The Void Rains Upon Her Heart

i keep syaing this game is a big transfem allegory but no one believes meee

Я обычные-то аркадные шмапы очень люблю, а тут рогалик-шмап! Попробовав раз, очень втянулся, очень понравилось! Но решил ждать полноценного релиза, чтобы потом вкусить весь кайф и полное впечатление от завершенного продукта. К сожалению, игра уже очень долго находится в раннем доступе. Когда выйдет, никто даже примерно не знает, даже сам создатель. :) Но всё же я жду с нетерпением и буду ждать!

so many friends to love!

♥♥♥♥♥ bengin pot of soup, ong fr fr, no cap, this some good mf soup

Это, наверное, самое лучшее, что создало человечество. Лечит игровую импотенцию, да и, в принципе, душу.

I have learned three things about this dev so far: They liked Mountain of Faith, they got smacked by Mercury Poison a bunch and then decided to inflict it on their playerbase, and they are very, very good at their job. The first two might be projection. The third isn't. Hour count is due to leaving the game open, but it probably reflects future playtime anyway. Fantastic game for bullet hell players of all levels from "curious" to "Lunatic", huge amount of content presented and remixed in clever ways that add up to utterly staggering levels of replay value, great style, great music, and I'm only at like 6% completion with half the game modes still locked. Actually let me elaborate on that first one. Most games, especially bullet hell games, have difficulty levels. This game has those, but its approach to difficulty is so much more than that. Every element of the experience, from the moment-to-moment gameplay to the run architecture to the meta progression, is crafted to let you choose how challenged you want to be, regardless of your skill level, without compromising on opportunities for skill expression. It's hard to put into words how impressive this is, especially in a genre renowned for its inaccessibility. Each fight presents you with two goals beyond just winning, one continuous and one discrete, one the same for each boss and one that plays differently depending, each taxing your mental resources in different ways, with maximising both requiring you to manage the friction between them. This is then layered on top of classic bullet hell gameplay, leaving you to decide just how far to push yourself on a moment-to-moment basis. The concept isn't new, hell, it all gets added up into a single score at the end, but the dynamism of the execution is so fluid that it does something I thought was impossible: it adapts to your current ability on the fly. I often avoid playing difficult games when tired or mentally fuzzy because it's frustrating to fail things you've beaten before and lowering the difficulty temporarily is unsatisfying. This game is so good at difficulty management that this doesn't happen; instead you do what your current skill and capacity allow you to do, and you still feel good about it. There's no tilt, just the anticipation of the next try. It's breathtakingly elegant. It lets you gauge your limits and push them on your own time, on your own terms, in your own way. It fosters organic skill growth while presenting ever-harder challenges to pit yourself against. It is, quite simply, a masterclass in offering players the freedom to engage with an experience in a way that works for them while retaining the concrete goals and challenges whose lack often puts people off things like sandbox games. Everything else is fantastic, too, but that was the thing I felt I was best positioned to elaborate on/gush about. The way the stakes of a roguelike run interface with these systems to...okay I have to stop myself now, I wanna go keep playing, just. Yeah. I hadn't quite realised until I sat down to write this review, but wow.

This game is great for those who like bullet hells in general, but it went beyond my expectations with the content I was expecting to be given. I saw the 700+ achievements and knew there was a lot of stuff in here, but still, it's been surprising me with how much there is to unlock, how many different ways of playing it there are, and how well it's all been built. - The game heavily encourages skillful play, tying your skill directly with how much more powerful you become. [spoiler]Good play results in higher scores, higher scores give you more Karma, and Karma grants increased luck with the upgrades you find.[/spoiler] - The bosses are all, while having similar designs among the different enemy types, are all quite unique in how their attacks function, and are surprisingly well-balanced as the difficulty increases. Almost every boss has [spoiler]roughly 10, maybe more(?)[/spoiler] different levels of difficulty, with patterns being harder and harder as the levels increase, and it's impressive how well the separate tiers have been scaled. - Each boss I've found has 2 different unique challenges to go with it, some only attemptable in the main roguelike mode to prevent it from being brute-forced or intentionally cheesed by using quick play. Some of these challenges are very creative, and all of them show that whoever came up with them has a very good understanding of how the gameplay and bosses work. For example, one of them I recall baffling me for a little while was [spoiler] "Kill (this boss) without moving" [/spoiler], which is in fact possible, but obviously requires a specialized loadout to accomplish. The other challenges I've seen usually aren't as puzzling, but do still require good knowledge of the boss and how the mechanics work in order to pull them off. - I will say, the story isn't the kind of thing I'd get invested in, but it isn't what I got this game for, so I don't mind at all. Roguelikes, for me, are almost exclusively played for the gameplay; I'm not very concerned with the story in Enter the Gungeon or Slay the Spire either, but those are still top-tier games, and the same sentiments go for this as well. The whole game does have a cozy atmosphere, though, and I appreciate that. - The music isn't something I pay much attention to as I play, but it isn't at all bothersome when I have it on. I personally usually play games like these on mute while listening to a video or other music, so much like the stories, I don't really go to roguelike games for the music very often. I honestly forgot how much I paid for this, but it was definitely worth whatever that was 9.5/10

Utterly Brilliant

Once the train of endless unlocks starts it just keeps getting better and better, it can be a bit tough getting used to Quickplay and some of the other game modes as you unlock them but man is it rewarding to do so!

Cutest game ever!