Sometimes you start playing a game, and you know, you immediately know, that you’re in for something transcendental. I can count on my fingers the number of times it’s happened for me, but it’s a shortlist of some of my favorite games of all time: Resident Evil 4, Geometry Wars, Spelunky, and Neon White. These are all games that dug their hooks deep into my craw and changed how I view game design in one way or another, and my ah-ha moment with them all came within minutes, though crucially, each continued to surprise me for hundreds of hours afterwards. Sektori is my latest addition to this hallowed collection of the best the medium has to offer, and there’s a real argument for it being my favorite of them all.
Just looking at Sektori is enough to immediately convey the broad strokes—this is an arcade-y, pulse-pounding twin-stick shooter focused on chasing high scores in which you blow up millions of abstract shapes and constructs per run while the environment constantly shifts and settles around you and the best, most heart-thumping techno soundtrack you’ve ever heard envelops your soul. Movement of your ship is handled with the left stick; shooting is done by moving the right stick in the desired direction, and you’ve got a get-out-of-jail-free card in the form of a strike attack that shoots you forward a short distance while granting brief invincibility and ends in an explosion. The last major wrinkle is that there are various pickups to collect that power your ship up, as well as pads on the ground that can help in destroying a whole lot of enemies at once and/or get you out of trouble in a pinch.
Those various power-ups are the big differentiator in the moment-to-moment gameplay of Sektori, for multiple reasons. The easiest (and maybe most tired) point of comparison is Vampire Survivors; here, defeated enemies drop triangles on the ground, and collecting enough of them spawns a pulsating blue selector token on the field. Picking one up allows you to cash it in and power up your ship, though you have to collect multiple before cashing them in depending on what you want to upgrade. On the default ship, cashing in one token goes towards making your ship move faster, while collecting six lets you up your blaster’s capabilities.
Choosing when to cash these tokens in is hugely important; my favorite strategy is usually trying to get a couple instances of the Missile upgrade as early as I can, but with each of those requiring five tokens, it might be wise to also put a point or two into Speed along the way to make survivability more feasible. There are also three different ships in the game, with each one having different stats and quirks, as well as different orders of progression along the selector token tree, or even some instances of completely unique ones.
And on top of all that, you’ve also got golden glowing upgrades to collect too. Snagging one of these brings up three options to choose from based on which decks you selected at the start of the run. There are 16 decks total, ranging from straightforward ones that grant various upgrades for your blaster or shields to more complicated ones like Gambler, which can do things like guarantee more rare, powered-up forms of upgrades to appear more frequently and all the risks that come along with that. My personal favorite is the Exotic deck, and specifically the Laser Show upgrade housed in it, which automatically shoots out an array of enemy-seeking laser beams every time you cash in a selector token.
If that all sounds complicated, it’s really not! At the start you don’t even have the ability to change which decks are equipped, and the game is paused while you select your upgrades, giving Sektori an ebb and flow in which you’re constantly going back and forth from borderline overstimulation (complementary) to pondering your best course of action while clutching your poor Switch 2 in a sweaty death grip.
Rounding out the main campaign mode of Sektori are a surprisingly large number of alternate modes where the core rules and gameplay get remixed in really creative ways. I won’t detail all of them here, and I doubt many people are going to fully gel with every single one of these, but I’d be surprised if at least a couple don’t stick out as favorites for everyone. Gates was the standout here for me, removing all offensive capabilities from your ship in favor of having to navigate a perilously small playfield, desperately hunting for gates and bombs to steer into and set off to get a higher score and survive just a smidge longer.
But reading descriptions of everything on offer in Sektori instead of getting your hands dirty and playing it yourself is like attempting to behold Angelus Novus by Klee from your aunt’s blurry iPhone 11 shot with her stubby finger accidentally in the foreground. Yes, you can see it and might even appreciate it. But you can’t possibly get it. Not really.
The game never outright explains that all those tokens with letters in them spelling out MIRAGE (at least on the first difficulty), when each letter is collected, activates something called “rainbow mode,” turning your ship into a screen-clearing, high-score-skyrocketing death machine for a painfully brief few moments.
That yellow reticle that can appear for some reason around each boss’s glowing weak points? Completely controllable and manipulatable by a player that knows what they’re doing, it’s another way of being able to maximize score potential.
I had been playing the PlayStation 5 version for a couple dozen hours and feeling pretty confident about all these subtle gameplay tricks and nuances I had learned up to that point. Sure, my score was capping out around 5 million, with the highest people on the global leaderboards reaching scores in the tens of millions, but I was content with what I had managed. That was until I used a strike attack to go through a group of enemies and just so happened to pick up a selector token in the same action and noticed that my strike cooldown had instantly refreshed.
Puzzled, I proceeded to use a second strike to dash into a nearby jump pad on the ground and noticed that not only had my strike cooldown instantly gone away again, but also there was now text in the upper right corner of the screen indicating I currently had a “2x Strike Combo.” Strike dashing into another collectible on the ground upped that to a 3x. My heart skipped a beat as waves of realization crashed over me—I had seemingly cracked the game’s scoring system, but I now also had the daunting task in front of me of retraining my muscle memory to keep my strike combos going for as long as possible while also, you know, not dying. Within a few days my high score had more than doubled, and I was sure I had learned all of Sektori’s secrets.
My favorite feeling in a video game is when I’m asked to actually learn how to do something while given the space to discover things on my own, and Sektori offers this up in more ways than you can probably imagine given its simple twin-stick setup. For instance, with how much your senses are being overloaded in every single moment, it’s natural that you might almost entirely ignore the game’s scoring system until you really find your Sektori legs and start regularly finishing runs. But if you keep playing, you become brave enough to wade more into this technicolor laser, throbbing techno synesthesia ocean; your eyes now open to the opportunities around you at any given moment.
Months later I’ve put in over 80 hours across the PS5 and now Switch 2 versions and reached the point where I can comfortably play on the second difficulty level. I’m near the top of the leaderboards on both of these versions and pretty damn proud of it, frankly. And despite all of that, I just discovered last night at the time of this writing that cashing in a selector token also refreshes your strike cooldown, meaning it’s now easier than ever to keep a strike chain going, though I’m now also having to reconfigure my muscle memory for the third time.
Rare is the single-player game (much less a twin-stick shooter) that still has new things to teach me after nearly 100 hours. It has been nothing less than a gift. A day will come, I’m sure, in which I move on to other games, but for right now? I never want to stop playing Sektori. And I can’t wait to discover the next hidden-in-plain-sight game mechanic that causes the next 100 hours of high-score chasing to look completely different than the first.
