In Shotgun Cop Man you are a man who looks like a thumb and has gone to Hell to arrest Satan

ARREST SATAN in SHOTGUN COP MAN | From the Creator of My Friend Pedro - YouTube

If you didn't play My Friend Pedro, you missed out. Specifically, you missed out on clearing a room full of Real Bad Dudes by ricocheting bullets off a casually thrown frying pan while leaping from a skateboard in midair slow-motion.

DeadToast Entertainment, the developer of My Friend Pedro, is back with another slow-mo gunfest called Shotgun Cop Man. It's an even more lo-fi affair, which adds to its clarity. It reminds me of VVVVVV in its 2D simplicity. Stick-figure demons with guns wait beside pits of diagonal-line spikes to blast and be blasted as you, a man with a shotgun in one hand and a pistol or sometimes Uzi in the other, leap overhead.

You do not leap by pressing the jump button, because that would be boring. "Jump button," give me a break. That sounds like baby shit for babies and you can get it out of here. No, in Shotgun Cop Man you do not jump by jumping. You shoot the ground with your shotgun. Then you shoot demons with your handgun, which suspends you in midair for some reason.

Every level of Shotgun Cop Man is a mix of sliding down diagonal slopes and bouncing up between ledges, either blasting away at Hell itself to propel yourself further, or at demons because they're there and shooting back. Aiming in the opposite direction to the one you want to travel in demands rewiring some fundamental part of your brain, and I did find myself occasionally hurling myself directly at a spinning sawblade trap or down a hole I just climbed out of thanks to a temporary brainfart.

I didn't stop having fun, though. Shotgun Cop Man is one of those pure videogamey videogames, with little in the way of story to slow you down. "Freeze, Satan!" announces Shotgun Cop Man without irony. "You're under arrest!" Then Satan, who is wearing a nipply goth string vest, replies by giving the finger and shouting, "Fuck you, Shotgun Cop Man!" That is what passes for the plot in Shotgun Cop Man, and it's more than enough.

The Shotgun Cop Man demo is 17 levels long and you can play it as part of Steam Next Fest. The full game is due later this year and will cost you $US10.

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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.