Enter The Chronosphere is a fast, furious yet laidback series of top-down shooting hamster mazes

rockpapershotgun.com:

Back in the late 90s when all of you NORMIES were playing Diablo, I was playing a little-known Konami ARPG called Azure Dreams, which has alas never escaped PlayStation prison. It's a grid-based, upwardly mobile roguelitey dungeon crawler set in a big tower, each floor a semi-randomised maze of monsters (which you can capture), traps and pick-ups, where player and creature actions happen simultaneously.

Effort Star's Enter The Chronosphere doesn't have grids or monster capturing, that I know of, but it taps into a comparable vein of diorama-sized frantic-yet-laidback challenge, with characters, foes and projectiles frozen in time till you give a command. There's a demo on Steam as part of the platform's Endless Replayability Fest, which I encourage you to try, whether you are one of the COOL KIDS who played Azure Dreams or not.

In Enter The Chronosphere (Steam link here) you are some kind of swaggering alien adventurer who is mounting an invasion of a spacebound "reality-consuming gigastructure", the contents and overall behaviour of which vary between runs and floors. "The deeper you go, the weirder it gets," the Steam page promises. I didn't get past the sixth floor in the demo, after guerilla-rolling gleefully into a huge flying drill. What I played didn't feel weird so much as just... fun. I can live with fun.

The controls are fuss-free: you right-click the ground to move in that direction, or left-click things to shoot at them. The initial challenge is deciding when to shoot and when to dodge - enemies, including clockwork birds and martial beavers, do cute little preparatory animations before firing, and different categories of bullet travel at different speeds. Weapons range from Gatling lasers through rifles with an overcharge mechanic to "porb" launchers whose randomised rounds spit shrapnel over 90 and 360 degree arcs. Each has a nifty alternate-fire that's triggered when you quickdraw it from your inventory - which also kamikaze-propels you towards