Brainsuckers.
- Quad Damage: The Anger power-up makes Zortch invincible and heavily boosts the damage of her guns for about a minute or so, while also putting a red filter over the screen and playing demonic whispering audio.
- Quick Melee: In case Zortch isn't feeling like switching to the Wrench for melee combat, she's able to kick with a seperate button.
- Retraux: The game's art style pays homage to the Nintendo 64 and PC shooters of the late 90s.
- Rule of Funny: The world Zortch lives in tends to run on absurdity, from the Brainsuckers capturing ships using giant toy magnets to walking spider-mines getting distracted by beach balls.
- Shark Pool: One of the levels houses a swimming pool that happens to be attended by a lot of sharks. Luckily, the sharks are very easily distracted - even a single dead shark makes up for a snack for the remaining sharks and they even feed off the Ludicrous Gibs.
- Shout-Out:
- Trying to use one of the Classic Cheat Codes from Doom in the console unlocks the "This is NOT Doom!" achievement. Also, the level where you obtain the "weird gun" has a reference to Doom II's level "Dead Simple" (both are square arenas where the doors open up to reveal plasma-spamming spider-robots surrounding you on all sides).
- The end-of-level object being a button that triggers Trashing The Set is a homage to Duke Nukem 3D.
- Smart Gun: The Pugon Pistol. Its primary fire homes in on enemies, and its alternate fire generates a wide Deflector Shield that can absorb a lot of projectiles.
- Story Breadcrumbs: Aside from the ending, the player doesn't get much context for the world Zortch is trapped on outside of little snippets the telepathic voice tells her.
- Tank-Top Tomboy: The html/pdf manual describes Zortch as a "bit of a tomboy" and her design involves a tank-top, in addition to cargo pants and Spiky Hair.
- Teleporting Keycard Squad: In some levels, merely approaching a keycard will trigger a horde of enemies to spawn across the entire map.
- Throw Down the Bomblet: Bundles of dynamite are one of Zortch's options for dealing with enemies. Tossing these are slower than firing the grenade launcher, but don't have the disadvantage of needing to reload.
- Voice with an Internet Connection: Throughout the game, Zortch is guided by a voice talking to her telepathically. This voice belongs to the Brainsuckers' former captain, who despairs at what his crew became and tries to help humans escape their planet however he can.
- Wrench Whack: The first weapon Zortch picks up is a wrench. She can swing it at enemies... or better yet, toss it like a boomerang.
