Peanut Butter and Chocolate. Milk and Cookies. Beer and Curling. All great combinations that go great together. It turns out that SHMUPs and roguelikes are another great examples, two great game styles that blend great together.
The Void Rains Upon Her Heart (TVRUHH) is the inaugural game from Veyeral Games, a solo developer outfit run by Angel Polanco. Blending classic side-scrolling bullet hell mechanics with the unpredictable choose-your-own-adventure path style of roguelike games, TVRUHH provides players with a campaign experience that changes with ever run. The game released into Steam’s Early Access program on February 14th, 2018 – Valentine’s Day. We were provided a key to check out the game.
Unlike a lot of Early Access titles, TVRUHH hit the ground running, with more functional features than a fair number of titles have at full launch. The game’s main section is Story Mode, which contains two separate character stories, three levels of difficulty, and fourteen monsters (some of which are unlocked through various actions) to choose from in the campaign story’s ten levels. A Quickplay Mode allows players to engage bosses that they’ve unlocked via the Tetrid System up to whatever level that they’ve faced them in Story Mode.
The stories in TVRUHH revolve around love. Each character must face the monsters that taunt her day in and day out, loving them until the monsters love her back. Though many attempts end in failure and heartbreak, there is always hope that the next day’s attempt will be successful. The actual shooter mechanics revolve around this concept, with players maneuvering the character’s “heart” and shooting love at the monsters, knocking down their defenses, and eventually filling them with love.
Choose your next nightmare wisely, because the difficulty here will effect successive difficulty levels too.
Each story run presents a randomized set of enemies and power-ups that players choose from after every fight. In proper rogue-like fashion, difficulty in each run can be controlled, somewhat, by choosing the difficulty of the monsters one wishes to face. Higher level monsters have more and better powerups for successive levels, but in the words of Han Solo: “What good’s a reward if you’re not around to spend it?”
Defeating monsters, in both story and quickplay modes, rewards players with one of six types of colored Tetrids. These tetrids are used to unlock story information about the game’s monsters and gifts. Unlocked monsters are available in Quickplay. Unlocked gifts become available to equip in Quickplay mode, and are displayed when they come up as rewards in Story Mode.
Using your special (called a Panic Attack) will clear everything around you for a limited amount of time and do damage to whatever it touches.
Further enhancing the game is the lovely chiptunes soundtrack, which adds immeasurably to the atmospheric feel of the game. As a virtuoso labor of love, it’s quite impressive to know that the art, programming, and music have all been done by one individual.
The game is planned to be in Early Access for approximately the next twelve months. The developer plans to add an additional twenty-two enemies, eighty-four gifts, three additional characters, additional character endings, and random Story Mode events. One major feature that this writer hopes will make the final product would be some type of endless mode.
Just a few things to dodge here.
Notable bugs in the v1.0b EA version are remarkably limited. The lack of cloud saves is a feature that the developer has stated is planned, while the inability to take screenshots is a pain, but also a problem that doesn’t effect a large number of players.
In its current state, The Void Rains Upon Her Heart is a solid SHMUP that offers plenty for both casual and veteran players who enjoy the genre. With the promise of continued improvements over the coming year, it’s one game that this writer will be returning to regularly to take on whatever new challenges arrive.
Success! Collect your loot cards and some more Tetrids and love the next monster.
