A quick recap on why I have been gone for two-plus weeks: Comcast wanted me to pay $150 a month for internet. JUST INTERNET, so I decided to just snap abandon Xfinity and go right to Verizon for $40 a month internet. I also only exclusively played High On Life and Death Stranding for the past two and a half weeks.

This week I become John Wick. This week’s demo is Fake Signals

Fake Signals is a 2D action rogue-lite from Vona Soft. The game will release on Steam sometime in Q1 of 2023.

You are a man that resembles John Wick, but you are not him for you have lost your name. In my case my name is Agamemnon and I am the best-hired assassin. It looks like the story is hinged on an anonymous handler feeding information about the protagonist’s past after each level.

Each of the levels kind of blends together, but regardless they are fun. Each level has you go in and usually tasks you with assassinating everyone in the area and then prompted to leave. When taken into consideration, each level is its own puzzle that needs the player to die a few times to fully realize the sequence and the discretion needed to complete the level with an S rank. Bad guys with guns, knives, automatic rifles, and even security cameras litter the area ready to alert those baddies to your position. I really like that the demo also ramped up the difficulty a little to give me a nice pace for when I was trucking through the first two levels and then was stopped dead because the level design had changed dramatically.

The gameplay really reminds me a lot of Deadbolt. Stealth is the main idea in Fake Signals, but it is not the only way to play. Each level starts the player with a knife and it is up to them to find weapons within the environment. Taking cover usually rewards the player with a choice between the loud or the quiet route. There is no wrong way here, both are super fun and rewarding in their own regard, it seems. Enemies can take more than one shot if not aimed at the head, and they in response get to kill you in exactly one bullet. Restarting back to the beginning of the level is the punishment for dying but it really never feels like it was the game at fault for my dying rather than a miscalculation on my part.

Fake Signals has quite a nice look to it. It has a clean look to it overall… until you cover everything with blood, smoke, and metal.

There is a really awesome song that plays throughout the demo and it really adds to the pacing. It bumps fast and you want it to keep going.

Overall, Fake Signals looks eerily like a Deadbolt clone. It is a little alarming how close it looks and plays like it, down to the melee animations. I do not want to be the one that says that Fake Signals is a complete re-hashing of Deadbolt, but it is something to keep an eye on.

Even on that note, I did have fun playing the demo.

The gameplay is something that I really enjoyed. Knocking on a door, backing up, and waiting for a bad guy to open it up to their death, barrel through, headshot a few guys, jumping in a vent, and grenade a guy in the bathroom to then stroll on out is something that I will live with for a long time.