Can you remember a time when games were so simple they were literally lines on a screen? If you've ever tried coding your own games, then you might have started off with incredibly simple paths and dungeons, the kind of thing that you might have found when playing a game on Teletext in the 90s. Well, game developers Relevo have taken this retro style choice and remade the iconic arcade game Gradius using only text.
The game is called 'Battle for Asciion, ASCII being the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. ASCII is essentially a code that links a numerical value to a letter in the English language. You're essentially looking at a black screen with text making up all of the action, action that is fast-paced and very 'bullet hell-esque' despite it literally being a bunch of symbols.
According to the official game page on Steam, '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.'
We've just made Gradius, except it's 100% ASCII based, you can even save your screenshots as .txt files. https://t.co/C3c6ZRatCY pic.twitter.com/NZlzzmdJ2W
— Jon Cortázar (@Jon_Cortazar) March 10, 2026
I'm not going to lie, it's pretty hard for me to follow what's happening visually; if you've gone from playing Pokémon FireRed on Switch and then picked up your Steam Deck to play this, then your eyes might be in for a shock. In terms of capturing that retro, early computer gaming style, however, it's brilliant. There are modes that emulate different monitors and add scanlines, and you can play it with your keyboard as though you were playing a game you've made entirely out of code yourself.
There's also a neat feature called Textshot where you can save your gameplay as a .TXT file instead of a screenshot. You're capturing your exact moment in the game via ASCII characters that can be copied, printed, saved in a document, and reopened in a text editor of your choice. It's niche, yes, but cool nonetheless.
Battle for Asciion launches on Steam!
— RELEVO (@REL3VO) February 5, 2026
A re-release of our 2012 web game, rebuilt for PC. A shoot ’em up made entirely of real ASCII text.
💰 $3.99 / €3.99
🎉 25% launch discount
👉 https://t.co/UsskCr7bhy#indiegames #pcgaming #retrogames #ascii #shootemup pic.twitter.com/cAzHdWKG6l
Relevo also mention that Battle for Asciion actually featured as a web-based game back in 2012 when the likes of Miniclip was still distracting students in IT classrooms and stopping them from achieving their full potential, so there's a strong chance you might have checked this game out before. It's an interesting project and one that, at £3.39, won't break the bank when checking it out. It's not something I would play for hours, but it's a great example of what's possible with a little imagination and a whole load of code!
