{"id":1354234,"date":"2025-10-11T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-10-11T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/FbnEuR3SmehPkfuzAkknAZ"},"modified":"2025-10-11T14:00:00","modified_gmt":"2025-10-11T14:00:00","slug":"prepare-to-have-your-brain-fried-by-this-electric-shoot-em-up-from-an-ex-housemarque-designer-when-it-launches-next-month","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcader.org\/news\/prepare-to-have-your-brain-fried-by-this-electric-shoot-em-up-from-an-ex-housemarque-designer-when-it-launches-next-month\/","title":{"rendered":"Prepare to have your brain fried by this electric shoot ’em up from an ex-Housemarque designer when it launches next month"},"content":{"rendered":"
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For a very brief period before becoming PC Gamer’s weekend newshound, I wrote a newsletter dedicated to rounding up the best Steam demos of any given week. By far and away the best demo I played during those days was for a little game called Sektori<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If you haven’t heard of Sektori, it’s a geometric shoot ’em up in the vein of Housemarque’s Resogun<\/a> and Nex Machina<\/a>, before they became all about ultra-hard third-person shooters like Returnal<\/a> and the upcoming Saros<\/a>. There’s good reason for the similarity. Sektori’s creator, Kimmo Lahtinen, worked at Housemarque for 13 years, before departing to pursue his own projects, like a hack ‘n’ slash game called Barbarian, and a match-3 life sim called Day Repeat Day.<\/p>\n

Neither of these games made much impact, and I don’t know whether they deserved to or not. But I believe Sektori does. Housemarque’s lineage oozes from every glowing, spinning polygon. You control a little 3D arrow (known in-game as a ‘ship’) blasting shapes as they spawn all around a top-down arena. If you get touched by any shape or projectile, the game is instantly over.<\/p>\n

It sounds almost stupidly simple, but when I jumped into the demo this time last year it revealed its genius almost immediately. These games are often described as being “kaleidoscopic”, but Sektori suits the term more than most. Not only because of its colourful visuals, but also due to how the arena shifts as you play almost without you noticing: expanding, narrowing, changing shape, splitting into two.<\/p>\n

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