Sword of Tanis, a brand new narrative-driven retro bullet hell, launches onto Android
A brand new bullet-hell-inspired narrative-driven indie game from a one-man team, Sword of Tanis, seeks to take your image of the genre and spin it on its head. It offers up a story full of tragedy and romance in equal measure as you go through stage after stage of difficult fantastical shoot-em-up gameplay inspired by retro classics.
Bullet hell as a genre has typically always been super surface-level in terms of story content, usually content to throw you in a spaceship, hand you a large swathe of baddies, and tell you to shoot them all before they shoot you. Sword of Tanis, on the other hand, does away with those conventions and instead gives you a tale of a man on a quest to save his lover.
This man, a nameless protagonist, seeks to go deep into the mountains to gather herbs for his sickly girlfriend. On the way home, he comes across a blade that is cursed to bring misfortune to all that hold it. Upon being attacked by monsters, he realizes he has no choice but to fight back in order to make it home and save his partner.
Gameplay-wise, if you’ve played other genre contemporaries like DoDonPachi or Danmaku Unlimited, you know what you’re in for. Enemies will barrage you with projectiles as they fly in from all angles along the screen, and you’ll have to dodge between them as you shoot your own back in return and destroy them. It’s simple, but it’s always very fast-paced and intense.
Sword of Tanis is a small project, only taking a few hours to blow through for even novices to the genre, but it’s interesting to see an indie game try to change up what is usually a pretty straightforward genre. If you’d like to give it a go yourself, you can download it for free at the link below this article!
Looking for more projectile-based shoot-em-ups to test your skills? Check out our best bullet hell games for iOS!
