I found out about this game through Vincent Kinian on Twitter, digging through his “Obscure Game of the Day” tag. And I’m kinda fascinated by the game and its developer Rail Slave Games (aka Dylan Barry). It’s a weird fusion of about half a dozen Genesis-era action games, Wisdom Tree unlicensed Biblical games and those kinda creepy, semi-coherent religious pamphlets you sometimes find leftover in public places. It cuts back and forth between gameplay and grainy footage framing the game as some weird shovelware some folks found, ragging on the game and dismissing it as cheap and nonsensical and upsetting.
The game got trashed on Steam, and few of the dev’s games are particularly well received. Uriel’s Chasm got a followup, referred to by some as “the sequel no-one asked for.” But I find the dev’s story interesting. He was a failed musician and born-again Christian who saw the documentary Indie Game: The Movie and had an epiphany that games could be as personal as songs. He had very little experience with modern video games, and associated the term “indie game” as meaning something “darkly rebellious and destructively psychedelic.”
It’s like an outsider art take on the retro game revival, and I’m not sure if it’s good, but it’s compelling.
Are you ready for a confusing, unplayable bullet hell nightmare with inexplicable bible quotes and heavy-handed, esoteric cutscenes? We sure as hell weren't!
WATCH THE WHOLE VIDEO HERE!
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The Unlicensed Bible Game That Should Have Been Buried in a Desert: Uriel’s Chasm Review
All of this started when a friend of mine gifted me a copy of Uriel's Chasm, one of the few games in Steam that has an 'Overwhelmingly Negative' predicate based on around 2600 user reviews. I have since completed the game (in approximately 30 minutes) and delved into a series of internet articles and reviews about the game and all of its oddities in order learn more about the game, but the more I do that the more I feel like I'm sucked into some sort of weird world where normal gaming logic doesn't apply. It is tempting to read too deeply into Uriel's Chasm and get lost in the multitude of interpretations and bizarre stories about the game, but it is also equally tempting to simply dismiss it as an atrocious game without taking a look at the context. Instead of doing those two things, I'm gonna explain the game as it is and let you decide what to think of it.
A fair warning, a lot of what I'm going to write in the following paragraphs will sound bizarre but believe me, it is an exact description of Uriel's Chasm.
Uriel's Chasm is a 2D shmup & platformer video game developed by Rail Slave Games for Steam. It was released late in 2014 and has since spawned 1 sequel, but we're getting ahead of ourselves here. The game, as far as I'm concerned, tells the very vague story about an intergalactic nun called Sister Tabitha who is sent into the edge of the universe to investigate an orbital monastery called Enoch's hope. The game is divided into 4 small chapters, each having a different gameplay: chapter 1, 2, and 4 are the shmup part of the game, while chapter 3 is the sole platformer part.
However, the game also presents another angle to the narrative. In a somewhat meta twist, Uriel's Chasm also tells the story about two girls picking up Uriel's Chasm and playing it. A found-footage type video will pop out in between chapters showing two girls calling themselves "Shovelware Queens" and their impression of the game (spoiler: they called it shit at one point). This would also also a good time to point out that all of the cutscenes and videos in the game are unskippable and you can't pause or save anywhere in the game. Also, be careful not to press esc as it'll immediately throw you back to the main menu.
So let's get down to the nitty-gritty of each chapter. In the first one, you control a space fighter and shoots asteroids around you to acquire bible pieces to increase your faith. Your actions are limited by the amount of fuel and ammo you have, both are drops from the asteroids or the enemy that spawns from it. Getting hurt reduces your faith and increases the limit of faith you need to surpass to complete the chapter; be careful to not get hit by the floating giant jaw in the field as it will deteriorate your faith quicker than anything else. When you take a piece of the bible, a random verse will appear on screen for you. At some point, your faith will automatically increase when you stop moving giving you time to actually read the bible verses.
The second one, which I assume takes place inside the planet where the orbital monastery is in (before, you were floating in outer space), is a classic sidescrolling shmup where you play as Sister Tabitha herself, riding something that looks like a giant water tank. You need to get through robots, flying crosses, and grotesque plants to finally meet the boss of the chapter, which is a giant head that shoots stuffs at you. Here, Tabitha's hit box is only the small red heart with a cross on her chest, so finishing the chapter shouldn't be that hard.
After some more found-footage videos showing the "Shovelware Queens" dismay at the game, the third chapter begins. It's the most psychedelic chapter of the bunch where you control Tabitha and navigate through a deserted plains to search for 7 Jesus on a stake. To make things even trippier, the screen pulses with all sorts of color and rotates slowly. Every time you found the object that you're looking for, a random bible verse flashes on the screen. It seems to be a randomized verse in case you were wondering, I encountered a verse more than once in my playthrough. The chapter is the simplest one, but it also could take the longest time if you got lost in the area.
If you're adept at shmups, you'll finish the previous chapters at around 20 minutes or so. The fourth and final one is more of a boss fight rather than a chapter, where once again the game shifts into a top-down shmup. At this point you shouldn't even be fazed on the fact that the boss is a giant space giraffe head that looks like he (she? it?) just smoked weed. It's a pretty basic shmup part that ends relatively quickly. When you finally beat the chapter, Uriel's Chasm abruptly switched into a plain 'the end' scene with a song playing in the background. I'm gonna save you the time: this screen is the actual end of the game. I waited for around 5 minutes just to see if there's more after the song ends and there's absolutely nothing else. Press escape to reset the game.
Congratulations, you’ve finished Uriel’s Chasm.
So what does all of this mean? Well some people values Uriel's Chasm as a spot-on homage to shovelwares of the past, while some other applaud it for the metaphysical experience it apparently offers. A lot of users at Steam (around 2000 of them) pointed out the elephant in the room and said that it could just be a horrible game. Me though, I'll just take it in the same vein as I take abstract arts: I absolutely don't get it but apparently there are those who valued them highly, so I assume there’s something there. If anything, the process of researching and writing about it has given me new insights about shovelware and such; I would welcome anyone that want to gift me a copy of other Rail Slave Games' title any day.
Currently, an indie game called Uriel's Chasm (2014) holds the third-lowest user review score on Steam. In its sales pitch, it is described as "the Unlicensed Bible game that should have been buried in a desert"; and its trailer--a mishmash of lo-fi pixel art, noise rock and live-action video--baffles further still. Yet a player who finishes this maligned work may, if she is honest, have a realization: that this is the boldest, most shattering art game since Mark Essen's Randy Balma: Municipal Abortionist in 2008. Better: it tops Essen's piece almost across the board. Who could have made it?
Accredit it to Rail Slave Games, a British studio operated by musician-turned-developer Dylan Barry. Since last year, Barry has been releasing raw, bewildering and (often maddeningly) difficult experiments. His work harks back to the indie scene's frontier years--to Punishment (2005) and Barkley Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden (2008). For example, //N.P.P.D. RUSH//- The milk of Ultraviolet, Barry's first game, stars a quadruple amputee attached to a combat motorcycle; and she rescues junkies in the city of "Nauseous Pines." Grinding music, surreal dialogue and smeary 2D visuals bombard the senses. In the strangest way, the results are poetic.
Somehow, virulent player feedback did not discourage Barry. In 2015, Rail Slave has continued its advance with //SNOWFLAKE TATTOO//--an overlooked pearl--and Selfie: Sisters of the Amniotic Lens (pictured above). The second work, his latest, is his most accomplished. This writer will not spoil Selfie with overexplanation; but it is a dark, funny, gorgeous, horrifying and psychedelic experience--and one that, thanks in part to its multiplayer component, leaves a permanent mark. We cannot wait to see where Rail Slave journeys next. Until Monday, Steam is selling the company's oeuvre at a heavy discount. Five followers who heed the instructions after the break will obtain a free copy of Selfie.
At our request, Rail Slave Games was kind enough to provide Still Eating Oranges with five Steam keys for Selfie: Sisters of the Amniotic Lens. They will be given out to readers who follow the directions below. The giveaway will end when all keys have been claimed.
Directions
Each entrant must:
1. Have followed Still Eating Oranges on Tumblr before this post was made;
2. Have the Steam client installed;
3. Be a Windows user, as Selfie currently is Windows-only;
4. Be comfortable with disturbing imagery: Selfie features a graphic corpse that is not for the squeamish;
5. Reblog this post and leave a comment that (for verification purposes) contains a link to one's Steam profile; and
6. Have Tumblr's Ask option enabled.
Keys will be sent privately through Tumblr. Thanks to our followers for reading and participating.
How to redeem a Steam key
1. Open the Steam client.
2. Open the "Games" drop-down menu.
3. Click the "Activate a Product on Steam..." button.
