Fucked up the planet with nuclear hellfire and warfare? Well, guess we better slaughter each other by the dozen to fight over a fancy chair. Nuclear Throne isn’t a game about learning from the mistakes of the past, it’s about doubling down on them. It hardly matters, most games of Nuclear Throne take anywhere between five and fifteen minutes. One-hit kills from cars accidentally exploding too close, the clumsy use of a plasma cannon, or getting a little too curious about a mysterious crystal. Bullets that gouge three pips of health out of a bar of eight and don’t even have the decency to make you flicker for a second.
It’s about a health bar that is so fragile as to be essentially meaningless. It’s about repeating that process about a thousand times, trying to get ever so slightly better at it every time you try. That dead-eye arcade stare that comes from quickly identifying the most pressing threat and eliminating it as quickly as possible with minimal resource usage. It’s about twitch reflexes, the honing and sharpening of the most mechanical and merciless of gamer reactions. It’s about winning the right to lord over a dead world. Nuclear Throne is about mutants and freaks obliterating each other in a fucked up biohazard of a world over a supposed seat on a likely meaningless throne. And sometimes, I’m all for a little annihilation. The post-apocalypse is supposed to teach us about the importance of coming together, of valuing peace over conflict, about what is good and hopeful in mankind triumphing against his darker nature. These are stories about love and trust, even if they play out in the nightmarish hellscape of a broken world. They can be about family and the importance of sticking by the people you care about, as seen in The Last of Us, with broken people healing and bonding over the corpses of raiders and mushroom-zombies.
Look at something like Fallout 4 with its emphasis on rebuilding, on getting humanity back to where it was after being kicked down a few pegs by nuclear war and giant radioactive scorpions. They can be used to illustrate the redemptive power of a clean slate, the chance to start again. They might be set against a godforsaken backdrop of radioactive fallout with roaming packs of cannibalistic thrill-killers, but beyond all the horror there is always a glimmer of hope, always something to hold onto. If the player dies, the game resets, and must be played from the beginning without any gear acquired in the previous run.It may not seem like it, but most post-apocalyptic narratives are fundamentally optimistic. While the game is linear, the player can complete a task that allows for a ‘looped run’ in which the game goes back to 1-1 at an incresed difficulty after defeating the final boss, and the player keeps all powerups and weaponry acquired until death. The levelset is always randomly generated, but always consists of the same ‘worlds’ and ‘levels’ from 1-1 up to 7-3 where the final boss of the game must be defeated. Additional design schemes can also be unlocked for each character after the player completes a challenge for each. Character abilities add additional variance to standard gameplay, allowing for varied playstyles and strategies to progressing through the randomly generated levelset. Each character is unique, both aesthetically and functionally, featuring a unique passive ability, active ability, stats, and in some cases, starting weapon. Two characters may only be unlocked under special circumstances in late-game. The player controls one of a cast of twelve different characters, eight of which must be unlocked through standard gameplay. There are also Daily and Weekly ranked challenge modes, allowing the player to compete for the best score, measured by enemies killed on the same set of randomly generated levels. Nuclear Throne is a top-down shooter consisting of two main game modes: Single Player and Local Co-op.
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