Sometimes you just know. A few seconds into Sektori, through an alluringly vague tutorial and out the other side into your arrowhead cockpit, dropped into the little starting play zone of pent-up ecstasy, a diamond shape of refining, refracting kinetic potential, winding up, coiling, taking shape… yes. You know. This thing is about to blow your mind.
Really there’s no need to be so high-minded about it. Sektori is exquisite but I’m also just plain old hooked on it. I can’t stop. I should be doing something else – hell, I should be writing about something else – and instead I’m getting hypnotised and mesmerised and probably even baptised in the light of this pounding thunderbolt of a video game. It’s so good I can’t do anything else. It’s so good I don’t think you should do anything else. Drop everything and play it.
“Drop everything” doesn’t carry quite as much weight, of course, when we’re at the time of the year when the things you’re carrying are probably large handfuls of Malteser Reindeers (an elite Christmas chocolate by the way. Sektori-tier Christmas chocolate) and if you’re lucky something liquid and vaguely mulled. But still, stop whatever pretend-important work you’re doing in these last few non-days of the year and get this thing in your hands. I say it because, gosh, if ever there was a time to play this game it’s now, where there’s a chance, if you’re luckier still and have some time off over the holidays, that the inevitable obsession might not become totally destructive.
In what I’ve seen elsewhere on Sektori, there’s a lot of effort going towards trying to categorise it. It’s Geometry Wars via Resogun via Returnal via Tetris Effect. Maybe some Nex Machina, maybe some Robotron – which was a fair bit before me, sorry, but still the original fountain from which all these games flow. This all makes sense because it’s from a bloke called Kimmo Lahtinen, who worked at Resogun, Nex Machina and Returnal developer Housemarque. But also: trying to describe it as a combination of games is to do it all wrong, when this is a game wherein so many neurons fire so quickly. Stop thinking! You fight off squads, swarms, hordes of geometric enemies, purifying the screen of worming, spinning, whirring little pronged and prickled foes like civilisation’s last white blood cell. And you do this by shooting, shooting, shooting, faster and harder and everywhere at once, never stopping, never blinking, until this orgiastic spectacle outruns your very eyes.
So yes, obvious, brilliant genealogy behind this one of course. But there are twists, and they’re fantastic. In the main ‘campaign’ mode I’ve been engulfed by personally, for instance, you can pick up golden yellow sparkles from amongst the noise to pause it, momentarily, and choose from a selection of three cards. Some cards are really decks, which add more cards to the future pool from within a specific category for when you next get a pickup. Others are just the cards, i.e. upgrades on their own. Others, golden again, are extra special upgrades, which I suggest you often (but not always) choose.
Then there’s the system of live, on-the-fly upgrading you perform as you go. Shoot enemies to drop glimmer. Collect enough glimmer to fill a bar, fill the bar and you get a blue sparkly pick-up to collect. Collect that, and rather than an upgrade point, you move the cursor on the list of upgrades up to the next one. So first is speed, then your score, then your dash, your shield, your rockets and, last, your blaster. Naturally, the ones that take several pickups before you get to them are broadly the most powerful, but even ploughing a load of points into speed can be a big advantage from the off.
Between the two systems you get something glorious. Sektori is – gasp! – a roguelike! And heaven forbid it’s technically even a deckbuilding roguelite at that. Where are you going? Come back! The emphasis is on the “technically” here, because Sektori is still a score-attack twin stick bullet hell shooter at its core. These systems simply enhance it, adding variance and verve. They also do something else quite special. Watching your enemies, your pickups, the glimmer, yourself, your bullets, the moving stage – the stages move by the way, self-destructing or re-forming around you, with insta-kill lethality, and varying greatly, with the outrageously powerful soundtrack, from one run to the next – as well as the little menu, miniscule in the top left, is a skill in itself. And a decidedly twin-stick skill at that. Between it and the periodical choice of cards, you’re essentially building a playstyle on the fly, and doing so while never actually stopping to contemplate it. So just as this genre is all about seeing multiple things in a moment, multitasking beyond any normal range of multitaskability, Sektori is the evolution of it: see strategy. See the fifth dimension as you move between two on the screen.
Sometimes this is purely reactive. I’ve taken a few careless early hits and need to build around shields and dashes, for instance. But inevitably you must gamble and stick it out to upgrade your offenses, if not only for the outsized advantage they provide but the sheer, extraordinary joy of watching them in action. All this strategy, this calculated risk-taking, happens amidst impossible busyness. It’s a testament, really, to what the genre itself can do. This genre – whatever the genre is at this point, that includes all those games above – is ultimately about proving the extreme, unconscious focus of which the human brain is capable, proving that a secret layer of awareness exists, beneath the intentional surface.
The first few times you play it – on ‘Experience’ difficulty! For people who don’t want too much challenge! The cheek of it! – it will seem insurmountable. You won’t even notice the symbols off to the sides, let alone understand what they’re for. Then slowly, slowly, furiously and repeatedly, you’ll learn. You’ll get a SEKTORI – collect all the letters, Tony Hawk style! – and max out your missiles and kill that bastard robo-snake, and see the kaleidoscopic beauty of it all, and realise the mind can do wonderful, extraordinary things.