Blazing Beaks is a top-down rogue-lite twin-stick shooter featuring cute birds and dangerous artifacts, and it runs great under Proton with no fuss; I've been playing on a GPD Win Max 2021 (Intel version), but I wouldn't be surprised to see it end up Steam Deck Verified before too long. Its gameplay-loop reminds me a bit of Spelunky (another favourite of mine that runs perfectly under Proton).

You pick a gun-toting bird, each of which has a unique ability, and then deal with a fun risk/reward setup - to progress you need to collect loot from fallen enemies, but the items that you find have negative effects of varying severity, requiring you to shake up how you play in order to survive until you can offload them at the next shop, where you can then exchange them for items which grant various upgrades. You can also buy better weapons in the shops - or pay a lower price to gamble on a random one that might or might not fit the bill, or steal one but then be unable to get new weapons in the shop for the rest of that run. And on it goes.



Everything's got a lot of personality - the birds are cute and well-animated, the weapons are fun, and the enemies are bizarre (the hilarious-looking Fat Fly, which is literally an obese winged bomb that slightly resembles a Dopefish, being a particular standout, in my opinion), and the music adds to the overall weird atmosphere.

There's also a daily seed with online leaderboards, a challenge mode, local co-op, and a local multiplayer arena featuring various game-modes, but I haven't yet gotten the chance to try out the latter two (apparently it's two players for the main game, and four for the arena) - if they're as good as everything else, then I'm sure that they'll be a riot! My one and only gripe is that there's no online play, but given the value-for-money presented by the rest of the package, I consider this to only be a small complaint.

Anyone else a fan of this one?

Last edited by Pengling on 25 Feb 2022 at 11:36 pm UTC