100% achievements.

November 6th, 2023, marks the day I would begin my journey of playing Hellsinker. 5 months and a day to be exact. With interest spawning from a stray suggestion by a friend of mine, this would quickly result in an obsessive play-through which then graduated to an obsessive achievement hunt which would THEN go on infiltrate my personal life via absolutely wreaking havoc on my sleep schedule, even hijacking my dreams.

And I couldn't be more thankful.

Quite honestly, I'm not sure where to take this review, I'll let my fingers glide along the keyboard and post whatever crops up.

At 89.1 hours, Hellsinker sits comfortably at my #5 most played game on Steam. Despite this, I've only gone on to engage with the game in its entirety through the lens of 1 character. The game features 4 characters, 1 of which has 4 "Ordinance Packages" which change up their loadout. Essentially, this 1 character is 4 though their endings remain the same between loadouts. This leaves me with a staggering 1/7 true completion. In addition to this, each character does have a unique ending depending on their TLB progression, not viewable within the game's text sequence viewer. Though I've already gone ahead and watched a video showing their contents (SPOILERS (DUH!)), I'd still love to play the game to experience them firsthand.

Alright, what more is there left for me do? Surely after that I would have completed EVERYTHING there is to this game... right?

WRONG! THERE'S SO MUCH! THERE'S QUITE FRANKLY TOO MUCH! AND I THINK THE FUNNIEST PART HAS TO BE HOW ABSOLUTELY UNINTENDED MOST OF THE EXTRA STUFF IS!

I'll start by introducing this game's older sibling, Radio Zonde. Yes, I have played the game before, but I haven't really completed in a manner I find acceptable, so there's still this entire game for me to play. Much of the ideas regarding design both graphics and gameplay are very much seen within Hellsinker. 1CC for Radio Zonde TBD.

Following this game would then come Hellsinker but in the form of a demo, kinda? Colloquially the build is known as Hellsinker 0.95. This build is quite.... special. There's a bajillion changes from this version of the game to the Doujin and Steam releases and although I'd like to talk about them all day I'll spare this "review" the word count and cut to the main thing. This game, although presenting itself as a demo, actually holds within itself the entire game but more importantly the final stage(SPOILERS(AGAIN(DUH!))) accessible through dropping in some files graciously provided by the original poster. In a non-patched version, only stages 1-4 are playable. The cut special stages also feature 2 versions from what I understand looking at the channel. One version would then go on to become the Shrine seen in the Doujin and Steam release. The other version cut from the final releases feature something adjacent to a dungeon crawler style level (not spoilers).

Okay so. That's it right? Nothing more? There couldn't possibly be more?

But there is! All of these are from the game's Doujin release era (so like 2007-2011?) I'll tally up everything here:
>Doujin release (PURCHASED)
>Completion of said Doujin release (unsure if I'll do all characters TLB but I'll cross that bridge when I get there)
>Buying the fanzines (warning the page probably has some Not Safe For Work Ads so please use an adblocker <3 ) and then reading said fanzines (currently studying Japanese primarily for that)
>A 3D Hellsinker Railshooter fangame (Completed)
>A Puyo Puyo styled Hellsinker puzzle game (Completed)
>Another Hellsinker fangame though I don't really know what to compare this one to, check the IGDB page for more info (Completed)

...and that's it. At that point, I'll have fully exhausted myself on every possible official and unofficial expression of love for this game. Have I made it obvious enough how much I love this game?

I'm currently in ownership of pretty much every version of the game out there with their fan-patches in addition to the fan-games so if you'd like any of that please contact my either on Twitter or Discord @strawhatcanti. Thank you for reading. Until the next "review" goes up,

Keep your dignity.

Meu novo shmup favorito, de inicio parecia a coisa mais louca do mundo e extremamente difícil, mas com o tempo se tornou extremamente satisfatório de se jogar, fazer a run completa desse jogo é como efetuar uma dança, de forma graciosa e bela depois de muito tempo treinando seus movimentos ate conseguir bons resultados e dominar aquilo. A OST nem se fala, simplesmente divina uma das melhores do gênero, além do jogo inteiro ser sincronizado com a música, todos os ataques, fica ainda mais aparente no Final Boss. Simplesmente uma obra prima, com várias e várias maneiras de se zerar, é um jogo desafiador mas que fisga o coração de qualquer um que se disponha a mergulhar na gameplay de HellSinker.
Keep your Dignity...

HellSinker. is and probably will continue to be my favorite shmup I've ever played.

At its core, HellSinker is a seriously convoluted mesh of tight mechanics and even tighter gameplay that has kept me glued to my chair for numerous hour long sessions of excitement, anger, disappointment, humiliation, and awe.

Everything about the game is so engrossing. Music, aesthetics, gameplay, lore, you name it. Throwing bits and pieces of lore at the player for overcoming the impossible and, even in unlikely cases, tossing something your way for ragequitting.

Reaching new areas kept my heart pumping in anxiety for what challenges could possibly come next, with each completed stage seeing a measureable improvement to my skill.

It's hard to recommend this game to anyone who's a newcomer to the genre of shmups but for those already familiar with the gameplay of shmup titles, more specifically those who are fans of the ZeroRanger game, I implore you to drop what you're doing and play this game. You won't regret it.

Over the course of about 2 weeks and then some days I couldn't think of any other game. Genuinely keeping me up at night for having not completed the 1cc.

But in the end, on the 16th of November, my journey had come to a close...

... or so I thought.

See, in addition to the innumerous mingling of mechanics and systems, the game actually has one more oddity to throw at you for the ending. And after concluding my 3 hour session which I believed to be the ending of the game, I don't think words could relay the humiliation I felt for what I had thought was the ending of the game.

It was not until after a 2 day hiatus from the game where I had actually gone on to 1cc the game, start another hiatus, and then complete the post-game content (relatively) far thereafter.

In spite of its cruel difficulty, discouraging gameplay, and brutal mockery it makes of your failures, I have persevered and completed it. And I couldn't be more proud of myself for doing so.

I have a lot to thank this game for, first and foremost as the beacon which brought me back into the world of shmuping. Reigniting a flame which I assumed had spewed its last embers long ago. And second for kindling and sparking conversations with an aquantiance turned friend of mine.

Please play HellSinker. please. I think it's criminally underloved and I'm seriously so surprised how little fanworks I can find online. If you HAVE played HellSinker. I'd suggest playing the only known fangame SHAFTDIVER, it's an interesting experience to say the least.

Atribuir uma obra como "genial" é algo que eu costumo ter bastante receio de fazer, mesmo com minhas favoritas, mas eu não consigo pensar em um adjetivo melhor para descrever Hellsinker. A primeira vez que abri o jogo, eu me assustei bastante, a prosa é esotérica e confusa, a HUD usa termos nada convencionais, tem milhões de mecânicas não muito bem explicadas que funcionam de forma completamente diferente dependendo do personagem que você escolher, e o jogo exige que você domine cada um deles; os levels te cobram em múltiplas dimensões e você tem que saber usar todas as mecânicas do seu personagem a seu favor para poder otimizar seu dano e se defender eficientemente, além de que é necessário uma administração de recursos, assim cobrando de você também um entendimento profundo da HUD. Porém, eu continuei jogando e entendi a alusão de que Hellsinker é como aprender uma língua nova, vai existir uma barreira inicial, mas aos poucos você vai conseguir ultrapassá-la, até chegar em um ponto em que vai parecer que a barrreira nunca existiu. Depois de horas nesse jogo, eu me sentia em casa, o que antes era confuso, se tornou familiar e eu passei a sentir que as regras do jogo estavam se comunicando precisamente comigo, eu entendia o comportamento de cada bala, eu entendia como eu tinha que responder a cada perigo e entendia o que eu precisava fazer para poder dar mais dano nos inimigos, tudo isso por observação e instinto. E é isso que Hellsinker busca construir com seus sistemas e ludonarrativa, o jogo cobra que o jogador esteja acima das próprias regras impostas a ele, não importa o quão críptico ou difícil tudo possa parecer, através de pura determinação, essa abstração vai ser superada e você vai conseguir alcançar o final.

Un juego no es mejor ni peor por tener más elementos. Muchas veces lo que hace funcionar (o no) un juego son las pequeñas decisiones de diseño. "If a game has enough interesting elements it's an interesting game". Más allá de la primera impresión de complejidad, Hellsinker es distinto, se siente distinto, se juega distinto. Tienes tu disparo vertical típico de shoot 'em up y tus bombas que vacían la pantalla de balas, pero luego muchos ataques los haces cuerpo a cuerpo y te ves lanzándote a los enemigos para hacer el máximo de daño en el menor tiempo posible. O dejas de disparar y generas un escudo a tu alrededor que frena las balas y cambian su trayectoria y, en consecuencia, tu forma de moverte por la pantalla. Creo que lo que más me gusta es la colisión. Chocarte no te quita una vida directamente sino que te hace rebotar. Y rebotar en un bullet hell ya de por sí es un concepto bastante interesante. Luego tienes el diseño de enemigos, los distintos personajes, el misticismo en la progresión de niveles, el contador terra y el shrine of farewell o que el juego llegado a un punto decida ponerse a hablar de sus temas sin importarle que hayas sido o no capaz de juntar las piezas para entender algo. Hasta la música conspira para que trasciendas el cuerpo digital y solo juegues con sensaciones. Que por cierto, creo que de eso va Hellsinker, no estoy seguro. Creo que pasaba algo con un gato.

1cc with TLB, Dead Liar, Full Sequence Order. Both extra stages cleared.

I absolutely adored this game. It's constantly, wildly inventive as an action game. It's pristinely paced and structured, taking advantage of its nature as a PC game without losing its arcade immediacy. It even works in some really out-there moving story beats.

If you like great shmups, hard recommend. If you're not too familiar with shmups at all, but you love weird edgy arty action games like NieR Automata or LUCAH: Born of a Dream, I think you'll find a whole lot to love here. And if you already love other shmups that aspire to tell moving stories within the context of great action -- games like RefleX or ZeroRanger -- absolute highest possible recommendation.

I'm conflicted with HellSinker... You might not like it too much at first, give it time, try out the tutorial or just continue to brute force it. It's one of those games that wants your attention, to learn everything it has to offer, enticing you to give it another go even if you might have found out you hate it or find it frustrating.

When I play, there's this feeling I get, "maybe this isn't for me", "this doesn't feel right", "actually I love this" "oh, that's how that works", "I should do this to prevent that". This constant learning process that genuinely captivates me, helps that the game has this obtuse nature of explaining itself or providing its information, gives the same air of mystery and strange allure, that made the predecessor Radio Zonde so appealing. It has so much that works for me, mechanically, visually, musically, I think it's just gonna take some investment for it to really click. I don't want to give up on it, not yet...

EDIT: It clicked...

Voivod is my favorite band ever. While their whole discography is awash with greatness, the run of 1987's Killing Technology, 1988's Dimension Hatross, and 1989's Nothingface is unreal. The band took its otherworldly cold-metal dystopian phantasmagoria vision, spearheaded by guitarist Piggy's signature bizarre dissonant riffs, and channeled it through 3 masterpiece albums that each feel distinct yet interconnected, breaking new ground with a deftness that makes it seem trodden a thousand times before.

When thinking about Hellsinker, I am struck with the same sense of awe. Hellsinker, impossibly, manages to be both wildly experimental and meticulously refined, bursting with new ideas yet grounded in strong fundamentals. Made by a single person over years of hard work, but that's the cost: something of this nature can only exist in a compact idea-space, and an individual's mind is the most compact of all.

I hesitate to talk about the mechanics too much, because the process of discovery is so core to the game's soul, but I'll mention a couple as both a cross-section and to entice you.

One of the game's main mechanics is the suppression field, a small aura that appears when you aren't using your main shot and slows down nearby bullets. In contrast to rounded bullets though, pointy-looking bullets are slowed down less, or not at all. And an interesting and deadly emergent property is how slowing bullets causes them to clump up together, suddenly denying you space and breaking a pattern's natural symmetry. Hellsinker takes these as an opportunity to construct frenetic patterns of push-and-pull between player offense, space control, and dodging, and flicks them on and off with whiplash pacing.

Like many shmups, some enemies will be blocked from firing if you are close enough. But unlike almost all other shmups, touching an enemy won't kill you, but instead bounce you away erratically. These two factors, combined with most characters having some sort of melee ability, make Hellsinker one of the most aggressive shmups I've ever played. Like when locking-on in Crimzon Clover, knowing when to get up in somebody's face vs. when to back off is a critical skill. But instead of the calculating sound of "click-click-click," it's a rusty knife rushdown, standing in stark contrast to the game's alien aesthetic and evoking the same electrifying chemical reaction between cold metal and fiery aggression that Voivod harnesses in their music.

Once again, music comes to mind. Music, especially instrument-driven music, is actually quite an abstract medium, since it doesn't rely on traditional storytelling/narrative. Instead, it excels at creating complex mixes and flows of feelings by interfacing with the subconscious. Much like the lyrics of many songs, the literal meaning of Hellsinker's story isn't important. The connotations and the delivery are the substance, mingling with the cold blues and lonely techno-religious environments. The synth trance is deliberately synced with the events of the stages, a la fellow doujin work Touhou. The crunch of quasi-gunfire-on-metal and gauges narrated by artificial voices calls to mind both shmup monolith Ikaruga and Cynic's tech-death classic Focus.

Hellsinker is notorious for being offputting to newcomers, as this review humorously illustrates, but in a certain sense that's simply another piece in the whole. The many esoteric mechanics, the dreamlike storytelling, even the bizarrely in-character manual, all of it loops back into each other and contributes to the complex feelings of alienation, exhilaration, melancholy, and awe that is Hellsinker. But don't take my word for it, take the dev's:

"I don’t really consider story, setting, characters, and music as something standing apart from “game design” per se. Even if one of those elements is excellent, it’s more about the holistic, overall vision I’m trying to present, and in that sense, all those elements are just one part of the whole (on the other hand, provided it doesn’t feel like something is lacking, not everything has to be “perfect” for me). Ultimately one is creating a single cohesive experience, and I think it should be conceived that way from the outset." - Tonnor in a 2019 interview

In a certain sense, I consider this to be the highest calling of the medium: aesthetics and mechanics unified as one, without sacrificing either. This describes many of the canonical classics of course, but works that flower like this from an alien core, such as Hellsinker and Voivod's albums, are often doomed to the fringes, for that's the only place they can be born. Yet their flames burn, silently but ferociously, waiting to entrance the next unsuspecting passerby who gazes too deeply inside.

An utter masterwork.

Reccomended by PKMudkipz from this list
At first this game is complete sensory overload but once you figure out its mechanics this is one of the best designed shmups out there. hellsinker is reminiscent of another one of my favourite shmups, radiant silvergun, in that it gives you tons of tools to get through its various types of obstacles, and expects you to diligently use them to survive, rather than just barraging you with a million bullets and holding down the fire button.

hellsinker: hello! welcome to hellsinker. would you like to learn how to play?

me: sure!

hellsinker: alright, so first things first, this is a bullet hell shoot'em'up with three unique playable characters: DEADLIAR, FOSSIL MAIDEN, and MINOGAME, plus one unlockable character. hellsinker has a unique emphasis on strategy and problem solving with a special scoring system and different routes.

me: cool!

hellsinker: you have a weapon, which can charge, a subweapon, and a special move. there's also a slowdown button. you can combine and time these to do different special attacks. when youre holding down fire you'll also have a SUPPRESSION RADIUS around you where some enemy bullets slow down and you can even delete some! if you get close to an enemy, you can SEAL them, which stops them from firing.

me: got it!

hellsinker: on the left side of the screen, you're gonna see a bunch of HUD info. let's break it down. first, you can see how many lives you have left. you can also earn more lives. pretty self explanatory

me: right. so if i lose them all it's game over?

hellsinker: yeah. well no, you'll get a chance to continue. but it's not like a normal continue, you only get one and it changes the game significantly, and you can lock yourself out of a continue. anyway let's get back to the bars. next from the top is SOL. SOL determines the strength of your main shot but is also your DISCHARGE gauge, so you have to balance that. LUNA just below it determines how fast you fire.

me: alright

hellsinker: okay so next up is STELLA. the more STELLA you have, the more bullets enemies will fire. your score will also scale with STELLA. you can increase and decrease STELLA with item pickups, or by aggressive/defensive play respectively, that kind of stuff. you can acquire APPEASEMENT that will help you decrease your STELLA if you graze the requisite number thus spawning two OLD RELICS

me: hm

hellsinker: finally, TERRA starts at 240. you lose TERRA if you die, but also if you avoid LIFE CHIPS and stuff like that. oh, also, it goes down if you finish a level. if it hits zero, as the next segment, you'll be sent to the Shrine of Farewell

me: what

hellsinker: on the other side of the screen, we have at the top your autobomb status, which can be set to ASPIRANT, SOLIDSTATE, or ADEPT. as a reminder, your DISCHARGE and Subweapon will behave differently based on whether you're holding the fire button down, the state of your gauges, etc. after that, you have the Spirit score, one of the three separate scoring systems in hellsinker. it's represented by three bars which represent the base 10 decimal digit values of your Spirit score. you can get a BREAKTHROUGH at 5200 Spirit, unless youve triggered the other BREAKTHROUGH in Kills, in which case it takes 6200.

me: wait

hellsinker: there's also a Kill score, which can also trigger a BREAKTHROUGH at 2500 or 5000 kills. BREAKTHROUGH will reset the threshold of LIFE CHIPS necessary to earn an IMMORTALITY EXTEND (80+40n pts) and sets said bonus to 200. Below that is Token score, which is like the other two but has no BREAK, and is earned by collecting LUNA DROPLETS (which have inverted gravity mind you), which also slightly increases your LUNA, and DROPLETS increase in value arithmetically.

me: uh

hellsinker: okay, so remember TERRA? so the Shrine of Farewell is a bonus stage boss rush but you get infinite lives. STELLA is constantly rising. there are four bosses, and one extra. your Spirit score drops to zero though. oh, also, BOOTLEG GHOST doesnt work while you're here.

me: bootleg ghost????

hellsinker: because your Spirit score is reset (m=0) you're probably worried about your score, but don't worry, you get the chance to earn your Spirit back in the Shrine of Farewell by collecting Crystals. after this, TERRA is disabled for the rest of the run, so make sure to maximize your spirit-to-crystal ratio if you're chasing a Spirit based high-score route, but its also useful if you're going for survival. hard limit of segment 7

me: wait but

hellsinker: as i’m sure you inferred by now, along with executive fire, the primary engagement of HELLSINKER regardless of which GRAVEYARD EXECUTOR you’ve selected (and agnostic of MISTELTOE configuration) is one of: α) management of SOL (DISCHARGE when necessary), LUNA, and SUBWEAPON gauges by destruction, collection, and timing β) safely managing proximity between mutable projectiles while evading needletype and other immutables γ) proximity protocol beta applied to adversaries to reduce production of danger δ) judiciously balancing STELLA with RELICS and transubstantiation of mutables into STELLA, in order to synthesize needs for evasion and for Spirit/Kills ε) maximizing destruction (Kills), Spirit, and Token ζ) achieving IMMORTALITY EXTENDS through BREAKTHROUGH (5.2k(+1k)m || 2.5k(⋅2)d) and LIFE CHIP acquisition η) again, doing all this while evading and using the proper attack protocols contingent on your EXECUTOR and/or MISTELTOE θ) managing TERRA reducing actions in order to deploy the visit to the Shrine of Farewell strategically, such as to maximize Spirit (m) prior: 1 Crystal (i) = 0.5% m1, upper bound of n = 424i (disambiguation: non-summated) ergo maximal execution miΣ(n424) = 2.12 * pre-Shrine.

me:

hellsinker: alright! that just about covers the basics. ready to start playing?

me: i'm still working on the left side of the screen