Sektori is a finely crafted adrenaline machine and I am a tiny baby

Sektori is deeply unfashionable. It isn’t stacked with layer upon layer of meta-progression, unlocks, and permanent upgrades drip-fed to you incrementally over hours. Death does not send you back to a glowing neon house to fill with glowing neon furniture, or an entire neon village inhabited by sexy neon people who tell you about your sad neon backstory. 

It is, instead, pure videogame. Sektori is an arcade shmup in the (neon) vein of Robotron in which you are beset upon by (neon) shapes that kill you if they touch you. Death presents you with nothing more than a score and an invitation to try again.

That’s not to say it’s solely a retro throwback. That paragraph above also perfectly describes Geometry Wars, an obvious aesthetic inspiration, but Sektori has broader inspirations and plenty of ideas of its own. The arena changes shape during play. You have a dash move which destroys enemies, and which can be instantly recharged if you use it to collect tokens. There are four different types of token, which advance you along an upgrade track, or give you a temporary increase in fire rate, or allow you to choose one powerup from a customisable deck of cards.

Nothing says “modern videogame” more than a deck of cards.

But then death comes and I’m back at that Game Over screen with none of my upgrades, and nothing to smooth the passage to another run. 

I want to celebrate this. I’m a little tired of dying in a videogame and being presented with three currencies, six menus, and a mannequin upon which to theory my craft. 

Unfortunately I’m not at all tired of videogames that provide progression regardless of my own actual improvement at the game. I’m bad at Sektori, even on the easiest difficulty level, and there’s no guarantee I’ll ever get better at it. I’ve been playing shmups for over 30 years and I don’t see any reason to think I’m going to become competent now. As much as I want to celebrate the purity of Sektori, I instead wish that it treated me more like the little baby that I am. Tell me I’m good, Sektori. Lie to me.

As it is, I play Sektori and immediately have a wonderful time. I am blasting, I am dashing, I am tapping my foot. I was playing it and looked over at my kid on the armchair and even he was bouncing to the soundtrack, as if unconsciously possessed. I appreciate that Sektori is clearly the work of a master of the shooter genre. And then I die, and I don't actually feel much compulsion to keep playing.

It does at least six modes besides the main campaign to flit between, some of which give immediate access to the kind of firepower I rarely see in the campaign. (And another of which replicates Geometry Wars' wonderful Pacificism mode, in which the player must fly through gates to kill enemies in lieu of being able to shoot.) Even without the drive to get better at it, I've had a few hours of fun skimming across Sektori's surface.

Perhaps you’re a better person than me, one able to overcome a videogame challenge without constant head pats and tummy rubs. If so, Sektori deserves you. It is undoubtedly a brilliantly designed game. It is exhilarating to play even when you’re bad at it. It is, if my relatively high position on the leaderboards is anything to go by, in need of a much larger audience than it currently has. You can find it on Steam.