I've followed the creative output of Shigatake for what is coming up to fifteen years now after seeing their sexy Shadow of the Colossus girl fanart as a kid. Who knew they had solo development of a game as furious and pristine as this in them? I did, I never doubted him, real recognise real.
Just such a ludicrously well-executed game that I’ve been massively enjoying bashing my skull through. Refreshingly uncomplex and a relatively short runtime, but densely populated with a daisy chain of unique blink-and-you’ll-miss-it gauntlets that keeps the warpath fresh. The kind of leanness you can only find in workhorse passion projects like this. Absolutely gorgeous too, polygons are so washed literally all you need is a diorama of parallaxed sprites.
The star of the show for me is this game’s Berserk mechanic. It’s one thing to reward the player with a score multiplier bonus for aggressive play - that’s to be expected, that’s boring - it’s another to reward the player with the opportunity to style on your enemies so hard they glow beet red and bounce around their cockpits in a fit of animalistic rage, adding new layers to their attack patterns akin to a soft difficulty boost. You couldn’t get me to care about high scores if you put a gun to my head, but you can get me to engage with your multiplier gimmick if you make engaging with it this expressive and heart-poundingly risky.
Fun as all fuck, short as you’d like it to be, Shigatake of course drew a cute human version of their ship and a ton of big-name guest artists chimed in to do their own renditions of her and you can set the main menu wallpaper to them. The release of Devil Blade Reboot coincided with a health check-up of his and he's constantly been making jokes about white poop from the white drink they gave him. The human condition.