Metrash

Metrash is a PICO-8 game that st33d posted to the Lexaloffle BBS on 3 August 2019 and also released for browsers, Windows, macOS and Linux. It is played from a top-down view across connected rooms rather than one continuously scrolling stage, and there is no health bar, so a single hit restarts the current room. Its exploration hook is that directional weapons are swapped rather than accumulated, so returning to an earlier room means solving it with a different tool, and the map is hidden in the room design instead of shown on a screen. The author has described the two-week result as closer to a shmup odyssey than a metroidvania.