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Black Future 88 comes to Switch and Steam on November 21st

by: Sean Colleli -
More On: Black Future 88

We are only a couple weeks away from the release of Black Future 88. From Publisher Good Shepherd Interactive and developer Superscarysnakes, the game is a cyberpunk roguelike race to the top of a diabolical tower. In the wake of a post-nuclear hellscape, you have only 18 minutes to reach the top of a tower and kill the mad scientist who destroyed the world. Along the way you can recruit allies, obtain new weapons and upgrade your hero, but if you run out those 18 minutes, your heart explodes. Luckily any experience and firepower you obtain can be leveraged on your next run, but if you abandon your mission, the tower will assimilate all those goodies, getting stronger in the process.

I'll be frank: I'm sick to death of roguelikes by now as it's a fairly obnoxious genre to begin with, and more often than not it's an excuse for lazy developers to feed a handful of art assets to some procedural algorithms and let them crank out what passes for a game. That said, the premise and theme of Black Future 88 is tantalizing and I'm curious to see what kind of following it picks up in the speedrunning community later this month.

About Black Future ’88:

 

Set in a grim alternate history where it’s always 1988, Black Future ‘88 puts players on a non-stop dungeon-crawling ascent against homicidal robots, cutthroats, bosses and more to exact revenge on the man who destroyed the world. As one of the last remaining survivors of a nuclear cataclysm, you’ll climb a procedurally generated tower through a merciless onslaught of fire, lasers and steel.

 

The only way to kill your mark before your heart explodes is strategically choosing and combining dozens of unique guns, buffs and curses. Choose from several characters with a huge arsenal of weapons and powers as you shoot, slash and dash through anything standing between you and the top of the world. Survive this nightmarish neon-lit retro dystopia alone or with a friend in two-player local co-op, then measure your mettle against other players by taking on special daily challenges to scale the global leaderboard.