Meritous

Meritous is a PC freeware game of exploration with a novel combat mechanic and a strong touch of the roguelike. You control Merit, a rogue psychic exploring the Orcus Dome, an area of natural power that has recently been abandoned. You must explore the ruins room by room, searching for items to reactivate the ley lines that power the city. Your progress is blocked by “the shadow”, enemies that fire some manic shooter-inspired bullet patterns.

The battles against the shadow are unique. Your psychic attack must be charged and unleashed as a shockwave. Longer charging leads to a more powerful attack, but also a longer recharge time. You could charge immense attacks before entering a room, but some enemies need to be hit several times: the long cooldown time of these attacks will leave you vulnerable. Your attack clears bullets, while your shield takes up more space as it gets stronger, making evading enemy bullets a very complex and satisfying task. As the attack hits every enemy in range, the game splits from ordinary shooters: accurate timing is the new concern. Positioning is only important in terms of evading enemy fire.

Crystals dropped by defeated enemies can be cashed in for upgrades to your attack, shield and cooldown rate, allowing you to confront meaner shadows deeper in the city. This, combined with the world’s procedural generation, gives the game the feel of a dungeon hack. The randomly generated city isn't really beneficial – it isn’t something you might care to replay once you’ve finished it, and there’s little benefit in knowing the layout except it saves you time. In fact, the most interesting areas appear to be re-written, whereas the randomly-generated rooms feel samey.

The game gets too easy near its end, where you are capable of dealing with pretty much every foe the game throws at you. The only risk comes from stumbling into surprisingly small rooms, where the concentration of fire is too great to apply any skill, or the boss rooms, which are a good change of pace and difficulty. There are a few clumsy control issues too - when you touch a door you are teleported immediately to the other side. You can find yourself blundering through several unknown shadow-filled rooms by accident in this way, which usually leads to your demise.

This game is a great mechanic welded to the wrong game type. The shockwave-shield mechanic is brilliant, but while this could act as the cornerstone of an inventive shooter, instead it is the sole attraction of a routine collect quest.