This is the one hundred eighty-fourth entry in the Scratching That Itch series, wherein I randomly select and write about one of the 1741 games and game-related things included in the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. The Bundle raised $8,149,829.66 split evenly between the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and Community Bail Fund, but don’t worry if you missed it. There are plenty of ways you can help support the vital cause of racial justice; try here for a start. This particular entry is also part of the Keeping Score series about games and their soundtracks. Lastly, as always, you may click on images to view larger versions.
Our one hundred eighty-fourth random selection from the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality is stalking us through some sort of indoor wilderness with a big revolver. It’s Heavy Bullets, by Devolver Digital (although they are only the publishers; the game itself is credited to Terri Vellman, with audio by Doseone), and its tagline in the bundle reads:
Heavy Bullets is a randomized FPS dungeon crawler with limited but reusabl…
Don’t call it a roguelike.
Reader, I’ve heard of this one! I think I read a short feature about it over on Rock, Paper, Shotgun back when it released in 2014. Probably this one. And then this other one, a year later. I’m also familiar with Doseone, credited here with “audo” which I believe means both the music and sound effects. I first encountered his music when I discovered the self-titled album (actually a collection of earlier EPs) from cLOUDDEAD in the early 2000s, and then later I saw Doseone perform live once, around 2003 or so, as one half of indie hip-hop group Themselves. He wore a shirt that had a three-dimensional, anatomically correct human heart sewn into the front of it. Just a little Doseone anecdote for you, my readers.
I’d heard that Doseone had started doing music for games like Samurai Gunn in recent years. And now that I’m looking it up, oh my, quite a few others, in what seems to be a long-lasting partnership with Devolver Digital: Enter the Gungeon, Sludge Life, and Disc Room to name a few. But I had yet to play any of these, until now. Heavy Bullets matches the kind of aesthetic I expected for a project involving Doseone: an indie game with high production values, a strong sense of style, and simple yet compelling action gameplay. I actually appreciate that its tagline does not use the word “roguelike” even though most people would call it one. It has procedurally generated levels, yes, and permadeath, but otherwise doesn’t feel much like a roguelike. It’s more like an arcade game, offering a stiff challenge for players to attempt many times until they start to make progress and eventually succeed. There’s a fixed set of items to find and learn to use, and a limited ability to (literally) bank some progress to help with future runs. I’ll come back to that.
First I should explain some of the basics: Heavy Bullets is a first-person shooter in which players only have a single weapon: a big, chunky revolver. And only six bullets for it. Fortunately, bullets can be recovered after use, bouncing around with a lovely little pop noise wherever they fell after being fired. But bullets must be reloaded individually. It’s possible to find or buy more bullets during a run, but players will never have a ton of them, so carefully lining up shots is critical. Almost everything can be taken out with a single, carefully aimed bullet, which feels great, and makes for a really satisfying core combat loop of blasting baddies with big, powerful shots, and then collecting the bullets and coins bouncing around after the battle is over.
As for what you’ll be shooting at, well. Players control a series of employees for High Rise Hunting Grounds, which appears to be a company offering a hunting safari experience within — you guessed it — a high rise building. Levels are roughly rectangular in shape, full of narrow corridors and larger rooms, but are filled with vegetation and strange creatures. You’ve got your standard ball of teeth that snarls before charging, soon followed by other nasty critters with their own behaviors that require different tactics to defeat. But there are also turrets in there, only vulnerable if players blast their power cells. A brief text exchange between some higher-ups at High Rise Hunting Grounds sets up the premise: the security system that’s supposed to keep clients safe during their hunting escapades has gone haywire, and is killing them instead. The only way to fix it is to reset the mainframe on level 8, which means someone has to get in there. A cash reward is all it takes. Many employees will die, but eventually someone will make it. So, the standard corporate response under late-stage capitalism.
I don’t want to spoil the different enemies players will encounter, but their design works really well. Most must get up close to the player to attack in melee, which encourages slow and careful movement through levels, constantly checking new angles in case a critter comes bounding around the corner. The turrets ruin this, however. They’re quick to blast a stationary player, but don’t lead their shots, so running around is a great way to evade them. Of course, you might just run right into a back of dangerous critters… it’s a lovely tension. And I must praise the wonderful audio here (presumably by Doseone). Each critter has a distinctive sound, so audio cues are just as important as visual ones, letting players know exactly what’s coming so they can brace for the challenge.
The sounds in general have an interesting lo-fi quality to them, suggestive of retro game sound hardware, yet modernized. The blast of the revolver, for example, is a sort of low-pitched synthesizer squelch, rather than the boom of an actual gun. I’m also partial to the heavily processed “awwwww YEAH” the protagonist utters when picking up a particularly tasty item or upgrade. While I’m at it, I’ll praise the art too. Heavy Bullets uses the low poly, flat shaded style that’s been used so effectively in recent years in games like Deep Rock Galactic, but also goes for a pastel color palette of magenta, blue, green and black. The dark grass and dark critters set against the brighter walls and trees almost make Heavy Bullets feel like a film negative, or a black velvet painting. Great stuff.
I do have a few complaints, however. Level layouts are pretty similar throughout the game, so new floors don’t have much in the way of surprises other than new and more numerous enemies. There are a ton of items to find in the game, running the gamut from bonus thrown weapons to shoes that increase running speed to sacrificial armor to block incoming hits, but players can only hold one at a time, leading to many a tricky choice. Buying a backpack will let players carry one extra item, but that’s it. This makes it hard to experiment and learn what items are useful. Some items, like megabombs, can be carried in stacks, so I often found myself faced with the decision to drop all three of my megabombs (or even all six, if I purchased one of the “Carry+” upgrades) just to pick up some other useful item. That made me even less inclined to experiment. That’s a shame, because there are some really intriguing items in the mix that could lead to interesting play styles. Including a bunch of secret ones, one of which was a great aid when I finally reached the end of the game alive.
Then there’s the banks. Vending machines abound in Heavy Bullets, from the critical medbays that sell healing to machines selling bullets and bombs, to machines offering upgrades to carrying capacity or movement speed. But the most frequent are the banks. Here players can deposit or withdraw cash, store a single item, and purchase life insurance. Money and items in the bank can be accessed in future runs, which is a type of design that I generally dislike. Too often, run-based games like this end up feeling like grinds, where players must play (and die) enough times to unlock / accumulate / obtain the things that they need to win. This began (I believe) as a way to take the sting out of a failed run in a more traditional roguelike: sure, you died and have to start over, but at least you unlocked a new thing, or made some progress towards something else, so that time wasn’t wasted. But ironically this often ruins the experience for me. Dying and starting over in a roguelike isn’t wasted time for me, it’s time spent learning and improving strategies. In a game festooned with unlocks and “persistent progression”, early runs can truly be a waste of time: it’s not possible to win without any of that persistent progression, so instead of learning the game I’m just forced to play a bunch of times before I’m allowed to win.
I stubbornly refused to use the banks in Heavy Bullets for a long time. Depositing money felt like hamstringing myself; what if I needed that cash later for healing, or for a key upgrade (which, fortunately, don’t last between runs)? Surely I would just be giving up on my current run just to make a future run slightly better? Later, I realized that it’s not that simple. Storing items is useful even within the same run, since they can be retrieved later from another bank, instead of simply being left behind. And banks are common enough that it’s usually possible to withdraw money when needed, while keeping the rest safe so it’s not lost on death. Getting to start with a nice bank account to withdraw from is nice, but it also emphasizes that the first few floors of Heavy Bullets simply aren’t that interesting, once players have seen them a few times. They’re really just opportunities to buy upgrades while they’re still cheap. Starting without any cash means not being able to buy anything for a while, which is boring.
And it’s especially boring given my other big complaint about the game, which is the bosses. Specifically, the mid-game boss, at the end of the fourth floor. This is such a huge difficulty spike, able to kill players in seconds if they don’t know what to expect, and it’s a hassle working through the first four floors again and again just have have another brief encounter with this boss to learn how to tackle it. I did eventually learn some good strategies to use, but it wasn’t much fun to figure out. This is an especial shame given that the later floors are the most interesting, with new and more challenging enemies to face. And to its credit, the final boss in Heavy Bullets is not nearly as brutal, giving me enough time to figure out what to do, and I was even able to beat it on my first try. If only the mid-game boss was as forgiving.
But, even though I’ve spent the last three paragraphs complaining, I really enjoyed Heavy Bullets. It simply feels good to play. I love the weird color scheme, and the chunky art and sound. I love how coins and bullets bounce with little chirps and burbles to help players find them after a battle. I love the way enemies fall to pieces when shot, the aforementioned balls of teeth collapsing into a pile of fangs. I love the humor of its corporate satire (the opening chat exchange has a few permutations, suggesting this type of security malfunction has happened before). I had a lot of fun with Heavy Bullets, and I think I would have enjoyed it even more as a game to pick up on occasion, rather than one to play through steadily for this post. It’s definitely worth a look. If you missed it in the bundle, Heavy Bullets is sold for a minimum price of $9.99, including versions for Windows, OSX and Linux and language options for English or Portuguese.
The Score:
I mentioned the sound effects above, but Doseone’s music for Heavy Bullets is fantastic as well. It reacts dynamically to the action, shifting into more intense rhythmic fare when enemies are near and relaxing into mellower music or even silence between fights. I liked it enough to turn to Bandcamp and purchase the Heavy Bullets EP. This consists of seven tracks spanning just under 20 minutes, but each is included twice, as a vocal version and an instrumental. That brings the total to 14 tracks and a runtime of about 40 minutes. The tracks all run into one another without any breaks, making the EP feel like a single piece of music.
That music is dense and fascinating. Like the sound effects, it recalls retro game music (in this case, chiptune) by featuring barebones synthesizer sounds that form simple melodic lines, but on the whole the EP is actually very high fidelity. Ambient sound, a soft menagerie of animal chirps and warbles, is mixed in. Where one might expect harsh programmed beats to match the chiptune synthesizers, there is instead an array of acoustic drums. The synthesizer melodies layer on top of each other and start to follow strange chopped rhythms. And then there are the voices, never quite loud enough to pierce through the rest of the sound, but filling the space with chants and wordless singing. All this teeters on the edge of cacophony, never quite losing control. It sounds as if a group of glitched out robots formed a drum circle in the jungle.
The instrumental versions of the tracks are the ones that actually appear in the game, so the EP offers a bonus listening experience for those who have finished the game already. I could still recognize the most memorable tracks from the game with the added vocals, like “IT’S BEAUTIFUL I’M SCARED” and “EMPLOYEE OF THE WEEK” (the latter of which I stood and listened to in triumph after finally defeating that dastardly mid-game boss), but others were so transformed that they sounded almost wholly new. As instrumentals, the tracks are not quite as overwhelming, letting players also pay attention to other things as they brave the deadly High Rise Hunting Grounds, or perform some real life task if listening to the EP. But the vocal versions demand attention, even though there are no recognizable words within.
Since I knew Doseone primarily as a lyricist and vocalist, I find the vocal tracks especially fascinating. His work with cLOUDDEAD is often classified as underground hip-hop, but the actual vocals on cLOUDDEAD tracks are weirder than that label suggests. They’re more like chants, melodic and harmonized, overlapping one another through many overdubs. But they always emphasize words, full of poetic imagery and unexpected turns of phrase. On the Heavy Bullets EP, the words are gone, but the chant-like sensibility remains. The voices fade back into the music, not quite distinct enough to latch onto, simply part of the sonic mass. Doseone’s voice is now just another piece of his production, another sound to fold into the soundscape, and its addition makes that soundscape impressively dense and intriguing. Fantastic work.
Which isn’t to say I don’t like the instrumentals; they’re great too. They’re the ones that conjure memories of playing Heavy Bullets, of creeping through the artificial jungle and blasting critters, and they make for a more relaxed listen. Luckily for us, the EP contains both! If you play Heavy Bullets and like the music, or are simply intrigued by what I wrote about it above, the Heavy Bullets EP is sold digitally for a minimum price of $3.
That’s 184 down, and only 1557 to go!
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