Bullet hell is one of the more niche genres in the gaming sphere, with their inherently hardcore nature relegating their appeal to the most dedicated souls. Only those who significantly invest in learning complex patterns and practicing their precision would be able to enjoy the visceral satisfaction this genre has to offer, right? The relationship between the number of bullets on-screen and accessibility are usually inversely correlated, unless the bullets are coming out of you instead of the enemies. However, with the release of Minishoot Adventures, hopefully the tide will turn on that notion. Minishoot Adventures is a shoot’em up with a healthy dose of Zelda sprinkled in, developed by two-person indie studio Soul Game and released in April of 2024. It is ultimately a charming little adventure that effectively reframes the bullet-hell genre into a cozier, Zelda-like framework, even if there are a few snags along the way.
Note: A review copy was provided by SoulGame. Thank you for the copy and for developing this game!
Presentation
Minishoot places you into an unnamed world populated by sentient miniature ‘shiplings’ under attack by a disgraced shipling known only as “The Unchosen.” With the village destroyed its denizens ensnared in corrupted crystal, a lone ship deep within a cave is called by a primordial deity with the task of restoring balance to the world. The plot is quite predictable and goes similarly to how you would expect a Zelda game to play out: a great evil corrupts the world, and it falls on a lone hero to explore dungeons and gather powers to face said evil in a climactic final battle. It’s a simple foundation, but it does exactly what it needs to do, establishing the world and an excuse to get the player exploring. What isn’t predictable is that there is more to the world than the basic plot, inscribed upon ancient texts that you can find throughout the world. While learning these texts are entirely optional, they give greater depth to the world beyond the standard cookie cutter formula of “being a world that needs saving.”
There’s an oddly satisfying simplicity to the game’s aesthetic, personally reminding me of the visual cleanliness of many Coolmath web games. This may or may not be an intentional direction for the style, but it’s comfortable, like the warm embrace of a fireplace during a bitter winter’s night. Even if not, it emanates the charm of an indie game, and there’s something comforting about that in an era of the safe and cynically overproduced AAA video game. The sound design is equally as warm, lacking anything loud or intrusive that would break immersion. The music is consistently mellow, regardless of the situation, and the hit feedback against enemies and the environment scratches a very specific itch within my brain. In a genre that often consists of millions of bullets and SFX cluttering the screen at any one time, there’s a surprisingly hypnotic edge to Minishoot’s aesthetic, and that could be attributed to it’s mellow tone and minimalism.
Gameplay
Minishoot Adventures is best described as a marriage of a Zelda-like adventure with metroidvania elements, if everyone in Hyrule was given a gun and an infinite supply of bullets. Explore an area, unlock it’s dungeon, obtain an ability, then complete a bullet-hell boss fight. It’s an unlikely formula, but it works in more ways than one. For starters, it gives greater purpose for the level design beyond simply connecting areas of greater importance. Each room is now a micro-challenge in of itself, with rocks, trees, and other scenery now serving as obstacles or barriers to safely hide behind. It enables the developers greater creativity in how they construct their bullet mazes, taking advantage of the open play space without sacrificing the claustrophobia that is staple to the genre. Rather than retaining torturous control of the pacing by restricting stage progression to on-rails movement, Minishoot offers greater freedom in how an encounter can be approached.
One encounter in a small dungeon littered with destructible blocks had a large enemy spewing bullets that threatened to deal double damage and wipe me out in seconds. Low on health and far away from a respawn point, I took out just enough destructible blocks to offer enough space for movement, but I left some up in case I was overwhelmed. From there, I ducked in and out of cover, shooting the enemy when they weren’t shooting and quickly getting behind cover once bullets started flying, and it was both exhilarating and liberating to utilize my environment to safely navigate that encounter. While this example doesn’t entirely encompass the breadth of challenges you will face, since many areas are far more open, the main throughline is that many encounters are quite creative in not only the enemy/bullet patterns, but also how they can play into aspects of the environment as well.
The combat starts out straightforward, and it remains relatively straightforward until the credits roll, and that is its greatest strength for accessibility. Many games in the genre often have mechanics that complicate the process or add extra steps in providing safety. For example, Ikaruga uses a polarity system where players swap between two states to nullify the lethality of two types of bullets. Light polarity protects you from light bullets, and dark polarity protects you from dark bullets. Take another game like Space Moth: Lunar Edition, where you have two separate firing modes for killing enemies, with the lesser damaging one charging a bullet absorption ability but causing enemies to fire even more bullets at the player. These systems are both great, but the added complexity limits their accessibility, since they both require considerable risk-taking on the players end, which can become punishing if they fail to use it effectively. Minishoot Adventures strips down these mechanics and only has the raw challenge that comes from the encounters themselves, though there are some abilities that make the players’ lives easier without requiring excessive risk, such as bullet-clearing shockwave similar to the blank from Enter the Gungeon. These add some layer of strategy to more difficult encounters, all while keeping the player from feeling constantly on the back foot. Even if an encounter is too difficult, there is quite a bit you can progress to ease the burden, including an all-encompassing assist feature.
Minishoot has a surprising number of layers to its progression. Setting aside the inherent improvement in mechanical skill, there is an RPG-lite leveling system, where killing enemies awards ‘experience points,’ and earning enough levels you up and awards a skill point that you can allocate to improving certain stats of your guns and ship. Such stats include the damage dealt, fire rate, fire range, movement speed, as well as the efficacy of the abilities you gather along your journey. It’s a simple system, but it works because each upgrade feels substantial rather than the placebo of micro-improvements found in many games with number-based loot systems. Further, it also introduces a level of meta-strategy in the earlier stages of progression by giving you the ability to remove skills and refund the points you’ve obtained, allowing you to re-allocate them into other skills for a certain encounter. I was struggling on a particular phase in a boss because I couldn’t get close enough to deal damage without taking excessive damage, so I took some points out of my movement speed and put them into my firing range, which made the fight significantly easier. While this evens out as you level up more and fill out your skills, it’s still a neat mini-challenge in the early to mid game.
While the skill system works well, it does require a shift in perspective before you can fully appreciate it. Starting out, I was hesitant, having started the game on Hard and expected a more hardcore experience where each victory was a result of my own skill, and concerns arose where I thought the difficulty would boil down to simply grinding for experience rather than earning each victory. This concern did become apparent in a couple spots where the difficulty spiked considerably, especially in spots where enemies shoot projectiles that deal double damage. One boss in particular caused some trouble, and while a few encounters worth of experience gave me the necessary skills to beat it, I felt that the victory was a little limp, because the additional skills evened out the challenge as I continued attempting the boss.
However, this concern only popped up once or twice, as the rest of the game’s difficulty was relatively balanced. Additionally, I’ve come to realize that this game wants to be more of a relaxing adventure about continuously making steady progress, and that’s fine with me. Circling back to the Coolmath reference I made earlier, it reminded me of the web game with a similar philosophy called “Johnny Upgrade,” a game about starting weak and eventually growing strong enough to take on the boss at the end. It is frustrating at the beginning, but it needs that edge because it’s what encourages you to explore and grow stronger, thus making the payoff satisfying. Because I was so weak in the first half, persevering and being rewarded with what the game gives you makes it all the more satisfying to play.
The other major portion of Minishoot’s progression lies within the many dark corners of its world. There are many, many progression-based items you can find throughout the world, such as health upgrades, energy upgrades, NPCs that offer various benefits in the village, miscellaneous upgrades, abilities to use in combat, as well as currency you can spend with various merchants scattered throughout the world. There is quite a bit to discover in the world of Minishoot, but the recommended progression for the main path is surprisingly linear, and the game puts a lot of trust in the player to figure everything out. While the next dungeon is always outlined on the map, the actual steps to unlocking it are obscured, thus encouraging the player to scout the area and look for the triggers themselves. This structure works surprisingly well, offering an open area to explore at your leisure without the paralysis of choice common in many open-ended games. Plot-critical progression of any one dungeon or area is entirely self-contained, and anything where an item in one area is useful in another is strictly relegated to optional content, which makes exploration tight and focused if you are seeking to progress the main plot.
Minishoot adopts a mostly wordless approach for its discoveries, relying a lot on visual language to communicate many of its elements. Picking up a new ability or item is hardly described at all, save a few words dedicated to tutorializing the controls necessary to use it. Instead, many of its elements are taught through gameplay. When you are given an ability that gives you a boost in your movement speed, the game gives you a ramp and immediately shows you how this ability can be applied to the world around you without spoiling all of its surprises. These portions are designed elegantly, giving just enough information without the need to overexplain anything, an issue that has become increasingly common in the games landscape. However, that elegance isn’t always consistent, mostly in how the rewards are presented to you.
There are plenty of rewards found throughout the world, though the game doesn’t always make immediately clear how they are useful to you, especially since many of them require specific NPCs to make proper use of. Take the golden scarabs for example: they are a challenging collectible to find and require some skill to successfully catch them. Finding them is satisfying, but I didn’t find out what they were used for until 2 hours later when I finally found the NPC that actually makes use of them. I personally didn’t mind the delayed usage of collectibles at all, but this puts a lot of trust that the players will actually engage with the world enough to locate every optional NPC that is available. If not, the player risks missing out on NPCs that offer crucial features, such as healing and other useful tools, and they can be discouraged from exploring if there isn’t any immediate usage found for certain collectibles.
The other (albeit more minor) obfuscation that was noticed throughout the game was in visibility of certain elements in high stress situations, more specifically, the player’s energy bar, which is attached to the back of your ship. The diegetic HUD element is nice, but it is important that it is starkly visible and capable of being gauged at a glance. Take Dead Space for example: in it, the player’s health is represented as a bright blue bar on the otherwise drab back of Isaac Clarke’s neck. The colors contrast the elements around it, and it is big/visible enough to see what it’s like, even from your peripheral vision. This is where Minishoot unfortunately stumbles a bit, since a small brightly colored energy bar on a brightly colored ship against a brightly colored environment does affect readability of this element, occasionally leading to situations where I would go through encounters not knowing exactly how much I had left at any moment. However, with how fast this resource recharges, coupled with some helpful sound design indicating when you are out, there is still enough to manually gauge what’s left, even if I can’t see it the intended way.
Trophy Hunting
Just like the main game, earning every achievement in Minishoot Adventures is a relatively simple affair, only requiring 100% map completion and beating the game on Hard mode. If you start the game on Hard from the outset, then you could obtain everything in a single playthrough. There is a decent challenge found in doing everything on Hard, especially the arena and many of the in-game challenges, especially since the Arena has a focus on combat. However, nothing has been found to be extremely difficult, and is all doable with sufficient practice. Additionally, if there is anything you are struggling on throughout the game, there is always an assist mode available to help you out, making the trophies a cakewalk. This platinum could be challenging, or it could be a relaxing break between bigger games; it’s up to you as to how you’d like to experience Minishoot Adventures.
