As part of the April Fool’s Day celebration, Sega released an 8-bit version of Bayonetta.
As you know, many tech companies, Google included, have a long-standing tradition of releasing something special during April Fool’s Day. Some of these materials might be part of a more elaborate prank, while others are completely legit. As part of April Fool’s Day, Sega released an 8-bit version of award-winning game Bayonetta on Steam.
The fan of the Bayonetta series can download and play it for free on their Steam account. Now, this may not look like much, but we have to admit that seeing the all-powerful witch stripped down of her otherworldly powers and weapons is something totally new.
The 8-bit version of Bayonetta is quite easy to play, but, in our opinion, it’s not actually a full-fledged game, since it resembles one of those mini-games spread throughout a bigger game. Remember Doom 3 and Resurrection of Evil, its expansion pack? If you recall, during the first minutes of the game, while wondering around the Marine base, there were a couple of arcade-style machines which allowed the gamers to play Doom 2 or Doom 1.
Well. It would appear that this is the sort of Easter egg mini-game one would expect to find in a title such Bayonetta. What can we say about Sega’s take on April Fool’s Day? It’s more like a hardcore survival mode.
The player controls a pixelated Bayonetta, wearing gray sci-fi suit. Unfortunately, instead of the traditional demonic spells performed using the character’s hair or the gruesome methods of execution using well-timed sword and pistol attacks or guillotines or iron maidens, the players will only have a modest gun which shoots only a couple of slugs per seconds.
The game’s animations remind us of the Contra series or perhaps Metroid Prime. So, as far as we can tell, the whole purpose of Bayonetta’s 8-bit version is to survive as long as possible and shoot down as many monsters as you can.
Since this is more of an April Fool’s Day hoax than a game, the player will only be able to use one weapon and to evade the incoming enemies by jumping. As for the game’s bestiary, you will have two types of enemies to deal with: a couple of winged demon heads, which look a lot like Doom’s floating heads on fire, and some foot soldiers who kind of remind us of the Wild Hunt’s navigators from Witcher III.
As we’ve mentioned before, the game can be downloaded for free from Steam.
Image source: Steam