Sektori hits you like a brick. Your teensy, abstract ship is thrown into a geometric plain, and you’re blasted on your ass with techno. A voice declares “BEGIN SEQUENCE” and enemies blink in. What follows is a trial, one where you must navigate various upgrade paths and a shifting playfield. Sektori is one of the best twin stick shooters in years and is borderline impossible for me to put down. For arcade freaks, Sektori is dangerous for your productivity, but I must insist that you try it.
Sektori immediately brings to mind Geometry Wars, an Xbox Live Arcade title so powerful that it became the sole sustenance for everyone who bought an Xbox 360 at launch. It is also deeply reminiscent of Housemarque, the Finnish company known for its retro-themed games that rock and, more recently, Returnal. Games like Super Stardust HD and Resogun filled an adjacent role to Geometry Wars for Sony over the years – Resogun in particular being the strongest game in the PS4’s release window.
Geometry Wars developer Bizarre Creations does not exist any more (although many former members went on to form Lucid Games and made Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions), and Housemarque is now preoccupied with big releases like Returnal and the in-development Saros instead of fun retro shooters. But Sektori’s designer, Kimmo Lahtinen, worked at Housemarque for 13 years, which explains why it goes unreasonably hard the second you start playing it.
Sektori’s big distinguishing mechanic is a stage that shifts in shape in campaign mode. You are constantly navigating through new topography, and if you are caught in a space that turns solid it’s game over. In addition to your blaster, you have a powerful, invincible dash called strike. Felled enemies leave “glimmer,” which in turn spawns selector tokens, which can be spent on the upgrade stack, which is an ascending series of upgrades to functions like movement speed, your gunfire, your strike attack and even the additional missile weapon.
Optimizing around the chaos is the immediate goal: snaking your way through the stages while collecting glimmer and carefully choosing upgrades. In addition to the upgrade stack, there’s also a rarer and more powerful set of upgrades called evolvers that change how your ship behaves, and take the form of card-based upgrades. Certain rare and powerful evolver tokens give temporary penalties, like disabling your shield for 15 seconds or or flooding the zone with enemies, in exchange for significant upgrades.
If this sounds a bit overwhelming then you abstractly understand one half of what it is like to play Sektori. To play Sektori initially is to be overwhelmed. But the other half is that, once you’ve played the game, all of these mechanics make complete, fluid, intuitive sense. For example, your strike has a cooldown that is indicated by two small lines on the side of your ship. This cooldown is bypassed when you strike through a token, meaning that you can chain the strike for as long as you can dash through tokens. What’s more, the number of consecutive strikes acts like a score multiplier for the current number of consecutive kills. When you understand what this means practically, this cold mechanical calculation becomes a ballet, your ship bounding from pad to pad, charting a course seamlessly between enemies, blasting gargantuan holes through crowds of malicious polyhedrons.
I just wanted an excuse to embed Second Reailty by Future Crew.
Sektori feels like you died and were reborn in a demoscene demo, down to the music. The actual music itself was composed by Kimmo Lahtinen’s brother Tommi aka Tommy Baynen, who himself has a fairly robust discogs page of trance releases. I am shocked at how good the soundtrack is, along with the care of its release, as they have included over two hours worth of music including extended and alternate mixes. If you do decide to give this game a shot, I highly recommend playing it with either some high quality IEMs, headphones, or speakers.
A certain kind of freak has been eating real good over the last few weeks. Lumines Arise, Birdcage, and the Steam release of Thrasher are all sustenance for flow state freakers who love pummeling their brain with shapes and sounds. Sektori came out of nowhere in the middle of that and not only filled a Geometry Wars-shaped hole in my heart, but delivered a game more dialed in and precise than I could have anticipated. If you are the kind of person who craves the gaming equivalent of the sensation of drowning, I need you to play this game. You must let Sektori into your heart for at least five minutes so that it can get its claws into you and derail your life for a solid week.
