Neophyte
| Crusade |
|---|
| Neophyte -> Kraken -> Guardian -> Execution -> Overgrowth -> Anomaly -> Phobia |
Neophyte is the very first boss of the game. Its stage contains the game's tutorial, and each form of the actual boss teaches a different necessary way of fighting bosses: shooting down enemy cores, shooting down enemy guns beforehand, and then shooting armor to sever certain guns.
Appearance
Neophyte has a slate-blue core and armor, and lime tentacles. Its latter two forms have indestructible red armor and tentacles that split like plant stems. Each core has a yellow, round-pupiled eye, with the latter two cores' eyes having red insides of the irises.
Its Nightmare counterpart has pale vermilion, striped tentacles, bright green indestructible pixels, and purple core and armor. It has wholly red eyes with small pupils.
Personality and Traits
Neophyte enjoys a friendly battle, but doesn't take being overpowered by the player too nicely. Uniquely, it treats its circumstances like a game instead of a life-or-death struggle.
Battle
Tutorial
Main article: The Oracle
Neophyte's stage starts off with spawning Oracle to teach players the basic mechanics of the game. After Oracle dies or flees, Neophyte spawns in to properly start the fight.
Form 1
Neophyte's first form is very simple and is designed to teach players the basics of how future stages will work.
His design consists of a central core surrounded by 8 squares of blue-grey pixels with the top, side and bottom squares each having 2 tentacles coming off, making a total of 8 tentacles surrounding Neophyte. Each blue-grey pixel is slightly tougher to break through compared to the green tentacle pixels. Each blue-grey box is also separated by a line of green pixels.
Neophyte switches between shooting 3 basic attacks. He always starts by slowly shooting out slow bullets around him anti-clockwise. If this attack is ever repeated he will shoot out 2 - 4 bullets at the same time. He is also capable of shooting a line of bullets towards you. Finally he can shoot out slow moving yellow and orange diamonds in all directions.
After a while if you have not yet hit Neophyte's core an indicator will show up for a couple seconds hinting towards the fact you must shoot his core. Neophyte can also ask whether the player(s) are going to shoot his core.
This form shows players the basics of detaching pixels as most players are likely to cut off a tentacle to reach Neophyte's core. It is however possible to fly into the gap between Neophyte's core and his tentacles while he is spawning in as there is no collision before Neophyte becomes fully tangible. Doing this is risky as there is not much room to dodge his revenge attack and you can easily collide with a pixel and take damage but it can result in a very fast kill for form 1.
Form 2
The second form of Neophyte consists of many more tentacles and serves as the introduction to attacking guns. This also serves as a players first encounter to invulnerable pixels.
Attacks include :
- Circle bullets shot directly towards the player from each gun
- Diamonds or Circles shot out in different directions
- A cluster of bullets in the shape of an arrow (↑)
- Slow moving walls of bullets that travel from 1 edge of the screen to the other. The walls have a large gap at a random point in the wall that you must go through to survive. This attack spawns if you take too long during this phase.
If you wait long enough, arrows will form and point to the 2 guns indicating that the player needs to shoot them.
This form teaches players how guns work with how they attack, that you can attack them and that guns can shield the core of bosses.
Form 3
The final form of Neophyte consists of more tentacles and this time 4 guns, all of which are fully surrounded by invulnerable pixels. This teaches players about the fact that you are able to detach guns to destroy them instead of just attacking them directly.
Attacks that can be shot include :
- Slow moving bullets in all directions, occasionally with damage up powerups mixed in
- A very slow red homing bullet
- A long cluster of bullets shot like 3 arrows (>>>)
- Diamond bullets shot in all directions
- Small clusters of bullets shot from each gun
- Miniature walls of bullets either shot towards the player from each gun or shot in all directions from Neophyte's core
Every time a gun is destroyed a large wall of bullets goes from edge to edge similar to form 2. This attack is permanent and once it reaches the edge another wall will spawn on the opposite edge.
Waiting long enough will spawn arrows telling players to cut through the blue-grey boxes in order to detach guns.
Nightmare Mode
Nightmare mode changes quite a bit about the fight. Apart from the usual nightmare pallet swap and buffed attacks, 2 noticeable changes when starting are that you're thrown straight into the fight without the tutorial and that Oracle is no longer on your side and is instead constantly attacking you.
Oracle constantly switches from moving along the bottom of the arena to moving towards a player. At the start of the fight he shoots a single diamond bullet towards a player just over every 2 seconds. If he loses a pixel he will warn players to stop and start attacking more frequently and will mix in an extra circle bullet attack which is larger and faster than the diamond bullet. If players continue to shoot him he will get angry, attack faster and occasionally attack using the same line of bullets Neophyte can attack with, except pink. Oracle and his pixels also have considerably more health than in Easy and Normal difficulty which, with all the attacks from both him and Neophyte, makes killing Oracle much more difficult, though it is recommended to kill him for the shield he drops.
Alongside all of Neophyte's attacks being much faster, larger and more dense with bullets, Neophyte is able to borrow some of Phobia's attacks including :
- A pink homing spider usually released from each of Phobia's guns when destroyed
- Multiple of Phobia's red revenge attack spiders
- The large slug like homing bullet
- The long and fast worm like homing bullet
- The ability to summon "vine" bullets across the arena which if a player touches one it latches onto them, anchoring them to a small area for a short period of time.
Unlike in Normal difficulty, shield containers have the ability to spawn.
The secret curse is not present in Nightmare Difficulty however, at the start of phase 3 the effect of the cursed debuff given from the secret curse will be permanently given to each player. The curse cannot be avoided by dying in Co op and being revived.
Secret Curse Achievement
Neophyte has an extra achievement: beating the stage with the cursed status effect obtained after collecting the 3-Slice curse hidden in the level.
| How to obtain |
|---|
| The secret curse is spawned in the top left of the arena shortly after The Oracle is killed (indicated by the curse spawning sound) but will fly out of bounds within a couple seconds. The easiest way to collect it is to move Oracle to the left side of the screen before killing it and then flying up and left as soon as Oracle starts imploding. The curse is still obtainable if Oracle is killed on the right side of the screen as long as you kill Oracle from a distance. The curse will not spawn if the tutorial is completed normally
|
Statistics
Medal Times
| Normal/Easy | Nightmare | |
| Bronze | 5:00 | 5:20 |
| Silver | 2:30 | 4:00 |
| Gold | 1:30 | 2:00 |
Powerups
- Oracle: 2 Cannon/Shield
- Form 1
- Secret Curse: 3 Slice
- Core: 3 Cannon/Shield*
- Form 2
- Left Gun: 2 Cannon/3 Repel
- Right Gun: 2 Damage/Shield
- Core: Double Gun/2 Shield
- Form 3
- Top Gun: Cannon/2 Freeze
- Left Gun: 3 Damage/3 Sweep
- Right Gun: Cannon/2 Repel
- Bottom Gun: 2 Cannon/Shield
*Replaced with 5 Slowmo if Shields are maxed
| Easy Mode |
|---|
There are no cursed powerups.
*Replaced with 3 Cannon/8 Slowmo if Shields are maxed |
| Nightmare Mode |
|---|
There is a curse, but no cursed powerup.
*Replaced with 4 Slowmo if Shields are maxed |
Trivia
- Outside Nightmare mode, this is the only non-Bonus official stage without Shield containers.
- Neophyte, Kraken, and Xulgon are the only non-Bonus official stages with no time bomb.
- Because Oracle gives players 3 free shields, and drops a shield itself on death, this stage starts you off with one less shield than normal (with the exception of nightmare difficulty due to lack of starting shields).
- Neophyte's gold medal time is by far the shortest in the official game, requiring you to beat the stage in under 90 seconds.
- The blue-grey pixels in Easy Neophyte are purple. This is the only pixel colour change in all of Easy Difficulty. Plans for Easy mode alternate color schemes were scrapped, due to Easy mode being an alternative to the normal difficulty.
- Because the secret curse is forced on you in Nightmare Neophyte, the Secret Curse achievement is the only special condition achievement hard-coded to be unobtainable on Nightmare difficulty. This achievement and Abstinence are the only ones that cannot be obtained in Nightmare mode.
- Neophyte's first form and the Execution boss are the only cases where an official boss lacks any guns.
| Official Content | |
|---|---|
| Crusade | Neophyte ! Kraken ! Guardian ! Execution ! Overgrowth ! Anomaly ! Phobia |
| Invasion | Medusa ! Hermit ! Goliath ! Monarch ! Prospector ! Storm ! Xulgon |
| Bonus | Quartet ! Crossfire ! Ball Pit ! Credits ! Timebrain |
| Other Content | The Oracle ! Xulgon's Minions ! Difficulties ! Speedruns |
| Fan Content | |
|---|---|
| Apocalypse | Catalyst ! Beehive ! Xenoware ! Amethyst ! Reaper ! Triton ! Quantum |
| Chaos Campaign | Blizzard ! Siren ! Phineus ! Labyrinth ! Macro ! Prism ! Singularity ! Forge |
| Champion Campaign | Skylier ! Volcanion ! Wireframe ! Phantom |
| Uprising | Mantis ! Cortex ! Overlord |
| Vengeance (Campaign) | Hydra ! Inertia ! Splode ! Attractor ! Terra ! Witch ! AI ! Vengeance (Boss) ! Redemption ! Nightmare-Only Boss |
| Other Content | Cultivator ! Cypher ! Fortress ! Ghost ! Gridlock ! Karma ! THE LOVERS ! Pulsus ! The Psychic ! Tryout |
| Stage Remixes | Bonus (Fan Difficulties) ! Chippy the Anime ! "Completely Normal" Bosses ! Legacy Prospector ! Remixes of the Past ! Slow-Strat Invaders ! Variance (Mechanic Demonstration) |