Strafe is a roguelike first-person shooter with a colorful history. After a rocky launch, it's really blossomed in recent months thanks to big updates like the recent Millennium Edition overhaul. Along with new game modes and enemies, the Millennium Edition also introduced more secrets for players to hunt for—and according to Thom Glunt, co-founder of developer Pixel Titans, players recently found the biggest one, roughly a month after launch.
That secret was Totino's Quest, an homage to the total conversion Doom mod Chex Quest, which was made to promote Chex cereal and distributed via boxes of the stuff in the '90s. Totino's Quest is a fully playable game within Strafe that is randomized every day—and it's far from the only one.
"We have four tiers of secrets in the game," Glunt says, "from small ways to get more armor and ammo, fixed secrets from [KickStarter] backers, secrets in our version of DOS in the menu, and lastly big secrets that are other games."
Totinos Quest included, Strafe hides seven secret games in all. The others are:
Luftenstein, "an homage to Wolfenstein and Luftrausers" which is also randomized everyday.
Jump Map, an aptly named parkour trial.
Trappy Mine, a randomized 2D mining arcade game played on an in-game handheld.
Rats Map, which pays tribute to the "tiny badass in a kids bedroom" levels of first-person '90s games.
Gungeon 3D Blast, which turns Enter the Gungeon into a 3D FPS.
And finally Going Home, "a slow-paced 'emotional' journey from the perspective of an aging hero." Going Home deliberately apes games like Gone Home and Dear Esther, and is arguably the biggest contrast of all given Strafe's otherwise frenetic action.
Glunt reckons Strafe has "some of the deepest secrets in gaming," and I'm inclined to agree with him. I don't even want to think about how much time went into these Easter eggs, though I would very much like to find them for myself.
