THE CITADEL: NOT YOUR MOTHER'S EROGE
there's an unfortunate number of people whose knowledge of the citadel stops at "retro pervert fps". so we're gonna get this out of the way first: the guro is subtle enough that if the creator wasn't a dlsite user, much fewer people would been suspicious. i know a game where your modus operandi is "gib bitches" doesn't scream subtle, but the violence is standard fare for graphic shooters. you'll be fine. you can also disable gore in the settings!
despite what the boomshoot mcretro style is immediately going to activate in everyone’s neurons, the citadel is NOT a doom clone! (or a quake clone!) personally, i identified more dna from the shadow warrior series - which the creator themselves cites as inspiration for the over-the-top gore, so you can’t call me racist for comparing two of the only first-person shooters to star japanese people.
you play as a freakishly agile anime chick with adorable hair. being a human in a world of robots (who are not all women, doekuramori just likes his characters andro), you will get curb stomped if you attempt to run and gun. in a post-ultrakill landscape where most of the popular indie shooters boil down to overstimulating power fantasies, i was excited to find that this game pushes you to take your time. soak in the level. manage your health and hunger bars. use your aim down sights and lean from behind corners to take out baddies stronger than you. when you do get to go fast, its in tactical, cathartic bursts. that slower pace is reflected every aspect of the citadel’s design. for example, rather than aggressive wubs or shitty djent guitars, the soundtrack opts for melancholic piano & synth arrangements as well as ominous drones. when it is aggressive (see: e3m4 - the downfall), it evokes desperation rather than testosterone.
the detailed gore is another point i'd pin in the game's slow design tenants. in retro first person shooters, the gore tends to be homogenized. shoot a fucker and red blood spurts out as they fly back. explode a fucker and they are reduced to red chunks. it's a simple visual language where red=dead. in the citadel, things are a little more complex; the style here is dismemberment. on hit, enemies lose limbs or fall to the ground wounded, often with organs exposed in a very grotesque manner. hit an enemy hard enough and you’ll expose their insides completely, littering the ground with intestines. like, a lot of intestines. in a game like dusk, this would create visual clutter and lag as you mow down hordes of enemies. but this isn't a game like dusk. you're not intended to dash through every level like a lunatic - there's a stamina bar restricting you from doing that. the unusually elaborate gore provides, if nothing else, some extra moment-to-moment entertainment.
i've noticed complaints about the repetitive visuals, likely as a side effect of the slow pace. i get where they're coming from. the limited tileset doesn't change. yet the levels had so much going on geometrically that i didn't even notice the repetition until someone pointed it out! there's an interesting emphasis on imposing verticality ("video games peak at jumping from rooftop to rooftop"). the citadel is littered with facsimiles of buildings, like a less underwhelming version of doom ii’s city levels. it never feels the same, even if it all looks more or less that way. the use of negative space is also great; shoutout to e3m5! doekuramori knows how to get full mileage out of their building blocks.
we’re 600 words in and i still haven't mentioned the guns in this shooter? shit. uh, the shotguns in this game. there's two of them. they're my beautiful twin babies. there's like an assortment of weapons with an upgrade system and alt fires and - listen, do you really care about all that when the game has TWO SHOTGUNS and BOTH of them are good? the sequel is going to have even more shotguns, so you better play that when it drops.
conclusion paragraphs are for posers. play the citadel or my autistic ass will break into your house and eat your dog
END GAME REVIEW