The health regen on Normies difficulty is a lie. Or maybe it's not. I sat there, letting pink bullets graze my ship, watching the bar tick up like a leaky faucet, and thought about the fox girl on the menu screen. Her ears. The way her kimono hangs loose. This is a spin off from some yuri visual novel I never played, and the whole setup is you're shooting through waves of nonsense while anime girls lose their clothes. Classic.

The bullet patterns are actually trying. On Bullet Hell mode, the screen fills with these slow moving purple orbs and fast little homing daggers that curve in ways that feel personal. I died. A lot. The homing bullets the player gets are fat and green and they seek out enemies with a kind of dumb determination, like a dog chasing a car. The enemy death animation is a little puff of smoke that sometimes covers the stripping part, which is the whole point, so I found myself dodging into danger just to see the sprite change. There's a volume slider for music and sound effects. The music is fine. I turned it down.

The juiciest scene, if you can call it that, is when you finally beat a boss and the character art scales up with this weird mipmapping thing they added. The image gets bigger but also a bit blurry, like looking at a polaroid developing in reverse. Her top is gone. One breast is exposed, the nipple a single pixel of color that my brain filled in. I wish the game remembered my difficulty setting between runs. It doesn't. I had to click back to Bullet Hell every single time, and that tiny menu button is the same color as the background. Spent thirty seconds once just hunting for it while the title screen music looped. The UI tutorial they added is just a single screen of text that flashes by if you breathe wrong.