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An hour or two with Seraph today has made me want to dig out the GameCube - not that I ever need too much of an armtwist on that front in the first place. Seraph's a 2D shooter with several forward-thinking ideas, and it reminds me of P.N.03 which is still, inexplicably, trapped inside that glorious purple box that Nintendo built with no apparent means of escape.Seraph and P.N.03 have some crucial things in common. They're both games in which auto-aim and acrobatic movement converge at the heart of a design that places the emphasis on evasion as much as damage-dealing. Both are games, in other words, that take charge of where your attacks are headed because you have much better things to be doing with your time. That's always exciting. (Worth noting: you can control target prioritisation if you really want to.)
In Seraph's case, the much better things involve zipping around the game's moody procedurally-generated levels while you try to stay one step ahead of the baddies spawning all about you. Seraph casts you as an angel, I gather - albeit a strange sort of angel who needs twin pistols to do her holy bidding and has to take the elevator when she wants to work her way back to heaven. Her enemies are all demons - animalistic, deathly pale things with talons and tails and other nasty appendages. They're fast-moving and many of them can teleport, so Seraph's key ability may not be those twin pistols that can lock onto two foes at once, but rather Blink, a dash move that can be triggered in any direction, giving her a bit of space to add to the standard arsenal of double- and wall-jumps.
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