Based on my admittedly limited exposure to the bullet hell genre, it appears to come in two flavors: games that establish their difficulty by mandating a ballet-like avoidance of easily readable bullets and enemy ships, and those that flood the screen with a borderline-incoherent mess of projectiles that requires turning off your normal human reflexes and weaving through a torrent of bullets one millimeter at a time. The latter can be entertaining to watch, but since I lack the time to learn the ninja master-ish art of navigating such games, I tend to prefer the former.

Game industry press releases are only just starting to get back into the swing of things now that we’re into the new year, and one of the things that caught my eye is an indie bullet hell belonging to the former category called Project AETHER: First Contact. For one thing, it has twin-stick elements, and you can see in the trailer below that you can aim around you rather than being forced to shoot in one direction all of the time. The press release linked to in the email also mentions a customizable loadout, giving you access to two ranged weapons in addition to a melee attack.

All things considered, I have a good feeling about this one. Bullets and enemies glow in the trailer to make it easy to differentiate between them and background objects, the player character appears to have a dodge with invincibility frames, and the Steam page suggests an “engaging sci-fi story” (while that’s likely an exaggeration based on the limitations of the genre and setting, it being a priority is nevertheless promising).

Project AETHER: First Contact has a demo available now from its Steam page. I plan on trying out this demo for myself, but I’ve recently moved most of my consoles into the same room as my PC to make recording easier, and everything ended up positioned so as to necessitate a longer HDMI cable for my computer. Otherwise, I’d have included gameplay footage I recorded myself rather than tossing up the trailer and calling it a day.

I do have some minor misgivings. The voice acting in the trailer isn’t great, for one thing, though voice acting may only exist in the trailer (because some games do that). The trailer video also maxes out at 720P at 60 frames per second. It’s possible that the footage was recorded using a capture device that only supports 60 frames per second at 720P—I used to use one of these almost exclusively and still use it for recording older consoles like the Xbox 360—or that reducing the resolution was the only way to maintain that frame rate while recording, but one shouldn’t have to download a 2-gigabyte demo to tell if a game will play at 1920x1080 or higher. It also forced me to stretch the header image, which looks bad.

Project AETHER: First Contact will release on Steam on February 24th, 2020.

Project AETHER: First Contact looks pretty good, actually first appeared on Killa Penguin