NIDUS

I don't understand how this game is so incredibly niche despite it having some of the most fun gameplay and art direction I've seen in a bullet hell roguelike. The things you can pull off and the satisfaction you get from seeing a million little flowers flying off your dude gives an incredible dopamine hit. PLEASE give this game a try, it's so cool. Very hard (not surprising), but so good.

could use some changes to the visual language to make what you're supposed to do more intuitive. It's hard to tell if I'm just "bad" or if the style is too chaotic and homogeneous to tell and understand whats going on

this game runs like crap but still is a good gameplay

Brutally hard arcade shooter with a psychedelic art style. I never felt like I truly got a good grip on the controls, having to play two characters at once stretched my brain in an odd way I wasn't very comfortable with. It is viscerally fun to weaken and smash enemies with both symbiotes. Once you get really into the groove you start implementing the projectile explosion to clear enemies quickly. Boss mechanics are interesting and unique, even if they can be ludicrously hard when you are deep into a run. Outside of highscores or achievement hunting there isn't much replayability here, which would be a bigger complaint if not for the asking price. I think this game should specifically be praised for the unsaid mechanics it teaches the player. Bosses each have some kind attack or pattern that seems difficult at first, but clues the player in on small things they can do that improve their gameplay. The earliest boss taught me to hold down the blue symbiote for more damage when spinning. The hoplite taught me to dodge through attacks. The Gigant taught me to use the yellow symbiote further away from the blue one. For such a small game there is a sense of discovery I really appreciate. I like this game a lot, but probably would have liked it more if it wasn't so ridiculously hard. Only 1% of players have completed a run on Delicate, the "normal" mode.

SUCH a good game. A couple of things to know: - It takes a little while to figure out what it's asking from you and what types of moves you can do, but once you do, it has such a fun flow. - The 'tips' menu is really handy for getting the basics, but applying them and really seeing all that you can do takes a good bit of time and experimentation (and possibly watching other people play). - I think the most sensible way to play is right-hand on mouse and left-hand on controller. Aiming wasp is a bit easier with mouse, and controller gives flower a bit more freedom of movement. - You probably won't blink during gameplay. My eyes burn.

The performance is not great. I had 50fps in the tutorial with a 3080

Listed minimum requirements don't seem to be true. With 16GB of RAM and an AMD Ryzen Pro 7, the game is lagging like hell. Refunded.

Loved the art style and saw it was a twin stick shooter and just bought it. Almost instantly made me wanna play something else. Definitely isn't a shooter at all. If you like twin stick shooters, this is not that, fair warning.

what the hell is happening

I felt kind of "meh" about this game playing it on the standard difficulty and was ready to drop it until I was reminded that there's an easier difficulty below that - so I dropped the difficulty down and very quickly found that I actually *hate* the late-game encounter design. There are multiple fights where I have no idea how I'm supposed to move the flower fast enough to avoid massive, swinging melee hitboxes, the number of moving parts makes it increasingly difficult to actually parse where each of my guys are (and sometimes even which is which, something which had not happened to me at all prior to that), and finding windows to actually attack becomes increasingly rare and frustrating. I spent minutes on the beetle-like boss with the long legs and huge pincers, not at risk of failure, but completely unable to land a solid hit because the wasp kept bouncing off the side of the arena, running into the boss's pincers, and being forced to recharge - or! the boss would start doing a bullet curtain attack and I would immediately need to reposition the wasp in front of the flower and blow any chance of getting an attack in. Later in that run, I ultimately died only a hit or two away from beating the last boss after constantly taking hits I could not possibly avoid and was so profoundly irritated that I instantly closed the game. I'm not feelin it.