Lo-fi soundscape is paired with magic weapons and action in You Are Dead. It is a twin-stick shooter created by an independent developer, Oh No Pono Games. This is a demo highlighting the game’s style and potential features. It is fully functional and has 3 semi-randomized levels. The game is about a nameless, dead character. You must control the character to interact with curious characters who will show around this strange world. 

Shoot or play dead!

You Are Dead is a shooter game that is part handcrafted, part procedurally generated. As the nameless protagonist, you must find 25 unique range weapons and 29 close combat weapons including magic rods, swords, handheld weapons, and stat-boosting items. The game is also similar to retro-inspired maps like Undertale where enemies lurk in every corner. You must use your boomerang to stun your opponents and unlock doors that lead to secret rooms.

This needs to be done repeatedly until you make it to the bottom of the dungeon (that’s 3 semi-randomized levels). As a third-person twin-stick shooter, the game employs two keys. One control dictates the character's movement, the other the direction of shooting. Importantly, these can be operated independently, so you’ll move in one direction, and shoot in another. For You Are Dead, control for movement is on the left-hand side while shooting on the right.

YAD only has two difficulty modes - easy and hard. It can be limited to a newcomer and an experienced player with these limited modes, but there is a tutorial that you can follow along with. Beginners can take it easy, while advanced players can perform a speedrun right after the tutorial. It’s worth noting that there are 25 Powerup items and 15 Enemy types. Use these bonuses well to finish the game in 1 hour or less. 

Nostalgia filled TTS

Titles that offer 16-bit bit graphics and twin-stick shooter gameplay are limited nowadays. With You Are Dead by Oh No Pono Games, you can experience the same gameplay as arcade games with a completely new storyline. As a demo, it is only a snippet of a larger story yet it offers a lot of challenges that a player of any user-level can enjoy.