Paranautical Activity is a "voxel based roguelike FPS set on a ghost ship"

You know you've breached the singularity and are heading inexorably into the dubstep-only future when even indie games are coating their trailers in a thick layer of the wubwub. I'm willing to forgive the excellently named Paranautical Activity , however, because - well - did you see the headline to this post? It's a voxel-based roguelike FPS set on a ghost ship, and it appears to be one of the better ones. You can buy into the beta of this very Serious Sam-like game on Desura , but keep an eye out for the giant voxel skulls. Those things really are the worst.

Sadly there's no demo, but Code Avarice's single-player game at least looks the part, with fancy lighting effects and menacingly cuboid enemies. Permadeath and random generation are the only roguelikey elements; at its heart this is an arcade shooter, but a hectic, OTT one.

Despite being out (sorta), this is still some way off being done, with the next patch - due Feb 28th - set to contain "2 new floors, 5 new items, 2 new enemies, 2 new bosses, and a new gun". There's also some talk on the Desura page about changing the very oblongish, devoid-of-furniture rooms so they look more like they're on a ship, a change I would suggest the team make post-haste.

Paranautical Activity will set you back £3.99/$5.99, and is cruising for clicks on Steam Greenlight - now here's that wub-heavy trailer.

Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.