My name is Edwinus Evans Thirlwellus, Commander of the News Writers of the North, General of a small lonely box of unpainted Warhammer 40,000 Orc figures I was given for my 21st birthday, and loyal servant to the true emperor, Timmy Mallett. FATHER TO NO MURDERED SONS. HUSBAND OF NO MURDERED WIVES. OWNER OF A BRONZE SWIMMING CERTIFICATE AND A WHITE BELT IN KARATE. Eater of pizza that has fallen on the floor, like a whole minute ago! And I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next. Hah, it’s much easier to make that last claim in a video game, rather than when standing in a literal circle of swords. The game in question is Dieseldome: Oil And Blood, and it is pretty good fun. There’s a demo on Steam, for now is the time of Next Fest.
From “Dieseldome: Oil And Blood” you will hopefully deduce a few things. One, there is a dome. Two, the dome is full of oil – absolute lakes of the stuff, bubbling out of vast pipes in perilous proximity to wide trenches of simmering lava. Three, there is blood – here cunningly portrayed as being equivalent to oil, from which we might conclude either that Dieseldome is a searching documentary about the human cost of the climate crisis, or that you are some kind of stupid mechanical man.
Continuing with these wanton free associations, your brain might drift to Mad Max 3: Beyond Thunderdome, aka the one with Tina Turner in. With the gibbering robot cherubs of insight nipping at your heels, your Sherlockian intellect might parkour backwards from the titular Thunderdome to its distant inspiration, the gladiatorial deathpits of Ancient Rome. Mind you, you’ve probably already deduced that Ancient Rome is involved from my crafty intro allusions. If you haven’t – because you hate Russell Crowe and all his works – you will have no idea what I’m talking about, and I congratulate you on making it this far. OK, let’s take this in an appropriately roguelikey direction and start from the beginning.
Dieseldome: Oil And Blood! It’s an arena-based first-person shooter with roguelike power-ups. It’s set in a world where “the Roman Empire never fell and instead went on to discover petrol”. Good stuff! Succinct! Should have put that bit first. You are a cyborg gladiator, armed with an absolutely batshit gun that looks like a derrick having sex with a sink plunger, and you are fighting for the hearts and minds of the crowd. And also, to keep your own heart and mind inside your body.
Helpfully, earning the crowd’s affections earns you boons such as homing bullets, the ability to fart out an exploding warboi, increased chance of health drops, and some kind of homicidal clockwork eagle pal. I once parped out an exploding warboi whilst flying directly above a mad blimp covered in cyborg legionnaires, and let me tell you, I do not expect to have such a satisfying toilet experience again in this lifetime. The titular dieseldome is a crackpot Spartacan playground of ramps and runnable walls and launch pads, broken up into four zones that must be captured and defended. It’s almost treacherously amenable to parkour, grabbing you by the collar and whisking you along the nearest surface at the slightest provocation. This is to your advantage, for to stay put and aim carefully is to perish. Embrace the flow! Try not to fall in the lava!
What else is there to say? Well, the tutorial demo makes it feel a bit naff at first: they slap invisible walls around you whilst teaching you to parkour, which makes zero sense. I honestly thought it was broken to begin with. My first two runs felt a bit underpopulated, a little dry. But then I broke the magic two-minute mark, and the game became respectably Doom-Eternal-esque – a question of frenzied backpedalling and strafing, strafing and backpedalling, right up to the moment when you backpedal straight into a tank.
Dieseldome doesn’t have a release date yet. Read more on Steam. “ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?” bellows Praetor Press Release, predictably but forgiveably. Yes, yes I am, for the moment, though I draw the line at “Romanpunk”. Everything is punk nowadays, including things that mean the diametric opposite. There is probably such a thing as Torypunk! I can’t bear to check, but I guarantee that there is!