How to Start
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This is all about skill, and for everyone it looks the same at first until you know the game well and until you unlock more features/skills. I remember that when I first played it, I totally forgot about the Deadlock timer. Whopping 18 minutes, and I had a good run if I survived 5.
At first, try to forget about healing and focus on evasion. Really. Finding healing is kinda hard, especially on a fresh game installation with almost no unlocks earned yet. Play with Hauer. She has a lot of starting health, plenty to train with. Most of the typical yellow bullets do plain 2 HP damage to you. Some do 1 HP, don’t focus on that, consider yourself lucky when hit for 1 HP.
Each type of enemy shoots in more or less predictable or repeatable way. Observe which enemy shots in what way. Some shoot at sight, some shoot after a moment, some shoot single bullet, some shoot spread shots, and so on. In general, bullets from different enemies may fly at different speeds, but a given type of enemy always has 1 way of shooting, and 1 bullet speed. Unless you are overwhelmed with a real bullet hell, most bullets can be avoided with after some training.
Some enemies are “red”. Those are “cursed” guys, they shoot with almost no delay and their bullets are very fast and thus hard to avoid. Try to move alot and hide from them (enemies shoot only when they see you!) until they are last in the room.
Most of the better weapons are locked at first. You have to do grind some XP in normal runs to unlock them. There are 75 “levels” to gain/unlock and each of then unlocks -something-. Some unlock weapons, some unlock skills, some unlock curses, some unlock more characters to chose from. Some unlocks are not unlocked by levels, but by other events like finding something in a special room, or doing something specific.
Aside from “normal run” (in the lobby, go down, enter the train), there is also “daily challenge” (climb up and enter the car). Daily challenge run is different every day, but you get the same character, the same set of starting skills and weapons, and the same dungeon layout every time until the day changes. This allows you to train in repeatable conditions throughout a day. Also, the set of characters/weapons/skills that are randomized may give you starting things that are not unlocked yet in the normal runs. Unlocking all 75 levels takes time, but with “daily challenge” each day you have a chance for a cool surprise to see something totally new.
Back to the game. Basics. Hauer. You lose 2hp for each yellow shot taken. Sometimes you may see you get hit by several bullets at one, and lose LESS health than expected. That’s a feature. Often if you get hit by many bullets at the same time, you lose health for only 1 hit. But don’t count on that unless in pinch. The time window for that is very narrow.
Some enemies drop pickups. That’s weapons, ammo, health, stims or money. In normal conditions, if you have no curses/penalties, you automatically pick up nearby money (“money magnet”). Other things you have to pick up explicitly. Be sure to pickup as much as you can. If you leave anything behind, it gets vaporised and consumed by the dungeon. The dungeon gets XP for that, and eventually the dungeon gets upgraded and becomes gradually harder. Ending/losing the game resets the dungeon back to easy. You can ignore weapons. Weapons are never eaten by the dungeon for XP.
Healing is hard. Picking up health pickups, sure, but these are relatively rare. You can find shops where you can buy health packs, but usually there is just one such shop in given dungeon level – and the shop’s contents are random, so there’s no guarantee that you will fing healing items there. Also, shop’s contents are not refilled. Once items are bought, you have to find another shop to get more options. With typical 1 shopping room per level, that means you have to defeat the level’s boss and go to next level to maybe find a new shop. There are other ways to heal, but it needs some tricks or skills, I don’t want to spoil the fun of finding them.
All pickups and all purchases always have IMMEDIATE effect. There’s no inventory and no carrying a backpack of items. You have only 2 weapon slots, and that’s the end of the inventory. If you buy a stim, it is applied immediately, If you buy a HP pack, it is applied immediately. And so on.
Almost last tip re health: sometimes you will get armour. That’s a SILVER hp bar. Armour is always used up first, and one armour bar sinks ANY amount of damage, but only once, and then it’s lost and you have to find new source of new armour.
Last tip re health: sometimes you will see “bubbles” or “smoke” on a health bar. It’s a “blood infection”. If you lose the HP infected bar, you will immediately lose more HP. Try to be extra careful if your HP gets near infected bars. It’s easy to forget about it and get killed in a lame way. Blood infection is typically gained when after using several stims. Blood infection can be cured. Some things in the game react differently if you have infection and usually it’s positive to you. You can have only one infection at time. If you have one, you wont get a second one. If you get your last or next-to-last HP bar infected, consider it very lucky. Losing that HP bar would kill you anyways, so getting extra dmg from infection doesn’t matter, right?
Ammo and shooting is pretty straightforward. Once depleted, a weapon without ammo becomes a dumb melee club that deals less damage than when used with ammo. Pay attention to melee weapons. Some of them have ammo as well. When they run out of ammo, they still are melee, and still seem normal, but their sound changes and they deal far less damage.
Train dash. You can dash through bullets and in 99% of the cases you take no damage when doing so, If you do a through-bullet dash and actually take damage, you most probably miscalculated the dash distance and got hit right after dash ended.
Finally, the deadlock timer. Starts with 18:00 and goes down pretty predictably. Some actions may use up some of your time, some may grant you more time. Read things and descriptions carefully and nothing should surprise you.
There are some ways to get extra slots for almost everything mentioned above. Or lose those slots. Except extra blood infections. That’s MAX 1 always. And extra stims effects. You can always have MAX 1 of each stim effect. I.e. picking up multiple VX20 will not give you multiple green hp bars or multiple green teeth-icon buff. Still, picking them multiple times DOES count for blood infection. And also, NOT picking them up will eventually upgrade the dungeon, like with any non-weapon drops.
Ok.. that probably was a lot of info, but most of that is really the bare minimum so you can get used to the game and start noticing other things that does not fit the scheme (like some enemies with weaker yellow bullets I already mentioned).
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