If you, like me, are basically always hungry for another fast-paced horde shooting roguelike with crazy items and combos to build, I’ve got great news. Upcoming roguelite shooter Gatekeeper is just that, and it has a pretty dang generous free demo slash prologue version out now that’s fully-featured enough to include cooperative gameplay.
Gatekeeper casts you, and maybe some friends, as one of a suite of characters with different abilities, hopping from one level to the next completing randomized objectives, defeating bosses, and collecting loot and experience used to buy upgrades. Any given level has you blasting through waves of enemies while you simultaneously complete objectives like finding keys for weird obelisks, staying near pillars that want to kill you, or taking down a few key enemies amongst the swarm.
Each run climaxes with showdowns against huge bosses that throw bullet hellish fields of attacks against you that you’ll have to dodge in order to survive.
The prologue—Gatekeeper: Infinity—has a fair few characters to enjoy in it, though the real delight is in chaining different kinds of stacking items and level up benefits into an unstoppable, broken monster of a combatant. I built a terrifying character in my run at it that focused on accurate automatic attacks that could themselves stun, knockback, ignite, and chain into enemies ad nauseum. It was delightful.
The prologue version has a few different enemy types to encounter and starts with two different characters to try out. There was some limited variety in what kinds of items you could find, and that somewhat limits the variety of cool builds to try, but I’m not going to judge based purely on the demo. I was intrigued enough to make sure the main game was on my Wishlist and followed for next year’s release.
You can find free demo/prologue on Steam as Gatekeeper: Infinity, and you can also find Gatekeeper proper on Steam, where it’s listed as releasing in the first part of 2024.