Review: Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance of the Slayer

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We take for granted how difficult it is to do a bad thing well, especially in video games. There are plenty of bad movies intentionally made to be fun to watch. Digital marketplaces are full of bad games made badly and good games made poorly, but creating a game that is intended to reflect bad design but is actually fun to play; that takes work.

However, with the emerging sub-genre that I like to call jank-pop, there have been better examples of it. Cruelty Squad, for example, features eye-piercingly garish colors and spaghetti-nest level design, but it winds up being fun to play with its dark but off-kilter sense of humor and deep (sometimes unintentionally broken) mechanics.

Some people take Cruelty Squad way too seriously. However, I don’t think anyone’s really going to do that with Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance of the Slayer, which looks to be the embodiment of video gaming’s awkward adolescence. Yet despite the fact that it is set up as a tribute to the worst circle of the late-’90s FPS modding scene, Slayers X manages to find depth and value as an extremely unconventional character exploration.

Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance of the Slayer (PC)Developer: Big Z Studios Inc.Publisher: No More RobotsReleased: June 1, 2022MSRP: $16.99

If you played Hypnospace Outlaw, you’ll no doubt remember Zane. He was a teenager during that game’s events and was an accurate reflection of a certain type of internet denizen that still exists today. He was a very self-centric type who mistook his alienation as a sign of being above everyone else and destined for greater things. The type who would make up a story like, “A drunk guy stabbed me at a party, so I pulled the knife out and threw it back at him.” Someone who