Hold It In is a hardcore sci-fi tower defense roguelite, focussed on deep strategic combat and sandbox play.
You play as a commander who must use at everything at your disposal to hold closed a rift, from which interdimensional horrors are staring out, ready to end our world if the shields are breached.
The game all takes place in a 360 degree battlefield, with the rift at the center, and a horde of robotic machines attacking your defenses.
Nobody knows why the machine host wants to open the rift, but does it even matter? Your job is to smash the living **** out of them and last long enough for the UN scientists to figure out how to properly close the damn thing.
This is an easy game to pick up and play, but a brutally difficult one to master. Key features:
Open ended playstyle with deep synergies and theorycrafting, and loads of upgrades and branches in skill trees
Varied and expansive roster of units and defenses to choose from
Extreme levels of player agency and possibilities for beating the game
Relentless, head-banging soundtrack with a very "Doom 2016" feel to it
Enemies that are truly diverse and carefully designed to feel like a real machine host throwing everything it has at you, and pushing you to the limit of your decision-making skills and game sense
Bosses that are memorable and throw up hard counters to your best laid plans, rewarding experience and knowledge
A high but fair level of difficulty, each run is permadeath, funds to purchase stuff is scarce and feels earned
Graphically, the game has a retro Bulletin Board System (BBS) aesthetic, with glyph-like and minimalist visuals, but a lot of juice and modern UI and UX sensibilities
Why am I creating this game?
I wanted to what it would feel like to play a tower defense with a similar intensity to the Doom series in terms of action, but with the strategic depth of games like Rift Wizard, FTL: Faster Than Light, and Path of Achra. This is basically that game, to the best that I can do with my skill and resources.
The game is meant to give a sense of surreal abstractness but also hard-hitting moment to moment brutality in the battlefield. It will feel familiar but also in a strange, almost liminal way due to the graphics and the storyline, which seem generic at first glance but go far deeper in terms of lore and realism than it would seem at first glance.
The game makes you feel like a smart badass at times, and at other times like you don't know what on earth you need to do to beat the next boss or enemy combination.
I envisage that most players will get at least a few hundred hours out of the game. It is designed to reward deep thinking and lateral puzzle solving. I have designed it carefully to offer a challenge to even the most crafty of players. Good luck and I hope you get as much of a kick out of it as I did making it.
