Vlambeer is wildly successful in blending all of this together to furnish that elusive third space into one that is enticing enough that I keep coming back no matter how poorly I play. All of this is punctuated by big booms of cars and barrels, the aggressive thumps of a machine gun or the PEW PEWs of a laser pistol. And there’s a tangible sense of impact on its world when you blast an enemy and send its corpse careening through a mob. The oversized bullets are joyous to watch as they cut through maggots and rats. The screen rattles at the explosions abound. Except in Nuclear Throne it is not a singular component that achieves this, but an entire recipe of tiny effects stacked up to drive that gunshot from your finger, into your eyes, quickly engulfing your brain. This third space might be deemed a secret ingredient, akin to a special sauce only able to be produced via a strange South American pepper. The game really exists in a third space, bordered by my inputs and the outputs they feed me. To Nijman, the game is more than what is on screen or beneath my fingers. Not just sound and visual design, but creating a connection between several different game elements in a way that is supremely satisfying. This is exactly what Vlambeer’s Jan Willem Nijman said that his games do extremely well at the 2013 Netherlands’ Festival of Games, and he’s right. The accompanying damage to the enemies and landscape makes it feel like my little mouse click has a weight and girth to it. Grenades fire with a characteristic THOOM and give off an almost too satisfying BOOM when they explode. When I stab a bandit with a screwdriver there’s a Wolverine style “snikt” that accompanies it. When I click the fire button my little revolver lets out an oversized boom. They infuse those outputs with a little something extra, something onomatopoeic, something loud. The difference is that Vlambeer does more than simply execute on this expectation. In general, of course, we expect outputs to accurately match inputs. But instead of feeling mechanical or dry, the launch of these bullets produces the same joy as the first bite of a hot, flaky pastry or a delicious slice of pizza. Pressing a key moves my character, moving the mouse aims, and clicking the mouse produces a bullet, and hopefully that bullet goes into the world and kills something. All of Vlambeer’s games primarily revolve around using a barrage of bullets to progress, but with Nuclear Throne the studio has tweaked gunfeel and everything that informs it to a master level. Out of this reductionist approach comes a focus, pure and distilled: gunfire. It’s simple: a game that proves the best sugar comes from sugar canes and that the formula needn’t be more complicated than that. With a driving anthem at your back you’re left alone to do battle and reach the Nuclear Throne. You select a character and are immediately dropped into a wasteland where you do battle with scorpions and bandits, armed with only your trusty revolver, and any other weapon you might be lucky enough to find tucked away in a random chest. There are actually very few features at all. There is no in-game currency, no cosmetic upgrades, no online matchmaking or versus modes. It does away with many of the modern trappings that clutters up the genre today. The beauty of Nuclear Throne is that it is very much the antithesis of so many other shooters.
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