Absence of Light (Koala Symphony Studios)

Cool and fast shooting with very small map and light metroidvania elements. The main gameplay is very similar to twin-shooters. Although playing with a keyboard and mouse is very decent, it’s much more comfortable to use a gamepad because it lets you move with the left stick and aim with the right. Shooting is fast, so you don’t have to worry about precision that much. The other important ability is focus. Since enemy, and especially boss attack patterns tend to lean towards bullet-hell, you need to use focus to slow down your movement to maneuver between bullets. Focus only affects your speed, which is pretty fast normally, and does not slow down anything. Also, your attack pattern becomes more scattered from the usual precise shots. Weapons can be upgraded up to three levels by collecting upgrade icons from destroyed enemies or caches. Later you can upgrade it even higher by finding a special item. Each level significantly increases the firing rate. However, each hit causes you to lose one weapon level. It seems more irritating than it is, because it doesn't take many upgrade icons to get a weapon over the basic first level. Aside from your main weapon, you can find four more…

The game looks very zoomed in which irks me, despite having a lot of space to operate in on the screen. I think it's because of the large geometry surrounding you. I didn't like that after a boss fight, if you want to go in with the best chance you need to farm mobs for XP to max your weapons again. This system only worked for me during the exploration portion of the game because it is otherwise tedious. With that caveat, I enjoyed the boss fights more than I did the exploration. I was not really immersed in the games world (In part due to the basic graphics style). The map system: You find the vendor for an area and purchase the map. This reveals an entire areas map and marks the location of any secret items that you haven't collected yet. The game has a death penalty where you lose gold. But you can bank the gold so it isn't lost on death. I don't see the point in this.. All it does is create a risk of needing to farm later to buy things, and forces you to decide whether you can be bothered going and banking your money all the time or not. I don't see this as a fun system in any way. It's otherwise a solid little bullet-hell microvania that looks to take 2-2.5 hours …

A wonderful bullet hell with great controls, awesome music, and great bosses!

no idea how this one is so under the radar, definitely recommend checking it out. Excited to see what this guy does next

Delightful schmup + metroidvania combo. Short but very sweet. Can get pretty challenging in the end. But still highly recommended.

Poorly implemented. Reflect ability not working with aiming or nothing.