You’ve got toxic spores growing out of your spine and your left arm is on fire. Believe it or not, this is a positive development. Double Fine’s RAD is set in the post-post-apocalypse, a world that’s been pulverized by nukes twice over, and its non-human survivors are bloodthirsty nightmares. Your freakishness is your primary means of survival.
A gaggle of land louses, crab-like creatures that emerge from tunnels beneath the earth, is bearing down on you. You can bludgeon them with your trusty baseball bat, but the more spectacular choice would be to trigger those spores on your back and emit a poisonous cloud, then use your arm to ignite the fumes and grill the land louses into ash.
RAD is an action roguelite in which you are a teenager trying to keep your town from disappearing off the map. This town is a relatively safe place at the edge of the wasteland. It’s also your hub within the game. Project Lead Lee Petty describes it as “a persistent element in RAD, filled with specific characters and a variety of shops that can be upgraded with new unlocks over many play sessions.” The town is in jeopardy: The ancient power source its people use to filter the air, fertilize crops, and secure its borders is failing. In a desperate effort to save it, the town elders send your character into the mutant-strewn Fallow in search of a fresh power source that will keep it protected and well-fed.
The journey is a difficult one that involves a great deal of experimentation through death. Petty told us that his team “wanted to embrace the rebellious spirit of the teens put to this impossible task, who on some level treat their quest like a road trip — even though it might spell certain doom for them.” With each run, the player assumes the role of a new teen, engineered by the town elders to absorb RADS from the environment and metamorphose themselves into monster-slaying abominations.
The precise shape of the Fallow you encounter, and which fantastic mutations you accrue as you make your way through it, are randomized. “RAD challenges the player to adapt their play style to best leverage the mutation they are given,” Petty said. “Some mutations have more obvious utility than others, but all mutations can be used effectively to progress through the game.” One of the joys of this is that combat changes quite a bit from run to run. You’re necessarily going to approach a boss fight a certain way depending on whether you have a ranged attack like Warhead, which turns your skull into a reusable grenade, or an unorthodox tool like Toxic Dump, which enables you to leave an enemy-damaging snail trail in your wake.
The procedurally generated levels offer novel challenges, too. Rather than dungeon crawling, RAD has the player traverse expansive, uneven swathes of land that contain loot, secrets, hazards, and even other wasteland communities. “These environments leave room for improvisation, experimentation, and the unexpected,” Petty explained. This creates a game that’s as much about exploration as it is mowing down gene-scrambled platypi and carnivorous mushrooms. A crate atop a tricky-to-climb rock formation might contain a useful item, or you might spot a handful of cassette tapes — currency, in RAD’s ’80s-inflected economy — resting at the bottom of a nuclear green swamp.
You will also, amid playing around with various mutation combinations and acquainting yourself with the attack patterns of enemies, discover the goofy melancholy of the world that Double Fine has created. RAD is a ridiculous game, cartoonish in aesthetic and drenched in references to Reagan-era culture, but poignant in its way.
As your character walks around, they rejuvenate the desiccated earth beneath their feet into lush, verdant plant life. It’s both a useful gameplay mechanic — it helps you keep track of which areas of the map you’ve already visited — and a clever bit of storytelling. You are a gawky teen, who is, as Petty puts it, “slowly transforming the world into a better place as you continue to mutate and become something less than human.” This is the beautifully unsettling premise upon which RAD is built. The game is more thoughtful than your average roguelite — and the only one in which you learn to use a magma arm and a fungus backpack for good.
RAD is available for PC today.
Recommended specs: