Shutter Asylum

What it's like to play

Shutter Asylum is a top-down stealth shooter in a pixel-art asylum, built on a 20 pixel tile grid across nine hand-made floors. The first floor is 53 by 37 tiles, which is 1,060 by 740 pixels of rooms, corridors and guards. The renderer keeps a buffer 400 pixels tall and derives its width from the window ratio (711 by 400 at 1280 by 720), then stretches it to fill the page, so there are no letterbox bars.

WASD moves, the mouse aims, Space or the left button fires, R reloads, F or the middle button toggles the flashlight, C or Shift switches between running at 3 pixels per frame and sneaking at 1, E opens doors, Q swaps weapons and Esc pauses. There are three guns: a pistol with 6 rounds, a two second reload and 250 milliseconds between shots; a machine gun with 30 rounds, three seconds and 80 millisecond intervals; and a minigun with 500 rounds, five seconds and 20 millisecond intervals. You start with 30 health, multiplied to 60 on easy, 36 on normal and 27 on hard, while enemies get 0.4, 0.8 and 1.2 health multipliers, vision ranges of 90, 60 and 30, and reaction times of 700, 500 and 300 milliseconds.

It is keyboard and mouse only, with no touch layout or gamepad support, which rules out phones. There is no music, just synthesized bleeps, and no save inside a floor. Measured frame rate: 53 in level one, 61 in the menu.

Verdict: What it does, it does with weight: sight lines and noise matter, and a floor ends only when the last guard is down.

Controls

WASD moves, mouse aims, space or left click fires, R reloads, F or middle click toggles the flashlight, C or Shift run/sneak, E opens doors, Q swaps weapons, Esc pauses.