Recommended by Cold_Comfort as part of this list.
Shmups are a genre I've always been interested in but never really got into. Much like their Arcade-origin ilk, they are gaming in its purest form: an exercise in skill and score. It's a genre all about throwing yourself against an insurmountable wall and trying to achieve not only completion, but mastery. It's a genre that's for the most part, rather light on story or characters because the in-universe stakes are unimportant when the true conflict is between player and game. When I'm tired of longer, story-heavy games, this kind of primal, back-to-basics approach to game design is therapeutic in a way: much like a rouge-like, it's non-committal and allows me to put in a run or two a day, get a little further, and not feel like I need to commit to anything longer than that. But despite my interest, I've never had a shmup that really hooked me. At most, I'd find something neat that I would credit-feed until I reached the end and promptly forget about a day later. But when I booted up ESCHATOS for the first time and heard the glorious FM Synth sounds of Yousuke Yasui's score pierce my ears as dozens of enemy ships flew on-screen and the camera made these big, cinematic sweeps and took these wild angles during the action, I could tell I had something special on my hands.
ESCHATOS takes a sink or swim approach to its game design: it lays down the ground rules and hands you all the tools you'll need, before throwing you straight into the deep end. You have 3 buttons that each serve a specific purpose: a narrow shot that travels to the top of the screen, a wide shot that covers more horizontal ground but doesn't go full-screen, and a shield that can both block shots and deal contact damage. To get a higher score in ESCHATOS, you need to destroy each enemy wave without letting a single enemy escape, which will increase your score multiplier. Let an enemy live, and the multiplier goes down. In order to get the best score, you need to learn each individual enemy's behavior, each wave's formation, and how to best use the tools at your disposal in order to keep the multiplier rising, encouraging multiple attempts to help you learn and master each of the game's Areas and Stages.
While it's not the toughest game on the market, ESCHATOS is no walk in the park either. Screen-clearing bombs are an instant-use pick-up and not something you can hold for later, and lives are few and far between, meaning that learning enemy formations, bullet patterns, and how to maneuver your ship carefully to both dodge, attack, and claim Bombs and Extends is essential to your survival. Despite its difficulty, what kept me from shelving ESCHATOS is how it encourages replays and multiple attempts. ESCHATOS keeps track of your total accumulated score over multiple runs and offers rewards at specific milestones to keep you engaged, from more lives when you start, to more continues, to the ability to start your run from later stages, meaning that even as you fail, it always feels like you're making headway, and each run always felt like I was getting closer and closer to the end.
Outside the standard game mode, there's also a remixed Advanced Mode that applies a new risk-reward power-up mechanic to the standard game mode, and a Time Attack mode that removes the traditional lives/continue system in favor of a time limit that increases as you do well and decreases when you get hit, both providing a good amount of variety and challenge if you ever get bored of grinding out runs in Original Mode. If you have even the slightest interest in the shmup genre, I would highly recommend this as a entry point. It has the right balance of challenge and spectacle that'll keep you coming back no matter how many times you've failed.
Shmups are a genre I've always been interested in but never really got into. Much like their Arcade-origin ilk, they are gaming in its purest form: an exercise in skill and score. It's a genre all about throwing yourself against an insurmountable wall and trying to achieve not only completion, but mastery. It's a genre that's for the most part, rather light on story or characters because the in-universe stakes are unimportant when the true conflict is between player and game. When I'm tired of longer, story-heavy games, this kind of primal, back-to-basics approach to game design is therapeutic in a way: much like a rouge-like, it's non-committal and allows me to put in a run or two a day, get a little further, and not feel like I need to commit to anything longer than that. But despite my interest, I've never had a shmup that really hooked me. At most, I'd find something neat that I would credit-feed until I reached the end and promptly forget about a day later. But when I booted up ESCHATOS for the first time and heard the glorious FM Synth sounds of Yousuke Yasui's score pierce my ears as dozens of enemy ships flew on-screen and the camera made these big, cinematic sweeps and took these wild angles during the action, I could tell I had something special on my hands.
ESCHATOS takes a sink or swim approach to its game design: it lays down the ground rules and hands you all the tools you'll need, before throwing you straight into the deep end. You have 3 buttons that each serve a specific purpose: a narrow shot that travels to the top of the screen, a wide shot that covers more horizontal ground but doesn't go full-screen, and a shield that can both block shots and deal contact damage. To get a higher score in ESCHATOS, you need to destroy each enemy wave without letting a single enemy escape, which will increase your score multiplier. Let an enemy live, and the multiplier goes down. In order to get the best score, you need to learn each individual enemy's behavior, each wave's formation, and how to best use the tools at your disposal in order to keep the multiplier rising, encouraging multiple attempts to help you learn and master each of the game's Areas and Stages.
While it's not the toughest game on the market, ESCHATOS is no walk in the park either. Screen-clearing bombs are an instant-use pick-up and not something you can hold for later, and lives are few and far between, meaning that learning enemy formations, bullet patterns, and how to maneuver your ship carefully to both dodge, attack, and claim Bombs and Extends is essential to your survival. Despite its difficulty, what kept me from shelving ESCHATOS is how it encourages replays and multiple attempts. ESCHATOS keeps track of your total accumulated score over multiple runs and offers rewards at specific milestones to keep you engaged, from more lives when you start, to more continues, to the ability to start your run from later stages, meaning that even as you fail, it always feels like you're making headway, and each run always felt like I was getting closer and closer to the end.
Outside the standard game mode, there's also a remixed Advanced Mode that applies a new risk-reward power-up mechanic to the standard game mode, and a Time Attack mode that removes the traditional lives/continue system in favor of a time limit that increases as you do well and decreases when you get hit, both providing a good amount of variety and challenge if you ever get bored of grinding out runs in Original Mode. If you have even the slightest interest in the shmup genre, I would highly recommend this as a entry point. It has the right balance of challenge and spectacle that'll keep you coming back no matter how many times you've failed.