CYGNI: AGB | Steam, PS5 and Xbox Series 2023

[beer gas canister]

The demo is pretty intriguing. Due to the insane ship speed it's kind of unplayable right now, but here are a few thoughts from several attempts:

1) Graphics are super gorgeous. The bullets are similar in color to enemy zakos, so it's not always clear what's what. The shadows look really amazing. It's sort of cool that the darkness can conceal enemies! There is a TON of potential in this advanced visual style.

2)The ground element is neat. There are some nice touches, like being able to damage the midboss way early (managed to knock him down to 95%). Again it's hard to tell with the controls in such a state but I like it so far. I wish homing was permanently enabled

3) It's very difficult to remember to shift energy to shields under fire. Not thrilled to be counting hits all the time at the moment, but it could become fun. Also, some hits don't seem to knock off a shield pip, maybe? Overall it's hard to understand the condition of my ship. There's a slow burn Gradius effect at work, where taking damage gradually forces you to drain from weapons to support shields, thereby extending fights. Might end up dramatic and interesting, or potentially a drag on pacing, hard to say at the moment.

4) Hitbox appears to be the entire body of the ship. It feels very large to me

5) Bullet patterns spawn very fast and dense sometimes. It's like Fire Shark hell world sometimes, but with less space to misdirect aimed shots. Will be easier to evaluate when movement is fixed.

6) Firing mode toggle and homing toggle fun ideas. Wish the firing modes (X button) had a bit more diversity and spread, or possibly I haven't been using them properly

One big takeaway is that because enemy visibility is so heavily obscured by bullets, shadows, and other enemies, I can hardly tell what's spawning and when it's going to shoot at me. Maybe the game is balanced to compensate for this, but in the classic bullet hell style, enemies generally give you a hint that they'll attack by a) not firing right away or b) firing slow bullets.

Also, I'm very bothered that you only get 1 life and have to restart the level every time. I hope very much that this a demo thing, because there's no way I'll play through a whole game like this. It's not checkpoints either, as far as I can tell - I died after beating the midboss and went all the way back. Barring the crazy move speed, this is the biggest barrier to entry for me.

Performance is pretty good! Running on a Radeon 580 and a decade-old i5 processor, settings on "HIGH" and it keeps at or just below 30fps. This is clearly not a "frame perfect play" kind of game so it feels fine.

Feel-wise, Cygni reminds me most of Astebreed, but there are shades of Dariusburst too, with the massive outpourings of zakos. It's also similar to Grand Cross, in terms of both the beam-ish 2nd stick control, and a generalized "what the holy fuck is going on rn" vibe. This is NOT like an arcade shmup at all, and I hope people give it a fair shake regardless. There's some super creative stuff going on but it's too hard to control, and too hard to know when I'm playing well vs failing. Lots of potential for fun here but it's pretty screwy right now