Hello! Having played this though quite a lot, I got curious about the enemies in this game and wanted to ask a few questions:

• What is the name of the large pink mutant (I feel my nickname of ‘The Lobster’ doesn’t do it justice)
• In the large room with the green slime, only one of the canisters seems broken - even though it repeatedly shows up after you get the vaccine, is there only one Lobster?
• When you fight The Lobster en route to the elevator you can’t kill him, only bring it to its knees, and is the subsequent respite based on a period of time or for a set number of rooms (for example if you bring it down it won’t show up for the next X number of rooms)?
• Are the humanoid enemies undead or just mutated / infected?
• What are those red tendrils on top of all enemies? Is that related to the virus?

And one more question about Arcade Mode in general:

• When does the mission timer start? Is it from the moment the elevator cutscene finishes or the moment you unlock the lab door at the beginning?

Apologies if the answers to these questions will spoil the story or gameplay but anything you can answer will help satisfy my crazy curiousity! 😁 Thank you!

Hey Speedcube-

Thanks for your interest! I'd be happy to answer. The way the enemies/boss work are actually pretty simple - we didn't go too fancy due to our time constraints for getting the demo out before February, so most of the time they'll just make a beeline towards you while avoiding obstacles.

1. The big pink guy there's no official name for yet, but it is the result of extreme mutation from the Pathogen-X strand. His "species" is the first in the development of weaponizing the virus, so he is relatively easy to defeat, but still hits pretty hard. I called him Meatman during the concept phase, just because he made me think of some mass of pink lumpy meat. We're thinking of naming him something along the lines of "Experiment One", or "Codename: Mutant-X".
2. Indeed there is only the one "Mutant-X". He managed to awaken and bust out of his tube after Hawk descends into the lab. There are a total of 8 Mutant-X monsters (there's also a small failed one you can find in a random room that may spawn with medical equipment).
3. Yes- whatever room you down Mutant-X in, it will take you entering/leaving 2 additional rooms for him to respawn (you can easily exploit this for tons of rocket launcher or Deagle ammo)
4. All of the common enemies you encounter were the research staff mutated by the virus breaking out before Hawk was called out to investigate. Think of the Pathogen-X virus as similar to the one seen in the film "28 Days Later". It's kind of like that without the added physical agility (and infection is airborne, rather than through physical contact). The virus enters the body and mutates muscle fibers to their extremes, resulting in tissue dying and being reborn into its own unique organism that  controls all basic motor functions. So they just become violent killing machines.
5. The red tendrils you see protruding from Mutant-X and the common monsters are their living muscle fibers having nowhere to go after mutation. The fibers essentially become a sort of "parasite" and expand greatly during the infection process, and since the body can only expand so much, they end up burrowing out of the skin. Pretty gross, actually.

For the mission timer, it starts as soon as the intro elevator cutscene ends.

-sodaraptor

Sorry it’s taken me so long to acknowledge your reply; I’m really grateful for all the context and the lore you’re able to share at this stage.

The effects of the virus are indeed gross but also very unique!

I had no idea there was a smaller Meatman that had a chance to spawn. I’ll have to go find him and try to work out his spawn conditions (love this sort of stuff).

I have noticed some rooms are rarer than others; for example I’ve only ever had a map with a staircase once in all my runs whereas the large green canister room seems core to every map.

Anyway thanks, and I’m definitely looking forward to the next update!