Indie Game of the Week 412: Minishoot' Adventures

I've played many explormers for this feature (some might say too many) but this week sees the debut of the first explooter. Very excited. This delicious auspiciousness comes to us courtesy of SoulGame's Minishoot' Adventures—they're French, so I'll forgive them for not knowing how apostrophes work—which was one of the big Indie surprises from last year that I intended on covering sooner rather than later. Since they call me the Explormer King around here (or will do any day now) it was a deeply pressing concern that I offered my two missile upgrades on the game's quality tout de suite.

Turns out I may have been a little bit premature in my classification, however. Rather than basing itself on the explormer model, it more closely resembles a Zeldersatz. That's right: It's not an explooter at all but actually a Zeldershootz. Good thing I'm here with all my professional gaming wiki taxonomy to set things straight. Were it not for all the danmaku trappings it'd be a fairly standard one of those too: big overworld to explore, many dead-ends and other side-objectives that lead to items you can use, big formal story-critical dungeons filled with enemies and puzzles that are often built to require the very same traversal-enabling item you'll find within, and all couched within a 2D top-down perspective that can occasionally obfuscate (intentionally or otherwise) entrances and other details with its tilted perspective. It also has this pleasing chunky look to it, almost like a mobile game but not quite in as much of a pejorative as that sounds. For whatever reason the comparison coming to mind most is either the hard-outlined animals of the DS Zoo Keeper game or the icons used in the Monster Hunter franchise for its various weapons and gear.

That simple aesthetic belies a great deal of designer knowhow behind it. For one, your enemies are going to be pelting you with bullets on a constant basis but the color of these bullets give you a sense of what you need to look out for. Red bullets are those aimed deliberately towards you and their source should probably be dealt with quickly (or else evaded), while orange bullets are more passive and part of an indiscriminate firing pattern that should be easier to avoid once you know the pattern. Eventually there's some deadlier customers firing dark red bullets that take two health points off you instead of one—a similar unwelcome rug-pull to a case seen in Hollow Knight and how a few of its endgame bosses also broke this cardinal "one hit, one HP damage" rule—so sometimes a battle can become a case of choosing the lesser of two evils if a regular red and a dark red is heading your way and you can't avoid both. While surviving the battles will come down to your own level of danmaku mastery, even on the hardest difficulty setting it's never overwhelming and there's plenty of upgrades you can go off and find if a particular boss, mini-boss, or isolated arena battle is giving you trouble. The game's also generous with its difficulty settings in this regard too, giving you three modes to start with as well as the more cheat-like accessibility tweaks. Even if you're not a TouHoudini (one who can escape any bullet pattern) you should be just fine here, assuming you're capable of swallowing your pride at least. Darn sight better than swallowing a hundred bullets a second, probably.

That's pretty much the game in a nutshell: Zeldershootzes aren't particularly common (in addition to Minishoot' I can only right now think of The Binding of Isaac and Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet that adopt that twin-stick style with some semi-mandatory exploration elements) but the Zelda format itself is fairly indelible so the loop will feel familiar enough to fans of that series, which I have to imagine is almost everyone. It does give you a pretty big world to explore and its upgrades are apportioned in such a way that every discovery feels like a valuable find. In addition to the traversal upgrades and the unique items that confer passive bonuses like a fixed chance to evade an incoming bullet (best not to rely on it too much though) you also have a standard skill tree that works from points gained from going up levels. This is a very versatile tree that lets you upgrade and downgrade any of its nodes free of charge: I took up the habit of dropping points into the critical hit chance boost and then withdrawing them later once I had enough for a flat damage increase (easy choice between "more damage some of the time" or "more damage all of the time"). It encourages you to always spend your points even if nothing you can afford is really jumping out at you, because you can always redistribute those points later towards something more impactful.

For the most part, I've really enjoyed this game. The highest difficulty setting is just about manageable for someone like me that was never great at bullet hell games but reached a level of adequacy that could pull me through the NieR games and The Binding of Isaac at least, and even if it can be annoyingly withholding with its secrets—it at least gives you upgrades that let you know if you're done with a particular dungeon or mini-dungeon—and its little races with playful spirits were definitely not my thing, it's been a treat just to fly around that world, drifting around corners and boosting over ramps, and completely demolishing the wandering enemies that gave me pause not too long before. There's also little stylistic touches like how the enemy encounter music for its arena battles initially resembles, at least for the first few bass notes, the boss music from Sega's Fantasy Zone. Minishoot, much like Fantasy Zone, is evidently aware that you can have a protagonist that's a spaceship while also simultaneously being "jus' a little guy" and its heartening to see this modern game give a respectful nod to a cute-'em-up trailblazer. Either that or I'm reading too much into it and no such homage was intended. (Don't worry Opa Opa, I'm still in your corner.)

Rating: 5 out of 5.