Zortch

Short-order cook Zortch Maxinum chooses a cheap holiday and discovers that its alien hosts plan to eat their human guests’ brains. Trapped on an unfamiliar planet, she fights through fifteen levels and five boss stages to escape, aided by a mysterious voice. This science-fiction horror comedy pairs retro first-person combat with strange enemies and six difficulty modes.

Zortch Maxinum is a short-order cook, amateur engineer and self-described professional slacker who is bored with her job and wants a holiday. The inexpensive trip she chooses is a trap: aliens capture the human travellers as food. The setup turns an ordinary escape story into science-fiction horror comedy, with the danger of being eaten set against a protagonist whose working life and practical outlook are deliberately unheroic. Zortch is stranded on the aliens’ planet and has to get away before she becomes a meal. A mysterious voice helps her along the way, giving the campaign a recurring question alongside the immediate need to survive and escape.

The campaign spans fifteen levels, with five boss levels among them. These stages make up a single-player first-person shooter journey rather than a sequence of multiplayer arenas. The premise supplies a reason to push through each hostile location: Zortch is captive in alien territory, and progress means finding a route onward while fighting the beings and machines guarding it. The levels contain a broad collection of threats, from giant brain-sucking aliens to their inventions and associates. Spider mines, rocket-launching lizards, raptors, amoeboid creatures that imitate humanoid guards, and a large cyborg flatworm bounty hunter are among more than thirty enemy types. The absurdity of those combinations contributes to the game’s comic tone while keeping the conflict plainly dangerous.

Combat is built around nine guns plus a kick, combining familiar firearms with stranger science-fiction devices. A double-barrel shotgun and plasma pistol offer direct firepower, while a grenade launcher, TNT and tripmines provide explosive tools. The arsenal also includes a living lightning gun, making equipment another part of the creature-filled world. The player can switch responses as enemy types and spaces change, and the kick provides an additional close-range action. Because the campaign is combat-heavy, managing which weapon to use and when to approach a target is a repeated practical decision. The game keeps that loop legible through a compact arsenal rather than a large inventory of upgrade trees.

Enemies differ in shape and function. Some are large creatures that attack directly; others are mechanical hazards or armed creatures that can threaten from a distance. Spider mines, rocket-launching lizards and raptors create different problems in a firefight, while humanoid-looking amoeboid guards make the setting’s alien nature part of the visual surprise. Boss encounters provide larger set pieces within the level sequence, including a flatworm cyborg bounty hunter. More than thirty enemy types populate the campaign. Their varied forms make each area feel connected to the alien ecosystem and its inventions, without reducing the opposition to a single kind of target. Some foes suggest the aliens’ ability to engineer or repurpose life, while others are strange organisms in their own right. The roster ranges from small hazards to large adversaries, giving the escape journey a changing set of threats as Zortch presses farther into hostile territory.

The game offers six difficulty modes, ranging from very easy to extreme. That range changes the challenge available to different players without changing the basic story premise or campaign structure. Portable medkits support recovery, while invisibility offers a temporary way to move through danger. These tools complement the combat-focused push through the levels, with pickups and the available arsenal helping Zortch withstand the alien population. Adjustable difficulty lets players approach the same escape journey with less or greater pressure. Invisibility is one power-up among those tools; the campaign remains centered on fighting through hostile spaces rather than requiring a separate stealth progression system.

Zortch’s comedy comes from the contrast between a mundane protagonist and an extravagant abduction scenario. Maxinum is introduced through her day job and lack of ambition, then deposited in a setting where aliens treat humans as a food supply. The holiday’s cheapness is itself the trap, and the mysterious voice offers an unexplained guide through the crisis. Broad, absurd enemy designs reinforce the comic tone, as does the gap between Maxinum’s ordinary working life and the extraordinary danger surrounding her. The game keeps that contrast present during its combat-heavy progression: the protagonist moves from one hostile location to another with little ceremony, confronting bizarre creatures and machinery while trying to escape. This humour does not erase the stakes of capture; it makes the danger and the premise’s absurdity occupy the same scenes.

The released PC game has a deliberately small technical footprint and uses a custom engine. Its presentation pairs retro first-person shooting with low-poly science-fiction imagery, while the campaign stays focused on one protagonist and one escalating escape problem. A field-of-view slider lets players adjust how much of the scene appears at once, and an optional letterbox mode changes the shape of the view. The custom violence setting also allows blood to appear as confetti or ketchup, giving players control over the look of combat. These options sit beside six difficulty settings, so players can tune both the challenge and presentation around the same campaign. The story follows Maxinum’s capture, her hostile surroundings and the systems used to fight through the levels. It leaves the mysterious voice and the outcome of the escape for the game itself to reveal.