Receiver

This was a cheap, "roguelite" FPS that got a lot of attention when it came out due to the supposed complexity and depth of its controls. Rather than reloading entire magazines, with your unspent bullets going into a nebulous pool, you must manage individual bullets in individual magazines (or, in the case of the revolver, individual chambers). The need to manage your partially-filled magazines, cock the pistols when necessary, disable safety, etc. follows logically.

Levels are procedurally generated and populated with drones and turrets for enemies. They attack in unique ways, unlike the expected FPS gunmen, and are disabled or dispatched in unique ways. A mag dump will take care of either, certainly, but as you'll only find three bullets here and five bullets there as you scour the level, deadeyes are rewarded for being able to strike the tiny location on each enemy which instantly disables them. Mag dumping is further discouraged by generally having 1 HP. (This isn't made clear by UI elements, and there are circumstances where you can take a bullet and keep going - sometimes for five seconds, sometimes indefinitely.) When you die, your run is over, and you play a new run in a new level with a new gun.

Exploration is necessary to find the 11 cassette tapes you must collect to beat the game, with enemy and resource generation becoming more plentiful and scarce respectively as you proceed. While the game's mechanics do result in a unique, tense, and challenging gameplay experience, the mechanics for managing your weapons can be outright mastered in a much shorter period of time than one would first expect. This is owed to the fact that most of the functions are completely unnecessary, or otherwise serve the same purpose as another function but with more steps. Once you've reached this level with the controls, they become a moderate hindrance over your typical tactical FPS and only mildly inform the gameplay experience.

There is a boilerplate cyberpunk dystopia story told via the tapes, but it's not the focus, and the at-home voice acting is bad enough to make you turn it off once you get the gist.

Receiver is $5 USD and is now being discounted to $1 USD during major sales. If it sounds interesting to you, it's worth picking up at either price point, but keep in mind it took me less than 4 hours to get my first winning run.

Mod support was added in late 2020 and as of 2022 it hasn't added much to the experience - a few poorly-balanced albeit interesting weapons (such as rifles and shotguns, not present in the base game), and a few "tilesets" (which are more than tilesets, seemingly generating brand new room and level types alongside them). They present little to bring back someone who's already beaten the game for more than a couple of hours at most.