A 3D bullet hell monster collector doesn’t sound like something that should work as well as it does.

I’ve been on a bit of an obscure indie game kick lately, primarily because they’re hitting a few intersections that bigger budget games aren’t for me; they tend to be short, they tend to be cheap, and I get a major kick out of unearthing titles that others haven’t seen or have otherwise looked over. It makes me feel like a real tastemaker. It’s immediately obvious that Hamelin’s Journey exists as the almost-platonic ideal of the exact kind of project I’m talking about when I say “obscure indie game”. This, in itself, is a bit of a shame, because it means that not enough people have played it. It’s also a boon to me, however, because I get to be the one who tells you to go play it.

The game itself is quite simple, requiring you to do little more than dodge incoming bullets while your collectible creatures automatically shoot back at the nearest target. You can’t aim, you can’t sprint, you can’t jump; you could play this on an Atari 2600 controller, given that all you’re really capable of is moving around and hitting the interact button to select menu options. When your means of engaging with a game are this simple, you’ve either managed to make something that’s woefully underbaked, or something that’s precisely as realized as it needs to be; this is unquestionably the latter.

A major factor in what makes this as enjoyable as it is comes down to how absolutely broken you can make some of your team compositions. I’m going to declare this as a universal, golden rule in the hopes that everyone in the industry adjusts their design documents accordingly: buffs must always stack, and never refresh. Having two of the same buff doubles the buff, as God intended. Having four of the same buff quadruples it. There’s one obscene strategy you can pull off that flies in the face of everything holy and decent by stacking a “double all outgoing and incoming damage” buff on top of itself four times. It rules. I don’t know if the multiplier is additive unto itself and thus gives you x8 damage, or if it’s multiplicative unto itself and gives you x16, but the only thing you really need to know is that you can pair it with crit boosts and fire rate ups to become the living, walking equivalent of an M134.

But while all of the mechanics are in place, there’s far too much redundancy present for them to shine the way that they ought to. Even in speedruns of the game that last for a little over ten minutes, about half of the runtime is dedicated to grinding basic enemies; leveling up is both exceedingly slow and exceedingly necessary, which grinds pacing to a halt like the game is throwing the emergency brake. Part of the appeal of monster collecting games over traditional RPGs — for me, at least — is the fact that fighting a strong opponent will give you a strong ally if you’re able to capture them. Mewtwo can beat your ass if you go at him with a weak team, but managing to capture him guarantees that you’ve got a WMD sitting in your pocket. Captured monsters in Hamelin’s Journey, however, lose all of their experience and drop down to Level 1 the second you get your hands on them. It’s one thing to grind away at a wall of muscle twenty levels above you in the hopes of getting a rare capture, and another to realize that you have to go through the same grind all over again if you want the powerful creature you got to be a fraction as powerful as it was when you were fighting it. I don’t see why these monsters need to reset to base stats when you get them. Keeping their power level high would certainly make a short game even shorter, but it would do so by cutting out meaningless, consequence-free grinding. That’s not the kind of gameplay worth preserving.

Hamelin’s Journey is fun, and a little creepy, and a very unique combination of gameplay elements that all mostly work in harmony together. There’s definitely still room for this to be a lot more than it is, but this is leagues ahead of the developer’s previous work. Not to make it sound like I’m shitting on them, or anything — it’s a good thing if your newest games make the old ones look amateurish by comparison. It’s always nice to see a creator improve on their craft, and Warkus and Xena-Spectrale might just have what it takes to make something truly phenomenal if they can stay the course.

I don’t know who comes up with the itch.io time estimates. This one advertised “two to four hours of gameplay” and barely clocked in over thirty minutes.