I play all my games on my laptop’s touchpad. It’s kind of my schtick. This, as you might imagine, makes some games difficult to play. As such, I don’t tend to find those games in my library very often.

I’m pretty sure, though, their rarity means that when they do pop up, it means the sheer novelty of them primes me to have an absolute blast.

Literally, in this case

Beacon is an action roguelike. You play as Freja Akiyama, sole survivor from the crash of the Ouroboros, trapped on an alien world. Your goal is to reach a distress beacon, and hopefully, escape this hostile and dangerous world. Along the way, Freja battles through a variety of levels, blows up (or lasers or shoots or disintegrates) a variety of enemies, and picks up mutations that, upon death, she can use to give herself new powers and abilities.

Like any roguelike, death is very much part of the game’s mechanics. For Beacon, death is used as an opportunity to mutate and modify a clone’s genetic code, letting each run build upon the lessons learned in a previous run. Combined with the sheer variety of weapons, grenades, and accessories, there are a massive number of ways to play the game and find a combination that works. This customisation makes each run feel unique, and, more importantly, just fun.

Did I mention it’s also very pretty?

With any roguelike, there’s always the faint horror that lies at the back of the player’s mind. Every attempt is one that only ends with death, and so, each attempt is, in essence, a suicide run. Many roguelikes handwave this away, but Beacon embraces this horror, adding it to its lore through journal entries, logbooks, and the creeping sensation that there is no way to know how many times Freja has tried to make this run to her beacon. Only the changes to her genome, bringing her further and further from a human baseline and more and more in line with the beautiful alien landscape around her, truly track how many times she’s died, and how many clones have been made. This, too, the game acknowledges and embraces. While it doesn’t incentivise the player to mutate less, it raises the question of cost, and whether that cost matters at all. While the game doesn’t have much of a plot or story per se, this addition of acknowledging what a roguelike is adds a delightful level of meta-analysis to the genre, and to Beacon in particular.

I also figured out that the grenade launcher will shove bosses off cliffs.

I am, as you might imagine, not very good at this game. I also do not care. Its art is beautiful. Its world is fascinating and fun to explore, and the story provides just enough of a motivation to keep the player motivated. Even as I died, I wanted to load the game back up and try again, just to see what I might encounter in the next cave, or what gloriously fun weapon I might chance across this time. There is a constant incentive to keep trying, to keep dreaming, and to go just a little bit further with each attempt.

Beacon is just fun.

Developer: Monothetic

Genre: Action, Roguelike

Year: 2021

Country: United States

Language: English

Play Time: 4-5 Hours

Youtube: https://youtu.be/iAkPJdXu0I0