There are certain games or works of art that I cannot recommend without severe caveats. Beyond Citadel fits this category. It is an unapologetically horny game that contains brutal and graphic violence punctuated by moments of immense melancholy. It has a plot and world that is difficult to parse. It also happens to be, mechanically, one of the best made shooters I have played in years, and possibly the most successfully-realized followup to Bungie’s Marathon to date.
WARNING: This article contains graphic and suggestive images that may be upsetting for some people.
Beyond Citadel is a follow up to The Citadel, a retro shooter by solo Japanese developer doekuramori. In both, you play a character known as The Martyr. Humanity has suffered a near extinction-level collapse, and those who remain exist through the use of cybernetic enhancement. In the first game, The Citadel, the remnants of humanity were enslaved by an entity known as The Sleeping God. The Citadel follows The Martyr’s attempt to destroy the guardian angels and kill the aforementioned slumbering deity.
Beyond Citadel picks up after the first game and follows a similar structure: The Martyr has returned to the titular citadel, and now must defeat seven trumpeters, all the while learning about her past. The world is bleak, surreal, and desolate, and if you’ve ever seen The End of Evangelion or played Nier: Automata, you may find the trappings rhyme a little.
There are two things that you notice when you first start playing Beyond Citadel. The first is the sheer degree of grotesque violence in the game, although the 2D sprites mean that it is often done cartoonishly. Enemies not only explode into gibbering viscera, they also occasionally die slowly, sometimes panting for breath as they bleed out and occasionally pointing a gun at you as they die.
The other thing you notice is that several of the characters are skimpily-rendered anime women. The Martyr’s outfit ranges from being a more revealing take on Leeloo’s bandage costume from The Fifth Element to an equally revealing riff on the costume from Æon Flux. When The Martyr dies, the player is often confronted with a first person view of her body being torn apart by bullets in graphic detail. In addition to this, the game features a gallery of borderline (although not fully nude) pornographic shots of The Martyr in compromising positions. Although I did not see any nudity in the game, not much is left to the imagination. Both the game’s gore and the skimpy gallery can be disabled in the menu, which is a nice option for people who just would like to play a good retro shooter.
While The Citadel had a structure and quality akin to a very solid DOOM WAD, Beyond Citadel is light years better. The basic level structure of the game has increased in complexity and there is a verticality to the world that was simply not present in The Citadel. As your character levels up and gains new abilities like double jumps and air dashes, new pathways through the level become available to you. Instead of going down a tightly controlled corridor where enemies have the high ground, finding a secret way to the roof and dispatching opposing snipers from a higher vantage point might be the best option. Beyond Citadel is also masterful at slowly increasing the complexity, adding in vehicle segments where you drive tanks, mechs and aircraft that are surprisingly fun to play.
In addition to the increased level complexity, the weapon system in Beyond Citadel is pseudo-tactical in style. The game gives you three settings options for how technical you want your gunplay to be: ‘load only with no jam,’ ‘load and cock,’ and ‘unload, load and cock.’ I highly recommend at least experimenting with the latter two even on an easier difficulty setting, as they add a rhythm and tension to the game that really sets it apart from other retro shooters. Being able to lean around corners also adds to the tension of being pinned down by a hail of enemy bullets.
Individual bullets have to be accounted for, and each gun develops a distinct feel and pattern that becomes organic. These weapons also develop in complexity with various mods, which allows every gun to be viable throughout the game. On top of this, each slot has three different weapons to choose from, allowing you to customize your loadout. During my playthrough I fell in love with the Cavalry Carbine with a scoped mod, a precise medium range gun which has to be chambered between rounds. The button to chamber and aim down sight were the same, so double right clicking became a natural part of the flow of gunplay. Guns in the game also have significant bullet drop, and accounting for that while taking out an enemy from across the map feels fantastic.
Of all the guns, the carbine in particular feels like it was dropped straight out of 1997 LucasArts shooter Outlaws. This is not a coincidence, as doekuramori’s own Twitter bio reads “Developing Outlaws & Marathon-like FPS / Gun simulator hybrid -Beyond Citadel-”. Reading the word “Outlaws” set my heart aflutter as I love that game dearly and, like the game Afterlife, feel like it remains an underappreciated gem in the Lucasarts catalogue.
As a developer, doekuramori is unambiguous in what projects influenced their games: Ghost in the Shell, the work of H.R. Giger, Tohou Project, the ultraviolence of old school shooters, Tsutomo Nihei’s BLAME!, Metabarons by Jodorowsky/Juan Giménez and the obscure X68000 game Relics are all named references. This fascination in a biomechanical world is something I deeply appreciate and relate to as someone who grew up on the works of Shin’ya Tsukamoto like Tetsuo: The Iron Man.
The contrast between biomechanical ultraviolence and skimpily-clad anime women leads some people to conclude that the Japanese subgenre of ero guro is also a distinct influence, an accusation that doekuramori refuted in an extensive Steam note for The Citadel in 2020. “I am not guro artist,”doekuramori stated. “This is not a guro fetish game.” While I think it is worth fairly representing the intent of a creator, it is also fair criticism to say that when you are looking at The Martyr’s beheaded and almost nude body being ripped apart by bullets, that can sometimes feel like a distinction without a difference.
Part of what makes reviewing Beyond Citadel difficult is how obtuse the story can be. Some of this is a language barrier – the translation is not great, and it feels like much is being lost. Many of the explanations for how the world fits together are primarily in Japanese or on the developer’s Twitter account. Another difficulty is that there is an intentional ambiguity in how certain elements of the world fit together. Every zone ends with The Martyr defeating a large boss, setting off a bomb and presumably dying in the explosion only to be reborn later in another vessel. Between these zones, The Martyr visits a liminal space similar to the Black Lodge from Twin Peaks or the End of Time from Chrono Trigger, and meets their brother Elulu. These sudden moments of quiet and rest are often deployed in a shockingly endearing way. The Martyr is clearly several different clones, and so how real are any of these experiences, and how reliable is The Martyr’s perspective? Is the consciousness of The Martyr the same from body to body? It is clear that there is a greater plan underway that The Martyr is simply a pawn in (the term Millenarianism is thrown around a bunch near the end), but piecing how these fit together can sometimes feel like trying to solve a conspiracy.
As someone who likes a lot of transgressive art, I don’t really like debating the morality of surreal violence in art, but it is fair to say this game will just put a lot of people off. It should also be said that Beyond Citadel is not a perfect game even if you accept it on its own terms – it overstayed its welcome for me a little in the last third, although that is exacerbated if you complete all the optional side stages. And I will say I straight up did not enjoy the core motivation of the main characters once they were revealed. At the same time, I must also admit that’s clearly the entire point of the narrative – this is a world fallen from grace, and you are meant to feel severe discomfort at what The Martyr and others have done, down to the gasping mindless automatons holding their guns in while raising a single, shaking pistol at you.
Beyond Citadel is a story about sin and redemption, and it takes massive swings in its world building that could only come from a true Otaku. Even if the combination of erotic fan art and grotesque violence didn’t always congeals into something I like, it is uniquely itself. Neither the violence or sexuality are what makes Beyond Citadel a good shooter, but it is also true that only someone with those proclivities like doekuramori, a dev who straight up retweets fan hentai of his characters, could have made this game.
Dominic Tarason said in his review for PC Gamer that Beyond Citadel is a game he wants to recommend to “everybody and nobody”, and while I understand that, I actually do know specifically who this game is for. This is a game strictly for the freaks, a term I would safely use to describe myself with endearment. I wouldn’t recommend this game to everyone, but neither would I make blanket recommendations for Throbbing Gristle, any film by Kōji Wakamatsu, the French novel The Necrophiliac and the undeniably gorgeous yet sadistic manga Shojo Tsubaki. It is too depraved for unqualified praise, too unique to ignore, and technically one of the best indie shooters I have played in years. Beyond Citadel is a bizarre masterpiece, one that elevates it above the corny category “boomer shooter,” and I can’t safely say you’d find the experience an enjoyable one.
