Have you ever played a game that makes you feel dirty? When I was younger, Earthworm Jim took this idea and ran with it—combining gross-out humour with charm, and many exclamations of the word “Groovy!” thrown in to make it feel cool to become the mess. Feed 64 takes that same confidence and delivers it in a monochromatic 2D platforming roguelike. Gennady is a romp through some of the grossest biomes, filled with the ugliest enemies you will see, and it plays well too!
If you’re looking for a compelling, nail-biting story that will make you question reality, Gennady is not the droid you’re looking for. Instead, Gennady takes a page out of Jonathan Blow’s book and delivers a story that is collected rather than delivered, and pages of a notebook are found through the biomes to make sense of the mess that is unfolding. Like Braid’s puzzle pieces, these notebook pages (without spoilers) let you know everything you need to press forward and give a reason as to why you’re doing what you’re doing.
Instead of The Beheaded (the powerful Dead Cells protagonist), you play as what I would refer to as a cross between Wario and Tony Soprano, complete with boxers and slippers—but without the robe Tony throws on before hitting the mailbox in the morning. You are underdressed, and one of the only splashes of color on display is the pink polka dots on your boxer shorts. Like Catherine: Full Body, this set of underwear attracts your attention to the totality of madness happening on the screen, and it’s a smart move deployed by Feed 64 to allow the player to determine where they are always.
With a colour scheme that can only be defined as “Mad World adjacent,” when you bloody enemies, Wario Soprano gets coated in the blood of his enemies after giving them a bare-fisted beating. Unlike Wario or Tony Soprano, you fight enemies on par with what the Men in Black deal with on the daily: alien spawn dressed in eyeballs and teeth. As far as the roguelike genre goes, Gennady injects some truly horrific designs into the player’s retinas, just in time for Halloween.
In action, Gennady has an infectious loop begging for the player to drop into one more try after perishing at the bottom of a pit. Like Wario, you can press the right trigger to do a barreling charge forward, but this operates more as traversal instead of your primary attack. This is called a Dash, and these are the bread and butter of traversal in Gennady. Mastery over dashes will determine whether you succeed or not, and at the start you regenerate one dash after expending the four banked dashes out of the gate.
“Gennady’s gameplay loop remains strong despite its faults and keeps the player seated for more tries when you perish over and over.”
In other roguelikes, you can pick up numerous power-ups and buffs to help you along with traversal and enemy interference. In Gennady, these are food items that can unleash hell on its biomes. While the Hot Pepper is an excellent drop (it lets you recover all four of your dash charges over time rather than one), the Soup Pot is basically a nothing burger, giving you a chance at surviving a fatal hit. While the motion-to-motion gameplay of Gennady feels good in practice, there are issues to be worked out before greatness.
One such issue is the power balance of the buffs you can pick up. As mentioned before, the Hot Pepper is great, and the Soup Pot is not. This RNG factor can play a huge part in how hard each run is, but unlike SuperGiant’s Hades, these don’t feel like build-crafting; they feel more like a random assortment of power-ups that don’t mesh entirely well with one another. On top of that, there is some unfairness at play, and sometimes you can rush to the left of the screen to be met with an auto-hit, which can derail an entire run.
Gennady’s gameplay loop remains strong despite its faults and keeps the player seated for more tries when you perish over and over. With all the shortcomings included, Gennady remains a fun and novel experience in a title that screams, “I’m Gross!” just in time for Halloween. While there are shortcomings, particularly with RNG, Feed 64 has deployed a solid roguelike filled with boss fights, multiple endings, and a seedy colour palette that mirrors Frank Miller’s Sin City. While Gennady may not be for everyone, if it’s your jam, you will undoubtedly find a new home in its biomes, just like Earthworm Jim when it was released many years ago.
