New shoot-’em-up Devil Blade Reboot is like an alt-history Sega Saturn import

polygon.com:

It’s rare to find a hidden gem like Devil Blade Reboot. The vertical-scrolling shoot-’em-up looks and plays like a Japan-only release for the Sega Saturn, the kind you’d read about on message boards in the mid-’90s and pay $200 to import without ever seeing a streamer play it.

There’s a good reason Devil Blade Reboot feels like a retro game from the 32-bit era of the PlayStation and Saturn. It’s an enhanced remake of the original Devil Blade released in 1996, a small indie project built using 2D game-making software Dezaemon Plus. The creator behind it is an artist known as Shigatake (aka Takehiro Shiga), whose work you may know from Vanillaware games like Unicorn Overlord and Dragon’s Crown.

Devil Blade Reboot doesn’t look anything like a Vanillaware game, though. It has a painstakingly pixel-painted retro look. Shigatake boasts that he “pushes the limits of pixel art” with the recently released shmup, a claim paid off by the game’s visuals. Screens are filled with ships to destroy, gorgeously rendered backgrounds, and hellish swarms of bullets.

Despite the game’s complex visuals and frenzied action, the concept behind Devil Blade Reboot is pretty straightforward. Simply “dodge, shoot, and destroy without any extra baggage,” the developer says. And true, you can play it that way. But the gimmick, such as it is, is about playing dangerously.

Devil Blade Reboot has a scoring mechanism known as the Berserk System. In short, the closer you are to an enemy when you shoot it, the higher your scoring multiplier. The maximum multiplier is reserved for being within a few pixels of your target (and in some cases, directly on top of it). Naturally, the threat of eating a bullet from an enemy ship is constant when fighting at point-blank range, and fast reflexes and pattern recognition play into not just surviving, but maximizing your score.

There are a few other twists to the formula. Your ship has two shooting modes: a narrow and wide spread. The former option slightly slows