Indie Game of the Week 451: Laika: Aged Through Blood

Welcome once again to the only Indie game review corner on the internet, probably, and I'm excited to announce that we're on that march to the half-thousand here in Year 9 of Indie Game of the Week! (*holds for applause, none was forthcoming*) Yes, yes, thank you, thank you. Resuming where I mean to continue for the foreseeable future, we have another exploraction game to check out this week: Laika: Aged Through Blood, from Spanish studio Brainwash Gang. A cheerful post-apocalyptic tale where almost the first thing you see is a child dog called Poochie strung up by his entrails. Laika is Mad Max by way of All Dogs Go to Heaven, or a Furryosa if you will, where the titular coyote mother leans on her family's unique curse of forever being resurrected to save her small village from an imperious horde of militaristic birds. The story is both extremely bleak and deeply personal, both fairly rare for the exploraction genre outside of an Iconoclasts, as Laika does what she can for her daughter Puppy (she'd already gone through several other daughters, all of whom died before adulthood, so she was hesitant to name the latest) and the rest of a group of beleaguered survivors of various anthro species. However, the game's main hook is the distinctive gameplay conceit, and it's a doozy.

Most of Laika takes place on a motorbike, which like its owner is also affected by the curse and is constantly coming back from a twisted pile of scrap metal whenever you might crash. While riding, Laika can also fire her weapon to take out enemies within range, ideally before they can shoot her back, and this creates a sort of "Trials with guns" dynamic where you're constantly having to maneuver your bike over ramps and through loop-de-loops with one analog stick while aiming your gun with the other. The game adds a little more Evel Knievel flavor via a mechanic where, in order to reload your gun, you have to do a full 360 back flip on the bike—this encourages some very showboaty Motocross Maniacs tricks as you fly around doing cartwheels gunning down enemies from all directions. It's even harder than it sounds to pull off effectively but the game does offer a few subtle boons here and there to help out: one, you have to hit a button to change direction (very awkward to start with) and this also serves as your parry, reflecting bullets back to their sources if the timing's right; second is that you can block any bullets that hit the bike's underside or wheels, giving you something of a shield that covers about 200 degrees of your circular hitbox though it's not always super reliable.

Once again saved by these bulletproof tires. If only I could've made this sick skull helmet out of the same material.

The game then inspires this showmanship aspect even further with the way its currency system works. Currency in this grim dusty future setting is viscera; something that flies off enemies quite often after you're done filling them with holes. You can continue shooting a bird corpse while it's in mid-air up to two additional times, as well as combo any other nearby enemies, and as the combo counter climbs so too does the amount of viscera flowing in. A typical amount for a normal enemy would be five, but if you were to combo juggle that same enemy twice more it'd balloon into 20 instead; you can quickly reach the 100s with two or more foes, provided you can keep spinning in mid-air to reload as many times as you need to, which of course is the sort of stylish hubris the universe—and especially this one—likes to punish as often as it can. That there's an achievement for dying 1,000 times isn't just a bunch of exhausted designers accidentally adding an extra 0 to the tally because they're three days from launch and the achievement set is the thing they left for last: you'll die so often in this game that they had to create an entirely new spin on the corpse run mechanic just to take the edge off. When you die, you leave half of the viscera you had on you at that spot and you can drop multiple "sacks" of these birdguts for later retrieval: it's only once you've died in more spots than you have sacks that you permanently lose anything. As such, the early game might feel especially discouraging as you struggle with the "pat your head while rubbing your stomach" dual-stick controls in addition to the birds' unerring accuracy and speed (though aiming does slow time down for you, at least) and the tough and punitive bosses certainly don't make things easy for you—they have multiple phases, and you very much don't with the game's one-hit-KO rule—but it's the type of delayed gratification where becoming versed in the ol' somersaulting murder sprees switches from frustrating to satisfying in due time.

In case the whole "dead kid" opener didn't make it clear, the story is a major bummer throughout. There are ringed planets that are less saturnine than this game. The birds are led by insane tyrants and its footsoldiers commit war atrocities as easily and brutally as any ICE agent (albeit with less comically falling on their asses), the soundtrack is packed with songs with vocals that are as beautiful as they are melancholy, and every NPC side-quest is tinged with mourning or revenge or the overwhelming sense of hopelessness you can usually rely on the post-apoc sci-fi genre to deliver in spades. Laika's own story arc about protecting her child by being every bit as ruthless as the foes conspiring to kidnap her for the sake of scientifically exploiting your family curse mixes her desperation to protect with her affection for her young charge, butting heads with her own mother over the harsh upbringing that molded her into the gun-toting survivor she needed to become, and it's a strained triangular family relationship that is tested with new revelations and events as the story progresses. Definite shades of Ripley and Newt here, as well as other literary cases where maternal instincts provide a necessary boost of courage. Your hub town has NPCs that have all similarly been through the wringer, having lost various family members and/or body parts to the bird scourge, and while it's a relief to come back home in one piece it never truly feels safe or welcome owing to the morose atmosphere. I guess the crux of what I'm saying here is that this doesn't really feel like a "Mike Minotti game" is all.

"Making birds fly" would be a redundant statement in most cases, but that is the key to earning a big payout here.

Beyond that, there's the usual crafting mechanics for upgrading or building new guns, a cooking feature that confers temporary upgrades like additional viscera or resources or a magnetic effect that pulls resources from further away (not to be slept on; it can be vital for recovering your viscera sacks from the dangerous spots where you croaked), and an idea borrowed from Hollow Knight where you have to seek out the itinerant fellow selling maps (who always cheerfully refers to you as "wanker", presumably because anything Mad Max inspired requires at least one person with an Aussie temperament) before you can get the lay of the land. The map doesn't provide much info besides where you can go but there are helpful markers available to highlight stuff that's out of reach or barricaded for the time being. There's also a fast-travel system but it requires items to use, preventing you from warping all over the place (though if only you use one to leave the town and one to come back, you'll probably find enough while out and about to recoup the loss) and a strict limit on how many weapons you can hold until you upgrade that element too. At a personal total runtime of almost 40 hours it's certainly not a short affair though I did tend to drive everywhere rather than use the fast-travel for the resources and viscera and of course was compelled by the usual dark forces to go for its slightly grindy achievement set, so your mileage may vary (I think HowLong has it at around 20 hours for a more streamlined approach). Bang for your buck, for sure, though I was certainly ready to call it quits by the game's final push. If you can handle the dour tone, the content suggested by all the content warnings, and a harsh difficulty curve early on and at any point where a boss is concerned, I think you'll find this to be a rewarding exploractioner with ample opportunities to feel like a badass similar to a Nine Sols or a Hollow Knight. That is, when you aren't dying at the same section a dozen times in a row. Hey, if you've played a Trials game before you should know the score by now at least.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

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