With so many expeditions into space ending in derelict ships drifting aimlessly as the battered survivor/s fight desperately against twisted horrors that have evolved only for voracious survival, the question needs to be asked: is it us?  Does humanity just suck at exploration and survival?  All signs point to mankind's carelessness backed by more than a touch of greed as the cause of the loss of an uncountable number of ships' crews eaten, warped, killed or otherwise dispatched in the most horrifying ways, only realizing when it's far too late that being king of the hill on Earth doesn't mean anything in the worlds light years away from home.  Darkverse: Rogue takes place on another darkened spaceship overrun with bio-terrors, but Alex has a hefty knife and the ship's storerooms hold a good supply of weapons, so with a bit of luck it's time for the space-terrors to be afraid of someone.

Darkverse: Rogue is a first-person action roguelike set in a randomized spaceship.  Alex has woken up with the standard hero-issue amnesia, but the ship's AI points him in the right direction and supplies an outdated but still handy little helper-bot to hack consoles and unlock the occasional security door.  The ship is built from a series of rooms all linked together by hallways, and once you've entered a new room it's locked down until all the enemies are cleared away.  Once the room is... sanitized is the wrong word, seeing as the entire place is covered in various types of goo when you're done, but whatever condition it's in the place remains alien-free from that point onward, giving you time to do a little light scavenging before heading to the next area.

Defeated enemies and broken storage containers drop general supplies, most of which come in handy somewhere in the demo.  The blue pips seem useless at the moment, but are most likely some type of currency for an aspect of the game that's not ready yet, while ammo comes in both physical and energy varieties.  The Darkverse: Rogue demo doesn't have anything in the way of instructions, leaving the player clueless on health, so the way it works is that each yellow + pickup fills a bit of the health bar and, once full, it can be used with a tap of the keyboard's C key.  All drops remain where they fell, no need to rush to pick them up, and the mini-map shows exactly where they are with a color-coded pixel.  It's incredibly handy when you need to regroup after an intense firefight, which happens in just about every room once you get to the third floor of the spaceship.

While Alex only starts with a knife, special chests in locked rooms hold the weapons that are required for survival.  Pistols, shotguns, new types of melee weapons, and a good number more may show up on a run, and much like the supplies they remain persistent until you leave the current floor behind.  This makes it easy to experiment, once the three-item loadout is no longer large enough to carry everything you find, and that extends to the enhancements as well.  Alex's standard armor has four expansion slots, which can hold perks like better jumping and more HP, and the weapons have between one and three slots as well.  It's not a particularly complicated system, but it does offer good choices depending on what turns up.

While the Darkverse: Rogue demo is only three floors in size, that's plenty for the game to start sinking its hooks in.  The art style in particular looks fantastic, with the chunky-pixel textures working to give a nicely retro look to the low-poly models while still allowing everything to run at full resolution.  This lets the more crowded battles remain clear and readable even when the action gets busy, allowing you to thin the crowd by pinging a shot off an explosive barrel with pinpoint precision.  Other small details also help the gameplay flow, like the way the stats of a new weapon are automatically displayed beside the current one on screen when you're near it, making the decision whether to swap or not one you can make by navigating a grand total of zero menus.  Little details like this, or the way the inventory and map are simple enough to fit on one screen together while being every bit as functional as they need to be, go a long way towards making what's a simple shooter underneath its action-roguelike exterior feel replayable.  The Darkverse: Rogue demo is in a pre-alpha state, meaning there's a lot more content to come, but it's already showing off that it knows exactly how to get to what it needs to be in the end.

https://www.anrdoezrs.net/links/3607085/type/dlg/sid/UUhgUeUpU9952/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MErCIBiljs8