Forced Sacrifice: Lost Soul

This is a dodge or bullet-hell game without the shooting. Each stage presents a unique challenge, requiring you to either negotiate a dangerous maze or dodge bullets or objects on a single screen. You never know what you'll get because it's always different. When you touch a directional button, you may move continuously or in steps. Alternatively, items may fly by themselves or only when you move. As one might expect, the game is not for everyone because it is extremely difficult. There is an easy difficulty level that removes most limits, but it is still not something you can complete in a few minutes. You can help yourself with a few skills, such as the ability to dodge or teleport to the point of death. Only one can be chosen before beginning a level. While easy mode allows you to freely employ skills, higher difficulties remove their use with each death. Abilities can be upgraded when you’re on the main map. This is also where you choose the next stage, but you’re stuck with it until you beat it. You can’t go back to the map even if you quit the game and click “continue”.

This game might be someone's cup of tea, if you like a story-heavy game with lots of dialogs like in a VN and are interested in the eschatological theme (but I suspect there might be more people repulsed by the theme than attracted to it). As for the game, you play through a bunch of simplistic twitch-reflex 2D stages where you have to avoid things, it can be quite tricky and the explanation disappear pretty fast, so it's easy to be left wondering what's going on. What made me finally give a thumb down is the very bad performance in some levels, due to the fact they just stacked a bunch of filters on top of each other and called it a day. And also the fact you can't redefine the keyboard controls.