Battle for Asciion
Relevo · 2026 · Action, Casual, Arcade, Shooter, Side Scroller
PC
Positive88% · 17
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Screenshots
About Battle for Asciion
Not styled like text. Made of text.
Battle for Asciion is not just styled like text — it is text.Every ship, enemy, explosion, background and boss is rendered in real time using actual ASCII characters.There are no sprites, no textures, no PNGs hidden behind the scenes.
What you see on screen is literal text.
Classic arcade action
Inspired by legendary horizontal shooters like Gradius and R-Type, Battle for Asciion delivers tight, old-school arcade gameplay focused on precision, memorization and pure skill.Fight through five long, challenging stages, face giant end-of-level bosses, and upgrade your weapons to survive increasingly intense waves of enemies — all represented purely through text.Retro display modes
To enhance the old-school feel, the game includes multiple visual modes that simulate classic CRT monitors, including scanlines and monochrome phosphor colors such as green, amber and white.It looks like a terminal.It plays like an arcade machine.
Textshot™ — Screenshots as real text
Battle for Asciion is so text-based that it includes a unique feature we call Textshot™.Instead of saving screenshots as images, Textshot™ captures the current frame and saves it as a plain .TXT file containing the actual ASCII characters displayed on screen.Open it in any text editor. Copy it. Share it. Print it.It’s not an image — it’s the game, frozen in pure text form.
Key Features
- Classic horizontal shoot ’em up gameplay inspired by arcade legends
- 100% real-time ASCII graphics — no sprites, no images, no textures
- Five long stages with massive text-based bosses
- Weapon upgrade system with strategic depth
- Deploy a single Option to extend your firepower
- Multiple CRT-style display modes (scanlines, green / amber / white phosphor)
- Textshot™: save gameplay frames as real .TXT files
- Local high-score leaderboard for true arcade competition
Controller Support
Controller support via Steam Input (keyboard emulation).Fully playable with keyboard or controller.
What Steam players say
Recent verbatim reviews from Steam — separate from playze.io community reviews below.
A small but inventive title. Simple, stylish, and fun for fans of classic side‑scrolling shooters. Loved it!2 found this helpful
Aesthetics are great, feels like a 80s BBS fever dream. Music is wonderful and fits with the theme, though I wish there was an option to adjust sound effects and music separately in the menu. Game can be tough, but I believe it is fairly forgiving. Still working on understanding the stages but I'm enjoying it much more with the recent hitbox changes in update 1.2.2 found this helpful
I love the graphical style, its great! Very neat to be able to select the terminal collar (white, green, orange). Unfortunately, the rest is pretty uninspred. While you have 4 ships to choose from, but they are all the same and just chacrater swaps. After beating the game you are told a code to play hardcore mode, but its barely more difficult, and should ahve just been a visible mode from the start. There are 10 secrects to find, but these appear to be just hidden targets you need to shoot, for an additional end of game bonus. I found 2, but here is no real incentive to keep playing to find these.1 found this helpful
Very cool concept, and a good bit of fun!
Battle for Asciion is an unusual and ambitious shoot ’em up that takes one of gaming’s oldest visual concepts and builds an entire action experience around it. Developed and published by Relevo, the game embraces a distinctive ASCII presentation where everything on screen is formed from text characters rather than conventional graphics. While many indie games use retro aesthetics as a nostalgic layer, Battle for Asciion fully commits to its concept, creating a side-scrolling shooter that feels like a forgotten arcade adventure running inside a vintage computer terminal. The gameplay itself follows the traditions established by classic horizontal shooters. Players pilot a spacecraft through a series of dangerous stages packed with enemy waves, environmental hazards, and screen-filling projectile attacks. The design philosophy clearly draws inspiration from genre veterans, focusing on quick reflexes, memorization, and careful movement. Every level demands concentration as enemies attack from multiple directions, forcing players to learn patterns and gradually improve through practice. This old-school structure gives the game a satisfying sense of progression, especially for players …
Retro style horizontal shmup. Maybe not the best out there but very entertaining for a buck. Very cool the TextShot screen capture in ASCII text format. Maybe some sort of global leaderboards can give it more life or replayability.
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