Continuing our "Juneween" summer horror season from last week's Gylt, this time I'm back in familiar stomping grounds (but not that familiar; the explormers are taking a few more weeks off) with the spooky boomer shooter Hands of Necromancy from Frechou Games. Or, given it's a rare gothic horror medieval variant, a forsoother shooter (a forshoother? Wow, that just plain feels bad to say out loud. I'm sticking with that, then). You play as an unnamed necromancer—you're a rare case of a heroic necromancer specifically, though the evil laugh after you pick up a new weapon suggests otherwise—who finds himself fighting the very Stygian forces he'd normally be summoning to attack his enemies or maybe just do some yardwork. Zombies, imps, hooded figures hurling personal insults (which could either be demonic monks or Fortnite players), demons, golems, and various other all-stars of the Fiend Folio stand between you and the true culprits dragging this blighted world to Hell. Still, though, it's an excuse to murder a whole bunch of creatures and not get in trouble for it: what's a necromancer to do?

Hands of Necromancy is unapologetic about its roots, adhering to the conventions of its archaic inspirations rather than doing too much novel to rock the boat outside of some always-welcome quality-of-life enhancements and a fairly compelling open-world structure that, despite still partitioning its areas in discrete stages, allows for a lot of backtracking and explormer-like (yeah, I know, it just kinda happened though) features that are not too dissimilar to another vintage FPS I played recently, Lobotomy Software's PowerSlave/Exhumed. In addition to the usual assortment of weapons, ammo, and health pick-ups there's also a few consumables that you keep with you until you need them, including a generous stock of curatives, as well as unlocking the permanent ability to shapeshift into various creatures, each of which have their own traversal abilities and infinite-use natural weapons (which operate on cooldowns instead, so you're best shifting back and forth judiciously). Beyond that, it's about as close to a modern (but not modern-looking) Hexen or Blood type as you could want from a throwback.

Much of the game's ingenuity is tied up in its arsenal of death-dealers, their only downside being that there's no handy way to check how much ammo you have for each weapon (that I've found, anyway; they don't put it front and center like they do in the older Dooms). The weapons are not just effective against specific foes but also specific circumstances, encouraging you to alternate between them whenever a situation seems ripe for a particular weapon or you're just encountering more of that weapon's ammo and might as well splurge since you're already maxed out. A fireball staff is relatively weak but one of the few very accurate and quick weapons, making it ideal for sniping distant enemies; an ice ring creates a projectile with a splash effect whenever it hits an enemy, making it best used against groups huddled together (and it's always satisfying to watch an enemy shatter into ice cubes); a tornado spell will slice enemies for moderate damage as it passes through them, but completely destroy them—including the burly heavies—if you're able to use it to trap enemies against a wall (they'll be pinned as the tornado continues to apply its effects) or knock them off high perches. Later weapons tend to have fewer conditional situations but make up for it by being very powerful, albeit usually very limited ammo-wise in turn. The consumable items also add a layer of strategy beyond a convenient means of healing: the titular hands of necromancy can resurrect any corpse on the level and put it under the player's control, letting them patrol around fighting anything that isn't you, while the berserker items will either boost your damage or your defense for a while. Naturally, these buffs are best held back for bosses: there's one at the end of each chapter, and though I've only taken on the first of them it was a very intense melee where I was grateful I could mitigate its difficulty however I could.

Visually the game is absolutely going for a retroactive "Best Looking Game of 1995" award with its two-dimensional sprites and blocky world design. It feels like a DOS game musically as well, though with slightly better audio quality of course. The map is detailed without giving too much away—secrets are shown with a purple outline, but only after you've already found them—and according to the control layout there's a means of adding your own markings that I wasn't able to activate. In an appreciated move, the game tells you how many enemies, major items (both keys and significant pick-ups), and secrets there are on each map, though the enemy counter is usually a few enemies shy of the true amount because I guess that's how the game likes to keep you on your toes. This info is especially welcome because of the backtracking nature of the game, alleviating any remaining doubts that there might still be something left to find in any given map. The backtracking is usually in service of finding keys that are used in other stages: whenever you find a locked door or a key the game tells you exactly where you'll need it, removing any ambiguity about where to go next (for better or worse). The usual gameplay loop largely involves moving to a new stage, killing everything within reach, figuring out what keys you can take and which you'll have to come back for later with either another stage's key or a new shapeshifting ability, and then moving back to the hub area each chapter starts with and finding a new stage to explore. A chapter then ends with one or more stages approached in a linear fashion, usually a bit harder and incorporating all the new weapons and tricks you've learned so far, capped with a boss fight. Since each of these chapters is about 5-6 hours long, it's possibly best enjoyed piecemeal; I'm about halfway through the second chapter as of writing and once it's done I'm thinking of putting the game down and switching back to Tears of the Kingdom or something else for a week before coming back for the third (and I suspect final) campaign.

Overall, I'm having a great time with Hands of Necromancy. It fully embraces the uncomplicated boomer shooter joys of zipping around a map, strafing around enemies while switching items and weapons around for what's best suited for the assortment of foes I'm facing, and the slightly more open world nature and explormer aspects are, of course, things I'm way the heck on board with. The shapeshifting reminds me of one of the earliest RPG-FPS hybrids, ShadowCaster, which I'm damn near certain almost everyone's forgotten about; there's no experience system to worry about here but regularly changing forms can often be beneficial to preserve ammo (one of the first, the snake, can also breathe underwater and fit into small gaps, making it a very useful power to keep highlighted on the toolbar). It is perhaps overlong at some estimated 20 hours but, with the above approach of giving it some down-time between campaigns, it's not that much of a demerit. I just unlocked a scythe and a shotgun (but, like, an old-timey medieval one) so I'm pretty much all set for even more demon-slaying for the foreseeable future.

: 5 out of 5.