HEAVEN SEEKER: The Savior of This Cruel World [ヘブンシーカー] Game Sample - PC

Whelp... this is yet another oddball title developed and published by the folks over at Success (through their "Team TwY" division). Tossing their hat into the whole twin-stick rogue-lite bullethell theme this time, there's almost no genre they haven't touched at this point, so I love to see it. However, with that said and with quite a few games in the genre already, what does "Heaven Seeker" really offer that the others haven't offered already? Released in mid 2024, the game was ported to PS4 and Switch about six months later.

The basic plot is that in this world, Pentagaia, there were five countries that were struck by natural disasters and transferred from five different worlds: Magic, Kamimori, Eastern, Machinery and Demon. The rulers of each nation sent explorers to the Castle of Heaven, where the secrets of Pentagaia were said to lie. They did so with the longing to return to the original world. These explorers were called "Heaven Seekers". Wanna know more? Me too, but info is pretty hard to parse as the game has a horrible machine translation (it doesn't even display the proper button configurations in the tutorial, opting for blank spaces instead), so that's already a demerit.

This is a bullet hell shooting game where you freely control your character and explore random dungeons while acquiring random skills and sometimes facing random adversaries. It's not so unlike "To Hell with Hell", "DemonsTier" (+), "Mystic Gate", "Enter the Gungeon", "The Binding of Isaac", etc... yeh. It's got pixel graphics reminiscent of the 8-16 bit era. It's got a (rather cool) synthesizer soundtrack (composed by Kazushi Tsurukubo, who also did work on "Operation Darkness" and "Buccanyar"). It's got lots of anime girls and women (a few of the designs like the witch don't leave much to the imagination... you can tell who their target demographic is). It's got lots of shooting. The controls aren't the tightest of the bunch and the gameplay isn't the most robust of the bunch, but it's perfectly playable , if not a little expensive compared to most of its peers.

Like many titles of this type, death and rebirth is the general theme as each run prepares you for the next one and the game's basic hub gradually offers more resources to make your life a little easier. Abilities are separated by Grimoires (Main Skill) and Side Books (Auxiliary Skills). Side books are very important as they adjust many different aspects of your firing capabilities from range, trajectory, size, speed, power, rate of fire, piercing capability, mana consumption, knockback and more. Having multiple grimoires opens up more magic options at your disposal that you can freely switch between. Magic abilities will gradually level up the more you use them and the more side books you collect, and you can also gain more power by finding treasures and buying goods from shops. More valuable spells or rarer treasures come with artifacts that bestow additional benefits to the player.

While the maps aren't especially large, another neat little aspect of the game is that each area has multiple "Warp Zones" which allow you to easily and quickly backtrack as long as no enemies are present. There's also a "Dice" mechanic that allows you to reroll item acquisitions up to a certain amount of times if you want to try your luck, and while the mechanic starts a little stringent, it gets quite generous as the game progresses. The game has a relatively high level of difficulty that's offset by the various characters and settings that one chooses to take advantage of and, like most games of this type, a single run is not terribly long if you know what to do (or if luck is on your side). With five main areas, the game continues to offer more skills, spells and artifacts as the player advances. If you own the "Vampire Survivors" spinoff, "ABYSS SEEKER", you'll also get to play as "Alcea", a sixth seeker. Honestly, she's more balanced in her own game, but it's a freebie, so it's whatever.

I'd wait for a sale as it's normally $20 and not really worth it at that price, but it's not a bad game to kill a few hours with. The translation sucks, but at least there's little dialog in which to speak of. This is a video of the game in action. You can get it at:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/28...

Enjoy.

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