There is no way to avoid it. In the process of building this post, I have to write the name “Slopper Johnson: Graviton Agent”. I don’t like to hear it in my mouth or brain, but as a game, Slopper Johnson is too interesting to ignore. It is a roguelike in which you build your actions during combat by connecting modules as you would with a modular synthesizer.
Here is the new trailer:
Roguelike deck builders often have the feeling of creating an engine to do damage with your card skills, but here it seems more literal. The different modules you can add to your rack can generate energy, modify it, or spend it to attack your enemies, and you can decide which modules to add, change, and how to connect them. Apparently, it also reminds me of several Zachtronics games.
It seems that you can also use your machinery to move forward or backward in time. In practice, it seems to be altering the turn order of the attacks, allowing you to skip enemy moves or give yourself several opportunities to hit.
The rest of the structure of the game should look familiar to you if you’ve played the recent wave of roguelike board builders. You’re moving through a “world haunted by permanent storms,” represented with wonderfully thick pixel art, but in practice this takes the form of visiting nodes on a map generated by procedures to fight the bad guys you find there, according to Slay The Spire and its kind.
My only real problem is that the name “Slopper Johnson” turns out to be the exact opposite of “cellar door.” Fortunately, there is also some hope: as for the name, the developer commented on Twitter that “the final decision in this regard has not been made.” For now, you can learn more about Slopper Johnson: Graviton Agent on their Steam page or in this longer video.