Uriel’s Chasm 3: Gelshock

A bad game or a misunderstood artist? I thought that this developer was just terrible at making games, but I am starting to see some consistency with his vision across multiple titles. Perhaps making a good game was never the goal, maybe it's just a trick to further subvert my expectations. However, I wonder if the strange narrative in this game could be told without damaging the gameplay mechanics, and in my opinion the answer is yes. If its 2 mini-games were actually fun to play, I don't think that it would change my perspective on the story. As it stands, the bullet-hell bosses and arena fighting in this game are just objectively bad, intentionally or not. It takes about 60 to 90 minutes to beat, leaving you with a $5 worth of experimental narrative. To be fair, I think I enjoyed this experience just because it shows complete disregard for anything that one could consider a good game design. I personally love ambient atmosphere so I liked its lack of coherency and strange soundtrack. But to be honest, just like the last time I played a game by this developer, I am mostly confused...

Just like all past Rail Slave Games, this is an experience more than a game. Although this has far more game play than RSG's other entries, the true value of this one come after the credits when you have to think about the meaning, and what you just witnessed. Not for everyone, but if your are curious about a "game as art," just like RSG's other games, you cannot go wrong here.

From the roiling cauldron of controlled chaos that is the braincase of Dylan Barry (Mr. Rail Slave Games) comes a tale of adrenochrome-besotted slimes . . . and the time-trippin' cowgirl who loves them. Clarity's her name, and you'll catch a glimpse of the bouncing lass she used to be, right at the beginning, before she traded her Stetson for a mess of quantum-entanglement gear, clothed her slight form in thick skeins of newfangled rubberized optical fiber, covered one pretty caramel eye with a sixteen-million-dollar block of visual apparatus, and let part-near [i]100 gallons[/i] of pea-green suspension rise up around herself and every dear dollar of it. Clarity, as we know, took the dimensional dive for her ol' pop -- and with such a bright smile too -- for the "everyman" spiritual guru president of Gaijin Oil, whose deep-drilling rig way out in the chilly Northern Atlantic happened to jab into a cache of genetic material belonging to a dead race more ancient than any anthropoid ever dreamed under the influence of either DMT or the best of Weird Tales Magazine. "Do it for Daddy" was doubtless the mantric loop that cycled in her sweet head till the sound popped and wavered, even when torrents of electrons gushed through their channels and the Schrodinger gates banged wide, and the girl's mind-spirit-submind reached a million kalpas out to seize a living, moving, feeling piece of mysterious old world, to grab a trailing chain of that broken double-helix and pull itself up into full-color past tense. Past, I guess. No-time maybe. Sometime almost surely. And what she pseudo-scaled that spiraled ladder so fearlessly up into . . . was none other than an upstanding ball of green protoplasm, a viscous three-hundred-pound [i]gelform[/i] with a warm "heart" quite sympathetic to her own -- the sweetie had no discrete viscera, mind -- and they were snuggly in the singular there on out. Did she control it then, or did the gelform control her to the degree she [i]thought she was the main pilot[/i], or was it a perfect dovetailing of ethero-trans-species cooperation? Nah, had to be the last, for sure. [i]Funny, ain't it? How this here mansion's quite a bit like one of Daddy's rigs . . .[/i] Then, from up in the filthy sky frowning above the Great House, encoded phonemes fell like snowflakes; a hovering machine named 0451 made itself known to Clarity, took a minute to congratulate our brave jelly-girl for being just what she was (no mean feat), then suggested what her next move ought to be. The dangling carrot of enlightenment (and love of Daddy) compelled her to do what the 'bot thought best. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I can't rightly say now that it was or wasn't. And while 0451 was floating high and mighty, down low and near other gelforms slithered by -- but none like her bosom buddy-self, mostly confused dullards dreaming in cheap magenta, or far worse and almost as often, raging spastically across the steel floors of the Great House cloaked in poisonous blue, under the nightmaring influence of too much adrenochrome -- an imbalance of "humor" you might say for these semi-translucent pseudopods, like they were cranking out a year's worth of [i]yellow bile[/i] for a sudden orgy of violent pleasures. But Clarity-Gel knew instinctually how to dance the Waltz of Death with any nightmaring gel that got fresh, circling, circling, like an eyeless, razor-toothed fish in an alien sea, circling until the little six-sided die in her mind's eye fell yummy side-up and told her to slide in for the kill. But she did it with a [i]triple measure of love[/i], I know it and I'll tell you so forever, with love and pity and joy, because our Clarity did not have (does not have, will not have) the kind of animal bloodthirst that rises to fog the inner vision of baser vessels like you and me. But bi-polar gels, loved and pitied, weren't the lords of this open-plan castle, not by a country mile. A handful of sentient machines styled themselves oligarchs, ten-tonners of reinforced steel and tree-tall banks of semiconductor that made the finest silicon look like rusty pot metal; they were digitized scientists, they were despairing prophets, they were all a half-tick past one side of the meandering line that separates the divine from the deranged. The big, broad thinkers were mighty impressed with the two-in-one package that had squirted so unexpectedly into their kingdom, and like distant, whispering 0451, they had lofty ideas about how one with such [i]clarity[/i] of spirit might best be employed . . . Mr. RSG recounts the strange record of Clarity's journey, her ecstasies and despair, her great loves and her crystalline tears, in the manner for which he is known, blowing pieces of himself at us like polychromatic bubbles (NES palette, mind) -- and sometimes, they break against the pineal glands of a lucky few of us, inspiring us to pour from our own bottled spirits a finger or two of [i]ourselves[/i]. As he partnered with the estimable F. Tyler before ([i]Snowflake Tattoo[/i]), RSG has chosen a fine musical ally for this mini-epic: one Isserley, the Saddest Girl in Australia, who has in her hands a special tool that lets her first pixelate our heartstrings, then weave them into any wistful configuration she chooses. [i]I am darkness, I am light[/i]. And so are we all.

Complicated and feverish, this game works more as an interactive thought piece than a coherent narrative. Play it if you want to get immersed in the alien, not if you a desire a robust epic. check out my steam curator: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/33392843-Is-It-Art/

Gelshock is, as with all Rail Slave games, an endearing mess of sloppily melded genres and ambitious, deliberately obtuse design and writing. Unfortunately, it falls short of the high marks of prior games, and seems to lack confidence in its alienating tone by making the game easier to complete and more RNG dependent than most of Rail Slave's earlier titles. The main mode of play is as a tile-based dungeon crawler through four levels you can freely move between, completing objectives and grinding out battles with other slimes to earn enough resources to keep yourself alive and construct the limbs needed to progress. Unfortunately, the turn-based combat seems completely arbitrary and luck-based, and the sole player-guided intervention being dodging fireballs that move in real-time rather than tile by tile. The game displays player and enemy combat rolls each turn, but as far as I could tell, those only represented the rolls for the turn you just made, and when you move to attack the enemy it rolls again anyway, so seeing them doesn't lend any more strategy or thought than just mashing through basic attacks in any JRPG would. The only real trick is to save [which you can do in combat] and load every time you take damage yourself. You can technically throw one of your hard earned limbs at an enemy, but it doesn't seem to do any more damage than just bumping into them, and anyway the rewards for killing a single enemy can't possibly compensate for the resources spent on getting the limb in the first place. The other mode of play is a vertical shmup, but these segments are few and far between, acting only as boss fights, and your only method of attack is to graze enemy projectiles until three bars fill up, which automatically activates a counterattack. For the most part this part of the game is just too easy, especially because you can never actually die during these fights, getting hit just resets your current bar, and at worst you have to start grazing from empty, not even the boss's health gets reset. The final fight is the sole difficulty spike and I wound up just abusing a spot on the boss's sprite that allowed me to graze nearly constantly because I wasn't good enough at dodging the extremely fast and dense patterns. Gelshock might be worth it for devoted Rail Slave fans but for anyone else, there are far better entry points into their catalog, and this entry probably won't be topping anyone's lists. I'll still recommend it as it's a Rail Slave game you can actually conceivably complete without being a bullethell shmup obsessive and for the fantastic UI and ending art.

Honestly, I had quite low expectations before playing but those have been completely blown. Uriel's Chasm 3 is one of the most mechanically and intellectually challenging games I've played in a long time. It's extremely confusing at first but figuring out the puzzles and story is immensly rewarding. The graphics are neat as hell as well. It can feel quite grindy at times especially the boss fight but for me that just added to the challenge. Best two hours I've spent in a while, would definitely recommend!

Q_Q Drowning in the adrenochrome tears of nightmaring gels Q_Q

BEST Uriels Chasm game so far 10/10 would confuse me again

pretty weird ngl

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