Available now with Bethesda’s stamp of approval
What’s the most 90s way you can market your retro-styled prequel to a 90s mech shooter? Other thanan Acclaim-style stuntwhere you offer people £500 to tattoo their baby’s face with the game logo, I’d say perhaps releasing aQuakemod. So here’s Episode Enyo, a prequel to upcoming “biopunk” hack ‘n’ slasherSlave Zero X, now available as a Bethesda-approved free add-on inside Quake.
Made by Ironwood Software, Episode Enyo is a prequel to Slave Zero X, which is itself a prequel toSlave Zero, a third-person mech shooter whichBrendy enthusiastically described as “a okay game”. The six-level campaign has us play as one of X’s antagonists, the assassin Enyo.
It took me honestly too long to realise that occasional kewl, cruel voice samples like “Beloved by the bullet” were kill quips from my murderer and not part of the soundtrack. I enjoyed blasting baddies while bopping tobanging beatswhile an edgy lady heaped scorn upon me. This delusion worked for the tone, and I must confess that’s a fair chunk of the music I was listening to in the early noughties anyway.
You can download Episode Enyo for free inside Bethesda’s modern version of Quake, on PC and on consoles. If you’d rather play within another version of Quake (I still useQuakeSpasm, though fancier alternatives exist), you can download the mod separately fromItch.io,Nexus Mods), orModDB.
If you’re curious,Bethesda have an interviewwith the some of the devs. I was delighted to learn that Slave Zero X’s 3D backgrounds were actually built inside open-source Quake map editorTrenchBroom, so the two already had common ground.
Slave Zero X is due to launch on the 21st of February onSteamandGOG. It’s also headed to Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch.
