Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance of the Slayer Review

thesixthaxis.com:

A couple of months ago, a mysterious Doom II mod called MyHouse.wad released and took the internet by storm. What was sold as a simple real-house tribute level made in a mystery modder’s spare time turned out to be a tech-defying, surrealist, horror-tinged adventure. The narrative fuels the world-design of the mod, while the world feeds back into the narrative, creating a self-encompassing world of an experience where even the true origins of the mod itself are a mystery. On the heels of this release is another video game experience steeped within it’s own fiction as just a simple boomer-shooter mod – Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance of the Slayer. While MyHouse.wad is a tense, liminal take on Doom II, Slayers X asks the question nobody was brave enough to ask – what if a teenager made Duke Nukem 3D?

Slayers X is technically a spinoff of the 2019 internet-exploration game Hypnospace Outlaw. In this alternate version of the 90s internet, Zane_Rocks_14 stands out as one of the most iconic and eye-rollingly edgy characters you’ll encounter. What if our favorite edgelord Zane wanted to make a video-game all those years ago, though? What if, decades later, a now-adult Zane found the forgotten notebook containing his grand designs, and set out to finish the game of his teenage dreams? Slayers X is the result – a self-indulgent, self-insert-fueled, grimecore and edge-tastic boomer shooter adventure through the mind of Zane – starring Zane, and fully developed by Zane.

It’s all too easy to make a bad game – level design is complicated, art is difficult, and they rarely come together naturally for a first-time game developer. Slayers X is full of lazy animations, repeated art, misspellings, and nonsense level layouts, but it