LYMBUS is hostile to my existence and keeps demanding brain cells I haven’t grown yet

What are you LYMBUS? In what vat were you grown? I feel like I’ve sluggishly ambled my way down to the fridge and tried to scoop a gherkin from the jar, only to find a disconcertingly tasty sliver of my own brain. Like a creature from Flatland trying to play 4D chess, and all the pieces are just tiny carvings of my face with “lol get a load of this prick” whittled into the forehead. I quite like it.

“We combined your favorite genres into one grotesque piece of software! You’re welcome, game journalists,” reads the Steam page for the demo. That is a very polite way to kick me in the head and call me a bitch, LYMBUS.

Right, let’s give this a go. LYMBUS: Incomplete Edition, as the demo is called, is from Happy Accident Studios. Earlier this year, they put out Anomalytics, which is partly billed as a boomer shooter but also arms you with a calculator. LYMBUS itself is a roguelike bullet hell where you need to play cards to do anything except move. The cards, which cost a real-time replenishing resource to play, let you do things like shoot, slash, parry, dodge, and shoot again but bullet-ier. Cards get burned on use, but you can find more by passing over tiles scattered around.

The tricksiness comes in the fact you’ll need to ready cards by switching between them, while also scrambling around like a terrified little wombat avoiding a lawnmower made of guns. Here’s the setup:

The year is 19XX. Great strides in neuromechanical research have allowed the most common human actions to be transcribed onto memory cards. Great oversights in said research have also made it so nobody remembered to save a backup. After a catastrophic crash renders most of the population comatose, you are tasked with diving into humanity’s collective unconscious to retrieve the memories that may hold the key to ending the blackout.

Where are you in all this? You are here:

Thanks for that. Here’s some more info:

Move around with your keyboard. Do everything else with your cards. In LYMBUS, exercise maximum strategy in building your deck, then throw that strategy out the window in screen-shaking, bullet hell-style battles. Combat happens in real time with no turns or slowdowns, meaning resources are tight and every moment matters.

LYMBUS is out later this year. Don’t let it bully you.