Restless Night

PC

Here’s a quick and easy recommend! Restless Night is a twin-stick shooter, rendered in the style of a Speccy game, but an awful lot faster. It’s super-tough, but almost irritatingly moreish.

As ever with this sort of game, I need to include the disclaimer that I’m completely terrible at it. My measure for recommending bullet hell games is whether I enjoy being terrible, or just feel constantly frustrated. Triangulating Restless Night, it falls squarely in the enjoyable circle. Rhombus.

This is set in a spooOOOooky graveyard, in which – like in all graveyards – zombies, witches, skellingtons and sentient pumpkins all want to kill you. You’re equipped with a little putt-putt-putt weapon, and any wits you bring with you. As you evade and fire, so many more of them spawn from graves, and when you’re lucky, drop bonus items. Health, shields, and in the best moments, improved weapons. Cruelly, this don’t survive level changes, which come every time you’ve completed the required number of kills.

There’s a boss fight every 5 levels (he said, pretending he could confirm this continues on throughout with confidence), and rather generously it restarts you on the level after the last you beat (continuing said over-confident concluding). And this is all delivered in those distinctively mid-80s rectangular graphics. It’s worth noting that when you’re playing, as your hitbox is a rectangle around you, which you need to remember when evading the sprites. That’s then polished off with some exaggerated CRT curved edges, and that’s pretty much it!

It’s all splendidly executed, and feels constantly achievable, even when you most assuredly aren’t. Achieving. Rhombus. I had to force myself to stop failing to write this, which is always a good sign. And heck, it’s so cheap!

• HugePixel
• Steam
• £2/€2/$3

All Buried Treasure articles are funded by Patreon backers. If you want to see more reviews of great indie games, please consider backing this project.