finished playing: minishoot' adventures (2024)

i think i first heard about minishoot’ adventures from nic mcconnell, your favorite retro game instruction manual reading twitch streamer, on bluesky a few months back. hadn’t seen it at all before but nic’s praise was effusive and the trailer looked slick, so i threw it on my wishlist and eventually grabbed it over black friday.

hot damn.

it’s fuckin good!

soulgame studio’s minishoot’ adventure is a twin-stick bullet-hell top-down zelda. everything feels really great about it honestly. power curve feels granular-but-noticeable on the minor upgrades but then nice and chunky on the gun level-ups. exploration sends you into an unknown until you get ahold of the map chunk for that area. mobility is maybe the king feature with just masterful tuning on the floatiness of the ship and the various boosts and jumps and dashes and whatnots you unlock over the course of the game.

and clocking in around 9 hours for 100% map and items and through the “true” ending, there’s something new going on every 20-30 minutes. it makes it so easy to just keep playing, i knocked it out in two sessions.

it feels like a flex whenever a game like this is confident enough to keep it short. it could’ve easily been double the size without feeling bad, but would it feel as strong? likely not. and hell, soulgame studio is only two people. i hope this is hitting their bar for success, i’m instantly paying attention to whatever they’re doing next.