Double Fine’s Rad bathes roguelike combat in post-apocalyptic neon

A roguelike action-RPG might not necessarily be what you expect from Double Fine, but the instant you see Rad in action it’s clear that this is another of the studio’s unmistakably original titles. You can pick out bits and pieces from other titles - your character mutates like in Binding of Isaac, you leave a trail of flowers and green grass when you run as in Okami, and Rad is the latest in a line of games drawing on the oversaturated colours of the 80s. Rad puts you in the aftermath of not just one, but two apocalypses - though project lead Lee Petty tells us that he “didn’t want to make a realistic, gritty post-apocalypse game where people were killing each other over food. Because that’s been done a million times.” Instead, the inspiration was the idea of being a teen living under the nuclear scare of the 80s. “I remembered how off a tangent Hollywood went at the time, and the early pen and paper role-playing games like Gamma World and other things like that, where they were very colourful. And even though it was a dystopia, there was this weird, colourful, neon-soaked upbeat quality to it.” In addition to the colours of these apocalypses, the radiation that results from them is a bit friendlier too - continually imbuing you with new abilities. Defeating enemies grants you ‘rads’ which fill a meter, and every time it fills up you’ll earn a new mutation. Those will be major new abilities - things like wings for double jumps, or a hulking mutant arm which you can throw as boomerang at enemies. You’ll also be able to pick up smaller mutations in the world that give you direct stat bonuses.

from PCGamesN https://ift.tt/2ThMAiB