Tips for Starting Out
Dying a lot is expected if you don’t have a lot of experience with platforming shooters, though if the difficulty bothers you, there are player assist/accessibility options you can enable to make the game easier.
You can reduce damage taken (down to 20%), reduce enemy health (down to 20%), and reduce the game speed (also down to 20%, so 5x slower).
There’s also two game modes, Standard and Mega Mode.
Standard mode is the regular mode, in which you get one life, and less stage selection choices available after each stage. If you die, the run is over, and you start back at level 1 with all items collected lost, except for your “memoria” which is the meta progression currency.
In Megamode, you get a hub where you can select the stage you want to tackle first, you can also change characters in this hub if you’d like, as well as shop and spend your “nuts” currency between each of these stage. Dying will only send you back to the hub, and you can keep retrying stages as many times as you’d like, without them changing, allowing you to learn from your mistakes and tackle them again.
Keep in mind though that trying to start in Megamode at “level 8”, while possible to beat if you’re good, will still give you a hard time. It’s usually best to start at the bottom and work your way upwards in the stage selection choices, as the bottom stages are the easiest (levels 1 through 3).
If you have no experience with platforming shooters or roguelite-gameplay, Megamode is definitely the mode I’d recommend first to help ease you into the experience.
Once you start acquiring Memoria for permanent upgrades you should prioritise Salvager Circuit, Dally’s Blessing, and Rite of Rebeginning.
- Salvager Circuit lets you acquire Scrap in place of Augs that you might not want, which you can spend at a vendor that you encounter in the levels for cool items including Armour parts.
- Dally’s Blessing gives you a Weapon or Core part right at the very start of a run giving you a potent boost in your fighting power.
- Rite of Rebeginning gives you essentially a second health bar. It functions kinda-sorta like Sub Tanks from Megaman X where you have to fill them up with health pickups first, then they’ll fill your health bar back up when you die.
So the stages are pretty much like your standard platformer:
10-odd platformer sections with 4-8 minions and possibly a lieutenant each
athletic or miniboss
10-odd platformer sections with 4-8 minions and possibly a lieutenant each
athletic or miniboss
10-odd platformer sections with 4-8 minions and possibly a lieutenant each
boss fight
prize room
Many of the platformer sections will have optional treasures to reward exploring, vendor or lore NPCs, doors that lead to challenge rooms, or the Very Safe Labs.
Each section is individually fair and rewarding. Athletic sections are where the game shines the most. Minibosses can be harder than the actual bosses, and challenge rooms… well, don’t take them on when you’re barely holding on.
Expect to get a few bosses in your first run. But don’t expect to win your first few runs.
It’s designed to be hard at first. Just like any Rogue game, you’ll get better as you practice. There are enhancements that you can buy that will really make grinds easier. I got to the point that I got really good at 20XX (clearing 95% of my untainted runs including daily and weekly), but the beta of 30XX really kicked my butt. Practicing is ESSENTIAL to getting better and dying is just a part of that process. Dying a lot is expected to those starting out on this game.