More Shooting Upward: Blue Revolver

[roadrunnertwice]

I’ve continued to lean into my shmup era lately, focusing mostly on Touhou 10 and Blue Revolver: Double Action (a brand new remaster of an acclaimed 2016 game).

I started playing Blue Revolver some time after making that last post, and it is a proper jewel of a game. Actually: it’s the very next shmup I would recommend to a newcomer after ZeroRanger. ZR taught me why I should care about shmups, and BR:DA is in the process of teaching me how to care about shmups.

I learned about this game from an enthusiastic video about it from a youtuber called Electric Underground. I thought his analysis was onto something really interesting; the nutshell version goes something like:

• The complex act of balancing scoring systems against survival is where most of the depth emerges in a shoot-and-dodge game. To serious shmup genre heads, the real game begins when you start playing for score.
• BUT: scoring mechanics and the scoring metagame are traditionally opaque, and hard to grasp without an external community.
• Therefore, the next design frontier for shmups is to integrate the metagame with the core game — transparently expose the full depths of the scoring systems, and build on-ramps to score-play through all the rest of the systems, so that new players find themselves beginning to play for score long before they even get competent at playing for survival. Shmups may never be appropriate for anyone but sickos, but that’s how to recruit and train new sickos (e.g. yours truly).

Subgenre-wise, BR:DA is a bullet hell in the CAVE mode, but with its own particular and cohesive point of view. In the developer's own words, it is “a game about using resources to break things,” and this ramifies out into an interlocking economy (special ammo, bombs, lives, rank, and score) where instead of being challenged to hoard enough resources to get by, your challenge is to spend enough of the right resources in the right places to keep your run going.

And wow, it really teaches you to give a damn about score play. The main tools it uses to do this are the breaks, the economy, the UI, and the missions:

• Breaks: On bosses, minibosses, and one long midgame sequence, there are optional risky “break” challenges (usually destroying things in a particular order) that can pay out a massive wad of score. There’s a big audiovisual impact when you nail one, and they often cover the remaining distance to your next 1-up, so you’re quickly conditioned to take the risk more often than not.

• Economy: All of the resources in the game feed into a sort of circular system of flywheels that you're trying to keep spinning. Scoring points pays you with extra lives, but also increases the difficulty rank. -> Higher difficulty rank means more scoring from big phase change cancels, but makes you more likely to lose a life. -> Losing a life reduces your difficulty rank, restores some special ammo, and grants two extra bombs. (So it can sometimes be rational to die on purpose!) -> Firing a bomb can save your life; it also turns enemy shots into special ammo pickups, and extends the special weapon score multiplier window. -> Killing with your special weapon costs ammo, but if you start firing when you’re already at a chain of 8 kills, it multiplies the score for each kill by 64 for a while. -> Scoring points, of course, pays you with extra lives...

  Anyway, this complex virtuous cycle ties score directly into all of the systems you rely on for survival, which makes it feel much more concrete. And it’s finally helping me learn how to bomb, because if you’re not bombing slightly more than twice per life lost, you’re getting ripped off!! (Bombs are capped at five, so if you die holding five bombs, your two extras are wasted.)

• UI: This is a vertical shmup with an upright play area, which leaves a lot of unused space on normal wide screens. That extra room gets filled in with “gadgets,” exposing a ton of numbers about what’s going on in the game right now: a checklist of all the break bonuses you made or missed, a per-stage score breakdown comparing your current run to your best splits, hints about temporary damage resistance on bosses, the current adaptive difficulty rank, even a “now playing” soundtrack display. (This scheme is basically directly stolen from M2’s ShotTriggers remasters.)

  Notably, a lot of those details are dedicated to how well you’re doing on your score play, and your approximate risk budget for upcoming segments. So once you start caring a little about score (due to the resource economy and the audiovisual feedback from break bonuses), there’s a bunch of supportive info available whenever you can spare a glance left or right.

• Missions: Off to the side of the normal game modes, there’s a collection of bite-sized challenges that teach fundamental skills or push you to perform at a high difficulty level for short periods. They all have both a base survival criteria and a score-based stretch goal, and the latter helps establish your intuition for what it means for a score to be “good” in this game and what types of risks you must take to get there. (For example, the boss challenges are generally tuned so you have to nail every break.)

Hmm, this is becoming a long post and it's probably about time to curtail it, but the main point is, I think that in addition to being very fun and stylish, it's also a very smartly designed game that does a remarkable job at cracking open a newcomer-resistant genre and inviting more of the world to enjoy its delights. It's also tough as fucking nails, but you probably guessed that already. I have not yet successfully beaten Hyper mode, but I've made it well into stage 5! The adaptive difficulty is a bastard, because the better I'm doing, the more likely I am to misjudge my risk budget and take one to the face. (By default there's no continues, and I haven't messed with that, as per my previous thoughts on that subject.)

Also, the soundtrack slaps.

Also also, random sidenote for people interested in game-building tools: this game is built in the LÖVE engine, which is rare to see in commercial games but which happens to power a small list of best-in-class titles. (Balatro, Moonring, Gravity Circuit, Eat Girl, Arco, and this.)

Comments

[roadrunnertwice]

Update: I still haven’t quite beaten Hyper mode (I’m very close), but somehow I’m in the top-30 of the global Hyper/any-framerate/any-loadout leaderboard anyway?! (With something in the 125 mil zone.) Refer to what I said above about goading players to start playing for score before they get competent at survival.

I think scoring most breaks and a lot of big multiplier cashouts means the adaptive difficulty is getting up in my grill much more violently than it does for someone clearing Hyper with 60 or 70 mil. Probably you’re not meant to be spending this much time at rank 4 or 5 while chasing your first clear.

(I don’t think I even mentioned Parallel mode in this review, but it’s the expert mode and it just locks your rank at 5 and gives you fewer lives and more bombs. So scoring too fast in middle mode can effectively kick you into expert mode for short periods.)