Amazingly, we don't seem to have talked about Slain! (Steam link) before, so here's a quick precis: it's a gothic action-platformer with a none-more-metal soundtrack, buckets and buckets and gore, scrummy pixel art, and a hero who looks almost exactly like our Witcher friend, Geralt. It's out this Autumn, and there's a new trailer showing all of those things below.
The YouTube video title says 'June', but the footage was published yesterday—how confusing! Devs Wolf Brew Games, and publishers Digerati, have announced that Curt Victor Bryant, formerly of the band Celtic Frost, will be doing the soundtrack. 'Celtic Frost' sounds like the name of either a folk or metal band—and what do you know, it's the second one. Here is a good picture from Google Images:
In Slain, "players control Bathoryn, a hero in a Gothic world, seeking to liberate seven great towers from 7 deadly overlords.
"Bathoryn must battle his way through a doomed land packed with gruesome pixel art foes before ascending (or sometimes descending) each tower, defeating puzzles, traps and monsters alike. At the heart of each tower, he must confront a mighty overlord. Defeat it and Bathoryn’s quest continues. Fail, and you’ll die gruesomely – mauled by werewolves, disintegrated by floating monstrosities, squashed by great weights or torn apart by hidden blades."
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Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.