Last year, indie developer Workinman Games told us that their PC-exclusive “single-stick shooter,” Deathstate, would eventually make the jump to consoles. Now known as Bread Machine Games, the developer revealed this morning that it’ll be out for the PS4 on April 25.
So how does a “single-stick shooter” work? I’ll let Bread Machine’s Keith McCullough explain:
Creating a bullet hell/roguelike was tricky. The bullet hell genre is more about dodging and positioning than shooting and aiming, so we knew right away players would need strong directional dodges. We love Binding of Isaac and wanted to follow its model, but we quickly discovered that the extreme volume of bullets, constant dodging, cooldown management, and twin-stick aiming added up to an overwhelming combination.
Our solution: lose the second stick!
In Deathstate, you are always shooting (as long as something is close enough to be shot). This shifted the player’s attention squarely onto movement and avoidance, and allowed us to get crazy with projectiles. Really crazy. On our highest difficulty, Insanity Mode, the bosses absolutely unload.
Featuring a retro-style aesthetic and a “Carpenter-esque” synth soundtrack, players will venture into an alternate plane of existence known as the “Deathstate” to discover the truth about what happened to their missing professor. But once you’re inside this weird realm of “Lovecraftian non-euclidean sunken temples [and] Hellraiser-esque labyrinthine black light hellscapes,” you’ll need to fight back against the pulsating denizens of hell by harvesting their organs to use as weapons. Eww…
You can learn more about Deathstate by visiting McCullogh’s full write-up at the PlayStation Blog.
