SlideThru Demo

Dungeon crawlers can be tons of fun under the right circumstances, but they can also get very repetitive if you keep grinding for too long. The gameplay mechanics are very important in the genre, given the fact that there’s not much of a story to distract you. However, there’s plenty of room left for innovation, especially if you are creative enough to come up with a few wacky elements.

SlideThru is very difficult to describe in a few sentences, and it’s even pretty difficult to figure out while you are actually playing it. On the surface it looks like some sort of mobile arcade game with slide-to-move mechanics, but it turns out to be more than that later on. Sure, it has a few bad design choices as well, but the experience is weird enough to be enjoyable.

The game is a dungeon crawler at its core, but the gameplay is much more different than you would expect. Your characters are displayed in a line at the bottom of the screen, and the dungeon moves around them instead. It’s actually just a straight line that runs from top to bottom, and it’s full of monsters you have to defeat by simply running into them.

The combat is pretty tricky as well, because your characters are designed to do well against monsters that are the same color as them. Thus, you have to swap them around in order to match them with the right monsters, otherwise they get damaged too quickly. Unfortunately, this is far too annoying to execute with a mouse, especially since everything keeps moving at all times.

Each character has a few special abilities as well, and they come in handy if you manage to make use of them at the right moment. The visual style is trippy to say the least, since the screen is always bathed in all sorts of ludicrous colors and weird shapes. The soundtrack is engaging as well, although it’s not exactly brilliant either.

In the end, SlideThru may or may not be your thing, depending on your sense of humor and whether your eyes can process a billion colors per second. However, the mechanics and the gameplay are certainly unique, and it would be nice to see a finished product in the future.

Note: You can support the developer by voting for the game on Steam Greenlight.