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.
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.
6 Comments
As an addendum, if you find the game too overwhelming at first, try playing Minogame. They have a lot of invulnerability-granting moves which can give you some room to breathe as you acclimate. If you can, you should try to use the manual to learn the game, but here is a helpful fan guide if you feel really stuck. https://hsmanual.web.fc2.com/hellsinker_manual_eng.html
I've yet to make it past stage 2 but I'd still readily give HellSinker a conditional spot on my all-timers list nonetheless, and this write-up does a lot to explain why. V good work 👍🏻
Thanks!
marvelous write-up if i do say so myself
going to be musically hallucinating when i play this now, "your mind's running slow..."
This comment was deleted
GoufyGoggs
1 year ago