It’s about time I made a review of the game whose main character is literally my profile picture.

…wait.

Hazelnut Hex has always been a game that just hit all the right buttons for me. Even as far back as when the game was announced on Nintendo’s Youtube channel, Hazelnut Hex intrigued me, especially as someone who was (and still is) obsessed with Touhou, but rarely got to actually play those games. That, alongside the game’s gorgeous presentation and charming premise, made Hazelnut Hex one of the games I looked forward to the most in 2022, and I am still absolutely thrilled to say that Hazelnut Hex did not disappoint. This is genuinely one of my all-time favorite games to play and revisit. And upon finally beating the game’s Moderate mode, I figured it was finally time to share everything that made me love this game so much, and why it’s stuck with me even after first playing it.

The first thing I want to cover is the game’s fantastic presentation. Like, everything about this game’s presentation is absolutely stellar. The catchy music, the artstyle, the character and enemy designs, the arcadey feel you get from playing the game, nearly every detail in this game feels like it has a ton of love poured into it. Hell, at the very start of the game, you get a screen referencing the “winners don’t do drugs” messages you’d see in US arcade machines, but instead it says, “Winner’s don’t skip breakfast”, which I think is just so damn genius and fits in so well thematically with the rest of the game. Hazelnut Hex is loaded with charming moments like this. The game’s boss dialogue, while short, was filled with little moments that made me chuckle, and as a pun enthusiast, it was fun seeing basically every enemy being named after a pun. However, I feel like where this game succeeds the most in terms of presentation is its art style. As a cute-em-up, the game definitely needs to strive for a cute artstyle, and Hazelnut Hex’s artstyle is just absolutely perfect for this. Everything is completely coated in pastel colors and drenched with purple outlines, and it all just looks incredibly pleasant without being too in your face. The way everything is designed ups the charm factor for me as well, specifically the characters and enemies. Even though a lot of the main characters show up pretty briefly, I found all of them to be memorable with great designs and fun personalities. My favorites are probably Jules and ESPECIALLY Nat. Words cannot DESCRIBE just how much I love Nat as a character, but I’ll probably save that for like a “favorite characters” list or something. The enemies have such cool designs and they’re animated so well, like, Chunderfins, my guy, did you have to go so damn hard on something that’s gonna appear for like, 3 seconds on screen? Also, I’m sorry, but can I just talk about how fucking FIRE this game’s soundtrack is? Just listen to Stage 5’s theme and you'll have a good idea on how fantastic this game’s soundtrack is. Honestly, I could go on and on about how much care and charm was put into this game’s presentation, but we’d be here all day, and we still have a whole game to talk about. You might wonder why I’d put so much focus on an aspect of the game that’s ultimately trivial compared to, you know, the actual game. But as I’ve mentioned in my Cat Girl Without Salad review, presentation still plays a pretty important role when it comes down to making games. When it comes down to it, Hazelnut Hex’s entire aesthetic and vibe played a huge part in why it stuck with me to this day. Overall, this game just absolutely nails the cute-em-up aesthetic, but has such an immensely charming identity that I can’t say I’ve seen in really any other game. Like Cat Girl Without Salad, the presentation really could carry this game alone, but I’ve gushed about it for long enough. How does the gameplay itself hold up?

Gameplay-wise, Hazelnut Hex is what you’d expect from your average Touhou-like shooter. You have your 3 different shot types, screen clearing bombs, the usual bullet hell fare. You also get a charge shot which, from what I know, is unique to Hazelnut Hex. It’s a really cool (albeit somewhat overpowered) mechanic, which allows you to charge up a shot that can pierce through bullets if you aren’t currently shooting. It can be really handy for people new to these games, but it can also be pretty risk-reward at times since you aren't shooting while charging up the shot, which is pretty nice. Aside from that though, that’s basically Hazelnut Hex’s gameplay. What you see is pretty much what you get. There isn’t too much setting Hazelnut Hex apart from your typical bullet hell at first glance, however, I don’t think this is a bad thing. Hazelnut Hex isn’t trying to be something super groundbreaking or introduce any new concepts, it’s just meant to be a really solid shooter game with a charming artstyle. what it may lack in totally unique concepts, it more than makes up for with its incredibly solid gameplay.

Rather than trying to establish something new in the cute-em-up genre, Hazelnut Hex takes what was already fun and polishes and refines it to an insane degree. This might be one of the most polished and well-designed games I think I’ve ever played. Seriously, I can’t think of a single section in this game that I disliked even a little bit, it’s just that fun. The flow of these stages are also immaculate. It’s so much fun to blast through enemies quickly once you’ve become accustomed to the game, and even if you haven’t, they’re still very fun to go through and are really well-paced. Simply put, it’s just a good, clean, fun experience. However… this is kind of where it starts to get hard to write about this game. Because Hazelnut Hex relies on its polish and great flow as opposed to something super standoff-ish (aside from its aesthetics and music), it’s kind of hard to write about what exactly I love about Hazelnut Hex without mentioning things that just apply to a great bullet hell game in general. Like, what would I write about that wouldn’t already apply to, say, Touhou 8, a game with a ton of polish in its patterns as well, yet also contains a player-swap mechanic? I don’t know, but I guess it can’t really be helped, so I’ll try to explain my love for this genre as best as I can. Please bear with me here!

One thing I love about Hazelnut Hex (and the bullet hell / cute-em-up genre as a whole), is that it can be really difficult to grasp at first due to the insane amounts of bullets on screen, but over time you eventually grow to learn the enemies’ patterns and mechanics, and can get to a point where you’ve mastered certain sections. Even the first stage can be overwhelming to someone who hasn’t gotten used to the game yet, as it has a ton of bullets flying towards you, and while it’s not so overwhelming as to make the first section nearly impossible, it can still be intimidating and take some time to get used to. However, as you make more attempts through the stages, you eventually get to learn more about what the stages themselves hold, how to deal with certain enemies, more about the mechanics of the game, and over time, you feel more of an incentive to get better and better at the stages. Hazelnut Hex in particular does such a fantastic job in allowing people to get more accustomed to its mechanics, which is why I think it’s a perfect bullet hell game for those entering into the genre. Like I mentioned earlier, Hazelnut Hex’s charge shot is a perfect tool for people new to these games, and can take a lot of the pressure off by removing a lot of what’s going on the screen. Plus, the game has unlimited continues, so you can beat the whole game in one go and see everything before coming back to it. Still, even with all of these helpful features, Hazelnut Hex still lends itself to being quite challenging. Bullet hells are, well, still bullet hells, and because there’s a lot of stuff flying on the screen, they require a lot of reflexes in order to avoid getting hit as much as possible. Even when you’ve mastered everything the level has to offer, you still have to put it into action, but when you’ve gotten to a point where you can finally zigzag past all those bullet patterns that intimidated you in the first level, you’re left with such a satisfying feeling that I couldn’t do justice through description alone. But I think what I love most about bullet hells is just how replayable they are. They don’t even have to have that much content in them, just having consistently fun dodging and shooting gameplay is going to make me seriously want to come back to them. They’re incredibly addicting and I really can’t tell you why. But there’s also something about bullet hells that make me want to get better at them and learn about their more nuanced mechanics. For example, Hazelnut Hex has a mechanic that they don’t explicitly mention, where the closer you are to an enemy, the more damage you’ll do to them, which is just such a fun thing to be able to put into practice. There’s a ton of other things like this that keep you coming back to it, like the game’s Moderate mode, genuinely one of the best Hard modes I’ve ever played in a game. Even little things like getting the boss dodge bonus (defeating a boss without using the charge shot) at the end of a boss battle make me want to come back and hone my craft even more. I don’t know what it is about the bullet hell genre in particular that makes me want to come back to it so often, but frankly, I’m not complaining, because each time I do, I have a ton of fun.

Though, now that I’ve talked about why I love bullet hells as a genre, what does this have to do with Hazelnut Hex in particular? Well, I say this because Hazelnut Hex captures all of these feelings perfectly and encapsulates everything I love about this genre. Sure, you’re going to struggle a bit as you first play it, and even when you’ve beaten the game, you’ve lost a ton of continues. But as you keep playing the game, you’re going to start to get more of a feel for it, until you reach that point where you can finally triumph over the game, and even when you do, you’ve had such a fun time that you still want to come back for even more. That’s what I love most about Hazelnut Hex.

Before I finish up this review, there are a few nitpicks I want to get out of the way. As much as I love Hazelnut Hex, it’s not perfect (I mean, no game is). So I’d just like to go over a few of its flaws that I’d like to see being fixed if Chunderfins ever decides to make a sequel to this game or even just another shmup in general. For one, this game is pretty damn short, only having 5 stages. While I’ve stated in the past that I typically prefer shorter games as opposed to longer ones, Hazelnut Hex is one of the few games that made me kinda sad that there wasn’t more, especially since in terms of extra content, you really only have Moderate mode to go off of. At first, I was thinking a sixth stage might’ve fixed this problem for me, as the main villain, Lamona, kinda just shows up out of nowhere at the end of Stage 5. However, as I’ve played more and more of Hazelnut Hex, I’ve started to realize that the main campaign is pretty well paced as is. I still think a 6th stage would’ve been cool, but I’d prefer something like an Extra Stage like in Touhou Project, as it keeps the main campaign flowing well while also giving players some new content. I think an Extra Stage would be cool to see in a non-Touhou game, maybe for this stage we could fight Ghost Lamona. I think that’d be pretty cool. There’s only one other issues with this game that I think is really worth mentioning, and that’s that the shot types are kiiinda lame? There’s 3 shot types, but there’s not much of a change between the three aside from range and speed, so you’re typically just gonna go with the one with bigger range. The 3 shot types definitely should’ve had more differences to each other, maybe one of them could have homing properties, one of them has low range but deals more damage, and the other could be your standard shot type. I really only changed one, but I think that would be enough, because this shot type lineup needs just a little bit more variety to make it great. Other than that, though, those are basically my nitpicks with the game. They’re really minor, and don’t do anything to ruin the game even a little bit, but I still felt like they were worth mentioning.

And with that, that’s all I have to say about Hazelnut Hex! This was definitely one of my more… rambly reviews on this site, but I really can’t help it. If you couldn’t tell already, Hazelnut Hex is a game I’m immensely passionate about, and something about it definitely latched on to me ever since I first played it back in late 2022. I really can’t recommend this game enough, especially since words can’t describe how much I think this game rocks. I absolutely implore you to try this game out for yourself. It might not live rent free in your head like it does for me, but even if you only plan on playing it once, I can confirm that you’ll definitely have a great time with it. (9.5/10)

Before we finish, I want to give a HUGE shoutout to @Phantasm for helping me put together this review and for fixing it up. Absolutely give them a follow as they’ve been a great help and make excellent reviews. With that, that’s basically all I have to say for now. I’ll see y’all in the inevitable Owl House: Witch’s Apprentice review.

I have finally graduated from Shmup Academy with my first 1CC: 3918000.
Anyway this game was a complete surprise that I'm very glad I checked out. The opening tracks rock and set the pace for the rest of the run. Short, literally sweet, and with an easy to understand scoring mechanic that has me doing my best to climb the leaderboards. Shoot clusters of enemies with powershots for multiplier, make sure to use your bombs regularly to cancel as many of the largest bullet clusters possible for bonus points. That's it, that's the game, and it's perfect.