Hellsinker

I don't view this as a video game so much as a misplaced alien artifact. While it (possibly) was constructed by normal human beings, it has the same feeling of something which hovers on the hazy edge of the real, sensical world. Playing Hellsinker is a deep dive into a uniquely eccentric narrative, but unlike games like Hylics, it doesn't at all feel like it was intended to be weird. Just very, very cryptic.

And oh man, is it ever cryptic. There's text and information embedded, hard-coded into the .exe file that you're unlikely to ever see because it only appears on screen for a couple of frames. Even trying to summarize the setting and narrative is a puzzle, with pieces so scattered across the web that it's hard to verify much beyond the "certain" information given in the game manual. But it's clear from the long stretches of dialogue between stages that the narrative is clearly very important to the creator, and that they very much want the audience to piece it together. To me, there's a powerful appeal to the enigmatic and unfinished quality of this game, which elevates it from an excessively complex shmup to a portal to an unknown world.

From what little we know about the setting, the game takes place in a desolate far-future world inspired by the excellent manga Blame! (go read Blame! please). Humanity attempted to extract and compress karma from the universe in a massive structure called the Cardinal Shaft, but an unspecified catastrophe took place and left much of the world barren of life. Only small bands of posthuman nomads survive, most of whom attempt to scavenge the ruins of civilization for helpful devices. The player characters are part of a group called GRAVEYARD who attempt to stage a return to the Cardinal Shaft, to fulfill a mission which (unsurprisingly) not much information is given about. But it seems that the world itself is generating guardians to halt them - strange biomechanical beings called Prayers which swarm out of the ruins of the Cardinal Shaft. As the story progresses, it takes turns which increasingly meld metaphysics and futurism, drawing to a conclusion just as enigmatic as everything that came before it.

Playing Hellsinker is just as much of a venture into the unknown as trying to track down information about it. Probably the best comparison is Radiant Silvergun in terms of control and level design - there's multiple paths, all sorts of stage setpieces, and a surprisingly large moveset which depends on holding combinations of buttons for certain periods of time. A few of these combinations, like Fossilmaiden's secondary bomb and flash laser, aren't very reliable to trigger which is a bit frustrating, but for the most part the player can easily access their entire arsenal. And you'll need to. This isn't like most shmups where secondary attacks are situational gimmicks. Each weapon has an important role, and the normal forward shot is generally the weakest and least useful (for survival and scoring) ability at your disposal.

Which is the most useful, and in a larger sense what strategies are best for scoring, is heavily inconsistent. Hellsinker follows some weird moon-logic when determining the effectiveness of weapons at raising a given enemy's score value (the linchpin of the scoring system being that some weapons do a small amount of damage but rapidly increase score value) or actually killing them. Some invulnerable enemies give massive score from chip damage, others are nearly worthless. Sometimes it's better to kill a "master" enemy which others are chained to, other times it's worth much more to finish off all the satellites before killing the master. Sometimes grazing lasers gives you hundreds of points in seconds, other times it's nearly worthless. Yet another aspect of Hellsinker's puzzle - enemies can look the exact same but behave differently depending on, say, what side of the screen they're on. ...That is absolutely not an exaggeration, by the way.

Despite its dedication to Not Making Sense, most of the difficulty of Hellsinker comes from figuring out what to do in a given circumstance, as opposed to actually doing it. It plays strategically in the way that R-Type does, basically, rather than the reaction-based spur-of-the-moment pathing you'd expect from something like Ketsui. Which is to say, behind the obfuscation the actual game doesn't demand execution on the level of most shmups... and since you have recharging bombs and liberal extends, it should follow that Hellsinker is really just a trash game for casuals that happens to disguise itself very well as something else. Of course, I'm a trash casual so my 5* should probably be disregarded, but I think that's a pretty shallow appraisal. Hellsinker isn't about 1ccs in the way most shmups are, but it's not really a shmup on a deep level. It just so happens that the most effective way for it to communicate its setting and narrative is through the medium of a shmup. Considering how effectively it's wormed its way into my deep subconscious, I can't deny that it does an exemplary job of what it tries to do.