Here’s the beauty of destruction: as enemies return to your position, you pull the trigger and marvel as the screen fills with particles, smoke and destruction… and as the air clears, you’re left with an eerie calm. This ebb and flow between quiet and sound serves as the fabric of Selaco, a new FPS developed by a small team and derived from 26 years of technology.
The game is technically in early access, but you’d never guess it – the included campaign has plenty of meat and the experience is impressively polished. It’s also more distinctive than most modern shooters, almost a cross between Monolith’s seminal FEAR, Irrational’s System Shock 2, and id Software’s Doom. It is the last point that is so important. Selaco is built on GZDoom, a fork derived from ZDoom, which itself was created thanks to John Carmack’s release of the original Doom source code in 1997. This makes for a fascinating game, with creative use of older technology combined with flow and design that we haven’t really seen applied to a sprite-based shooter before.
Perhaps the most impressive aspect is the sheer volume of interaction and destruction. Each level is packed with surfaces and objects designed to be shot or interacted with, with the game inviting you to play with its dense environment by destroying smaller objects directly with firearms or by progressively damaging objects larger voxel-based ones. All this is accompanied by impressive and often unique sound effects, layered on top of the game’s soundtrack, which moves from atmospheric exploration to driving combat rhythms. There are neat visual effects here too, with firemen spewing dust that is ignited by nearby light sources, for example, and there’s even the possibility of the destruction continuing through loading screens. It’s satisfying to be able to show where you’ve gone through the trail of destruction you’ve done.
Despite the destruction and mayhem, Selaco doesn’t play like Doom. Instead, it’s a more tactical shooter along the lines of FEAR, with your health bar draining quickly even on easy difficulty and therefore requiring you to use cover and flank to fend off your enemies. If you always run in guns blazing, you will die. Enemy AI is also surprisingly powerful, with a system that varies the aggression and intensity of enemies. The key here is that enemies will flank and shoot you, and dealing with that is a big part of the challenge. This is where tactics play a role. This isn’t Rainbow Six, but taking on these enemies requires you to take advantage of the environment and clever positioning, which I found appealing.
Beyond the strong AI opponents and destructible environments, the visual design is a major triumph. While the game benefits from GZDoom’s continued evolution over the years, developer Altered Orbit Studios has managed to go far beyond what I thought was possible, even in 2024. It looks like Selaco is one of the first games to completely nail the most GZDoom’s advanced features, such as gradients, advanced lighting and voxel objects. Take the lighting, for example – there’s dynamic lighting, complete with muzzle flashes and muzzle flash shadows, as well as heavy use of static colored lights to fill spaces, giving the game a late ’90s aesthetic. a la Unreal.
Selaco also supports more complex level layouts, reminiscent of what Build Engine can deliver. That’s how you get actual beveled surfaces, as well as things like fake reflections, where landscapes are drawn below the main map and revealed via transparent textures. The developers are perfectly walking the fine line between retro and contemporary. As a result, the Selaco ends up looking unlike anything else I can think of. Textures and lighting feel modern, but you’ll still see the limitations of sector-based map design if you look closely. While GZDoom allows for some things that wouldn’t be possible in Doom itself, many of the maps still manage to stick to those limitations.
Manage cookie settings
I think one of my favorite elements is the molded work on the sprites and weapons. It is very difficult to manually create each unique frame, but it gives you the opportunity to perfectly pose each one. This is most evident in the weapons, which, for my money, are among the best I’ve ever seen: rendered entirely in 2D images, but drawn at a very high resolution and influenced by the lighting and effects inside the scene. Every frame of a reload feels accurate, and some frames even simulate motion blur or depth of field. The sheer quality of the animation and the sharpness of every frame mixed with the particles… I can’t praise this enough.
Since the game is based on GZDoom, I wasn’t surprised to see a menu densely packed with options – but what surprised me was the quality of the user interface itself. It feels completely custom, with a large amount of graphical options for tuning both for performance and your visual preferences.
Naturally, I wanted to test Selaco on Steam Deck – but the game is more demanding than I expected, likely to the point of a CPU bottleneck, inherent in Doom Engine titles. However, Selaco includes specific Steam Deck menu options and presets, including a performance and quality mode. Although using these, I found it impossible to get a 90fps lock on the OLED Deck, and even 60fps was a challenge. For smoother and more stable combat, it might make sense to limit the game’s frame rate to 45 or 50 fps in Deck.
The last thing I want to discuss is the gameplay and design. I already mentioned that it’s a more tactical game, but there’s also the issue of level design and overall flow. This is where the System Shock comparisons arise. Selaco isn’t a comprehensive sim like that game, but it shares some elements that I think enhance the experience. There are puzzles to solve at points, key codes and cards to find, and other environmental challenges, all of which reflect the overall experience and encourage exploration.
The only words of caution here are that the first two levels of the game are the most confusing. Once you get your head around them, they’re fine, but I struggled with navigation early on due to how dense and packed with objects they were, making them difficult to analyze quickly. Once you break free from the hospital labs, this element improves, where exploration is still required but feels more rewarding.
All of this is to say that, while Selaco isn’t perfect, it’s still one of the most interesting games I’ve played this year. It’s rare to see a retro game that doesn’t simply lean on the past and instead manages to combine classic elements with new innovations that feel fresh in 2024. The game is still in early access, of course, but the included campaign is already well worth your time.
