Turbo Pudding
Loudnik has ten stations, and every one is its own little world. The first three, Pirate Cove, the Disco Rings and Bell Garden, are free, and we’ve shown them here before. This Saturday we flew farther out with a camera. Here are six stations past Bell Garden, one snapshot each.
Speaker Canyon
A rock station where the cliffs are stacks of amps. Mesas built of speaker cabinets stand under a dusty sun, over dunes shaped like sine waves, and a new antenna is waiting here. Speaker rocks at the edges of the screen send out a ring every two bars. A ring never hurts the ship, but it does give it a shove. Loops come up from below, and an arrow at the bottom edge always warns you first.
The boss is the Stack Colossus: three amp cabinets on tracks, with a row of knobs on the top one. Its speaker cones pump out rings of bullets, and its weak spot is the row of valves glowing in the grille of its base.
Drum Cave
A hollow asteroid that holds the station’s treasury. It is the breather of the game: fewer bullets, picks worth 30 percent more and capsule boxes twice as often. Drum skins with bolted rims are set into the cave walls in groups of three. When a group lights up one, two, three, hit the skins in that order, and a stash opens with a capsule and a pile of picks.
At the end waits the Great Drum, wrapped in gray felt. In the game it’s called the Muffled Drum: a huge drum lying face down, with two mallets above it. Pieces of felt tear off and drift at you as big slow bullets, and the bare skin underneath is its weak spot.
Night Highway
A neon city seen from above: lit windows, light trails on the road and billboards that all show Monotone. The street lamps at the edges are the danger here. A lamp draws a thin line across the screen, and 0.8 seconds later a beam runs along it. See the line, leave the line.
The boss is the Billboard, a huge flying screen with Monotone’s face, and its weak spot is the projector lens underneath. In one phase it shows its next attack on the screen for a second, a fan, a ring or a wall, and only then lets it out. In the picture at the top it’s about to send a fan, and Volta’s SOLO laser is already sparking on the lens.
Pixel Archive
A vault of 8-bit broadcasts that Monotone is erasing: a big-pixel grid, towers of cartridges with blinking lights and faint scan lines. Some enemies here glitch. They hop to a new spot, and a ghost outline shows where 0.6 seconds before they land. Now and then a band of the screen rewinds, like a tape that slipped.
The Pixel Whale stands guard, a whale made of square pixels, with an eye that blinks like a text cursor. Its tail attack rains down columns of pixel blocks, with one gap to slip through.
Factory of Silence
Conveyors and presses here stamp instruments into gray drones, between walls of foam wedges and caution stripes. Presses come down where a shadow showed 0.8 seconds before. Belts carry picks, and now and then a capsule, sideways across the screen, so you can grab them as they pass.
The boss is the Stamper, a stamping machine with two arms. The arms stamp HUSH onto two marked plates on the floor, and every impact lets out a ring of bullets.
The Armada
The station fleet against the Jammer fleet. Gray battleship hulls drift past, and small ships of the friendly stations fly by in their own colors. About every 20 seconds one of them drops a capsule or a record, and their thin tracers pick off small enemies for you. Ahead waits the flagship Hushmost, wider than the screen.
After the Armada there is just one station left, and it’s best seen for yourself.
Tune in
The first three stations are free to play in your browser at loudnik.com. The full game, all ten stations, is $4.99, paid once. More about the game is on the Loudnik page.
