Schism

Holy ♥♥♥♥ this game is like crack

This is an extremely flexible game. You may look at the trailer and think "I'm not too good at shmups, looks scary." but I'm also bad at shmups, yet I still managed to reach the good ending. That's because the game gives you an insane amount of options to break the game balance in half if you stare at the UI long enough and attune your mind to its arcane set of rules. If you go all in on the stat building mechanics you can be the worst shmup player in the world and still win, and vice versa. Its color switching mechanic fits thematically in that everything about the game swings dramatically in opposite directions. The art often looks dull and desaturated but occasionally swings towards beautiful high contrast color, the story is grimdark and depressing but is dotted with bits of effective comedy (shoutouts to the pilotredsun santa reference NPC), and many of its mechanics have some dramatic trade-offs to consider. For example, one of the challenges the game tracks is whether or not you chose to worship the god of fate, a god who selects another god for you at random in exchange for giving you +3 to your faith stat immediately. I started off with the darkness god who gave me +5 to all stats, but levelling up would ask me to *remove* a stat instead of gaining one. And then I got a relic which gave me omen chance, which causes poker cards to accumulate in your UI every time you use a card item, then gives XP based on your poker hand. Needless to say I didn't want that with the god of darkness, so the next altar I found I re-rolled the god of fate and landed with the god of jolliness, heresy be damned. New problem, I'm still losing stats on level up. So I find an active item that allows me to spend MP to exchange XP for faith XP or vice versa depending on my current polarity. So I'm spending this run collecting christmas loot, spending MP to avoid leveling up, but the chests that the god of jolliness gives occasionally contain memories, and one of them lets me boost my strength, so even if I get a level up I can treat strength as an anti-dump stat since I'm gonna get it back anyway. I ended up winning this run despite the fact that I'm bad at shmups, I had difficulty modifiers increasing boss difficulty, enemy buffs, and how many permanent diseases I start with, on top of my religion literally draining my power at every moment. All because I spent the time to search for secret rooms, maximize the value of each floor I went through, and buff myself enough to instakill most bosses. It's a galaxy brain game and I love it a lot. Also it gets bonus points for having vibes similar to the freeware titles I'd play on yoyogames on my high school computers, I love the audiovisual experience of this game a lot, please purchase and enjoy it.

This game has everything.

Schism is great, if you like the sort of thing it is. It takes The Binding of Isaac maximalist approach to the roguelike structure, grafts on the Ikaruga color-shifting, and retrofits some extra traditional roguelike mechanics -- most importantly a sprawling religion system that's fairly akin to Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. Each of the 26 gods rewards different behaviors, with some being fairly straightforward and others... well, I don't know why I'd want to play a couple of them. It's interesting, though! The game is really about building up your advantages and scaling. Scrounging all of the value you can get out of each of the rooms and resources that appear on each floor. The bullet hell with Ikaruga gameplay is quite fun when you're scaled similarly to the enemies, but most runs you'll either outscale the enemies before too long or end up well behind and annoyed with how bullet-spongy they seem. I only had a couple of runs where I eeked out a win through clutching out dodges, but that doesn't mean I wasn't always having fun when I figured out some crazy scaling scheme and rained unrelenting waves of bullets across entire rooms. The art and style have this indie-jank weirdo cyberpunk vibe to them, and I dig it. Combined with some of the stranger mechanics, the game really has its own vibe. I play a lot of different games, so I particularly appreciate highly unique styles like this. Schism is some of the most fun I've had in the roguelike twin-stick shooter space in a long long time. It's perfectly up my alley, and an easy recommend -- if you like this sort of thing. It's certainly a strange experience that asks the player to figure out a lot, and, while that's a major plus for me, it certainly isn't for everyone.

what a lot of roguelikes miss out on that games like Isaac nail so flawlessly is the ability to use your brain as the meta currency. schism succeeds at this aspect incredibly well by overwhelming you with information at first. what initially seems like incomprehensible, random nonsense becomes second nature as you go on, and the more you demonstrate your understanding of schism's language, the more it rewards you. check out the demo, and if you like the gameplay, get ready to go down the rabbit hole.

It's very silly, I mostly was winning boss fights in under a second because the powerup scaling is broken in so many ways, but that's fun for a while. The combat when it's *not* so broken that you don't even see it unfortunately isn't particularly fun or interesting - the screen is just full of noise so you don't have a lot of control over what happens. For this reason I'd recommend Binding of Isaac over this, but they're similar enough that if you're already all Isaaced out, I would give this a chance. That said, I didn't enjoy it enough to go for the "true ending" after getting the basic "you won a bunch of times" ending.

goty

One day, I'll go crazy and be able to get obsessed enough to understand this game. And I'm gonna play the ♥♥♥♥ out of it.

:O

Ikaruga x Star of Providence x Rogue