by Amr (@siegarettes)

• Straimium Immortally
• Developer: Anthony Case
• Publisher: Caiysware
• Switch, PC

Everything in Straimium is a little off. What initially presented as a regular rogue-lite shooter became something more curious as I realized how obscured its details were. Each screen is a miniature ecosystem, with flickers of life within its biomechanical interiors. Enemies, constructed with sparse pixel counts, swarm you as you enter new areas, while bosses and NPCs dominate the space with elaborate detail. Powerups appear only as symbols, leaving me to figure out their effects only through experimentation. All of this is obscured with a haze of color and visual effects, blending foreground and background, and having me wonder which parts of its ecosystem are hostile to you. 

But as I began to parse its visuals and understand its small eccentricities, I came to another realization: under all its obtuseness Straimium Immortaly is a deeply average game. 

There’s some novelty in seeing pink slimes erupt from chests to be collected as currency, and hearing what sounds like an off-brand chiptune rendition of 99 Red Balloons, but it wasn’t enough to make up for how aggressively OK everything else felt. The shooting was OK. The powerups were OK. The levels were OK. There’s not much to separate Straimium from a crowded genre, and as I continued to play I slowly became annoyed with its underpowered arsenal and uwu-speak cutesy NPC dialogue. 

All Straimium Immortally’s stylistic choices are little more than distractions, and the way they come together make it harder to play without offering a strong thesis for why.