• Zenohell
  

  74 minutes playtime

  13 of 23 achievements

This is a bullet hell SHMUP. You can move in any cardinal direction at a fixed speed, but can only shoot upward. You also have a limited number of bombs that clear the screen of bullets and damage (if not outright kill) all enemies on screen. Meanwhile, enemies will shoot swarms of bullets at you, and you’ll need to use your 2x2-pixels-large hitbox to try avoiding them.

When you start the game, you’re given a choice between three different modes, but aren’t given any explanation for what’s different between them (and the names don’t give much clue, either: sure, “ARC” probably means “arcade,” but what does that mean about the gameplay? Or what about KAI and ZOR?). I also couldn’t find any description online, so I just tried out all of them and here’s what I found:

ARC is normal mode. You have three lives and come back right where you died on death, even if you get game over.

KAI makes enemy bullets faster, but it’s not quite hard mode because bosses seem to have less HP (I was using the green ship, which has a lower “power” rating than the blue ship, but bosses still died quicker, only getting off a couple attacks at times).

ZOR is the same as ARC with one crucial difference: if you get game over, you start at the beginning of the level. Also, there’s a bug that causes the music to cut out each time you continue after a game over.

After selecting a mode, you get a choice between three ships: red (normal), blue (strongest, but narrow bullet spread), and green (widest bullet spread, but slower). I chose blue for my ARC run, but that turned out to be a mistake since its easy for a wall of guided shots to trap you between them and the edge of the screen, where you can’t hit enemies due to your narrow attack. The game also regularly has rows of cannon-fodder rain from above, and once again the narrow fire won’t let you kill all of them before they reach the bottom of the screen, let alone fire a shot or three at you. Plus, between the background, your shots, enemies exploding, and swarms of medals that expand into transparency upon being collected (and only add to your score), it can be difficult to make out enemy projectiles, especially when they’re so fast, they can go from the top of the screen to the bottom in a single second and also be fired with several other bullets of equal speed going in different directions (or worse, when several rows of bullets overlap each other so you can’t see where the safe spaces will be when they reach the bottom). Needless to say, KAI mode makes these bullets even more difficult to react to; I can’t see some of these patterns being something that one with enough skill could react to in the first place, instead requiring either luck or memorization to avoid. Of course, with the way continues work, none of that will impede your progress and you’ll beat the game in around 30 minutes (but you only get the goOOOod ending if you beat the game without using continues!!).

In theory, ZOR mode is what I’d want from a SHMUP: checkpoints that reset the enemies on death instead of the game just letting you move on. Thing is, since it still works off a lives system and puts you back at the stage’s beginning on game over, it runs into a similar problem as Gundemonium where you have to redo long stretches if you have trouble with a late-stage enemy wave, and each level is longer than the last (I wish there’s just one well-made SHMUP out there that has a single life, infinite continues, and more frequent checkpoints, resulting in more bite-sized segments like Super Meat Boy). Plus, on top of having the same aforementioned clutter issues, I dared make the mistake of using the red ship, meaning the enemies’ thin red shots were even more difficult to spot among my own. I made it to the railway near the end of stage 3 a few times, but between all the clutter and the music bug (and length needed to retry), I figured I should go ahead and just stop there.

So yeah, I don’t think I’d recommend this one, but if you got that racial justice bundle from itch, I guess you could try it to get some idea of what the bullet hell genre is like (though I prefer regular SHMUPs).