Brainpire: A Plungle to Unhumanity is an award winning indie game with psychadelic visuals and a unique audio track. And.., well that's about it.
Gameplay is a very simple onrails-tunnel dodging action. The player is controlling a vessel of sorts that is travelling through a pipe. Multiple obstacles and hindrances need to be avoided. The game's ten levels are randomly generated, each with their own trippy visuals. The amount of enemies and the speed increase with each level. The mouse is used to control the vessel and by clicking the left mouse button the speed can be slowed down for a few seconds. There is no UI other than the score count which is presented in a strange glyphs font. These points are acquired by completing levels and collecting similar shapes of glyphs. The health bar is visible with each collision and even though this regenerates when having a clean run this is by no means an easy game. Each collision also increases the speed, making more collisions likely and therefore depletes the health bar faster.
The only difference here compared to my normal Winamp visualizer is that at times this reminds me of one of the best Star Wars games ever made, namely Star Wars: Tie Fighter and more specifically the training mode in it. This is where different Empire ships where controlled in a small pipe while completing different objectives.
I have only given this one star out of five, mostly because this is really not a video-game. Even the developers realize this. On the credits they are thanking certain people for their work on this "game". Yes the word game is written in quotation marks. This is nothing more than an interactive screensaver, which interestingly still has a £8 price tag on Steam.
