This is a Korean indie bullet hell shmup with a beautiful art style reminiscent of both Japanese woodblock printing and hand painted landscapes. That's comfortably the most impressive thing about the game but there's enough good gameplay here to make it worth the tenner it currently costs on PSN, and it might be enough for me to double dip when it releases on Switch next Thursday. I'll have to see how successfully it pulls me away from Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate.
Mechanically, there's nothing especially new here but it works well. You graze enemy bullets to build up your soul meter and you can then enter Soul Collect mode to boost your score and your damage output. You can then also use a Soul Attack during that mode for a massive shot power up for a short time. It's very much like the superb Danmaku Unlimited 3, in that respect, though it's a little more complex. At the end of each stage, you have the option of an extra life or an extra Soul Attack, of which you have a limited supply.
It also shares with DU3 an interesting, arguably underwhelming, choice with the audio presentation. Your firepower is little more than a pitter patter, with the music and bosses' exclamations sitting much higher in the mix. Explosions are a little more pronounced than in Danmaku, though, so you do feel some sense of destructive feedback. I must say that the ideal for me is something closer to Dodonpachi DaiOuJou, where the music is catchy and pumping and atmospheric, but the bullets and raw firepower take centre stage. It's a significant part of what makes that game feel so overwhelming and makes you feel that you are the one unleashing hell, despite the onslaught of endlessly cascading waves of enemies and bullets. The music in Shikhondo is also pretty standard fayre, one part hair metal, one part Squarepusher offcuts and one part tartrazine synth pop. I do really like the plaintive menu music, though, and would have preferred something more in this vein to complement the Edo yokai aesthetic.
Bosses follow the Psikyo two-stage formula but with a little gruesome twist. They feel pretty well balanced, even on Extreme difficulty, with some slightly unusual patterns and a good mix of bullet speeds, colours and shapes. They're the highlights of the game, partly because of the detailed designs both in terms of the artwork and the bullet patterns, but also because the regular enemies and the actual stages are less interesting. The backgrounds are beautiful, almost to the point of distraction, and the difficulty is pretty manageable so you feel you're doing well, but they are otherwise pretty repetitive. Enemies and bullets seem to recur in subsequent stages more than is standard for this type of game. I might be mistaken but that's my impression so far.
It's not as excessive as I was hoping for (and Lord knows why nobody has ever tried to match the devastating, numbing aggression of DaiOuJou or Ketsui) but it's a fine shmup which belies its doujin status at its best, while not quite reaching the consistency or premium quality of its Cave influences.
