So I Tried… One in a Krillion

Each edition of So I Tried… I will try a game that I have never played before. Will I find something new to love? Will I find something new to despise? I'll take a full half hour, no matter how bad it gets or how badly I do, to see if this is the game for me. This time, I played One in a Krillion.

Well, technically, we played One in a Krillion. Recently, I and a few others in the GrinCast streamed ourselves under the sea.

What I Thought It Was

I didn’t actually have much of an idea, going in. Obviously something to do with krill and underwater settings and probably something tongue-in-cheek, but I hadn’t given it much of a look beforehand. Right at the start of the game itself, it appeared to be some sort of action game, which sounded interesting, at least!

What It Actually Is

A Devil May Cry-styled top-down action game where you play as a krill and use a sort of sword to fight fish and sharks while trying to aim for a high score! Additionally, you can swap between a solo and swarm mode at any time, which swaps out for different play styles. Going solo makes you and your attacks faster and gives you access to, among other abilities, a spinning slash attack that I adore using, whereas the swarm mode gives you one free hit before taking damage every so often and abilities like a giant hammer and delayed explosive blasts. Using all the tools in your arsenal, you can swim around through a handful of short arenas and fight off a variety of fish enemies before reaching a giant shark as the final boss. Overall, while One in a Krillion is relatively short, I’m really impressed by how solid the fighting mechanics are. There’s perfect dodging that you’ll have to get used to and, with all the projectiles and fast enemies, you have to make sure you’re always moving to get your hits in, but no damage is unavoidable. I mostly wound up using only two of the special moves, one per mode, but all of them are at least interesting, and you can enter a sort of rage mode periodically that allows you to use them endlessly, rather than having them use up your special attack meter, so there’s plenty of room to experiment.

Will I Keep Playing?

Oh, most certainly! The game is short, but One in a Krillion absolutely incentivises multiple playthroughs. It’s short enough that it can be beaten in under 10 minutes and there are loads of achievements for beating it under certain conditions: using only one mode, never taking damage, using only the hammer special ability, and so on. I’ll admit that part of why I’m stoked to keep coming back to this game is because I managed to figure out a way to consistently clip out of bounds which allows me to do runs that only consist of the first fight and the final boss fight (which absolutely lets me do many of these achievement runs with relative ease), but even beyond that, I just find One in a Krillion exceptionally fun to experiment in. Also, for anyone else interested, it doesn’t hurt that it’s free!