The Void Rains Upon Her Heart is an early access bullet-hell game available on PC. It’s all about earning randomised loot and learning to love the monsters you face. Random sequences of difficult bosses challenge the player to adjust their strategies, while special rewards augment your abilities and encourage risk-taking. It’s a colourful experience, perfect for anyone who loves or is curious about bullet-hell games.
Released in early access in February, the game tells the story of a lonely fairy who is trapped in a cave with monsters. Wracked with self-doubt and unable to fly away due her to deformed wings, she decides the best thing to do is love the monsters. This somehow takes the form of bullet-hell battles where you fire hearts at them.
It’s a story that make reference to issues like body dysphoria and suicidal thoughts, but the frame doesn’t really take much time to examine the issues it is alluding to, which can sometimes feel a little forced. But the battles full of flying heartships and wild monsters are a nice change from the traditionally high-tech aesthetics of bullet-hell games.
The Void Rains Upon Her Heart has a dreamy, Undertale-esque visual style that gives a lot of life to each battle.
The Void Rains Upon Her Heart takes cues from roguelike games, randomizing boss order with each new playthrough to provide a varied sequence of buzzsaw beats and lava-shooting monstrosities.
You need to adjust your strategies each time you play, and the broader experience changes as well through the granting of various gifts. Whenever you beat a boss, you get a new card that augments your abilities in one way or another. A card might add extra bullets to your fire-rate or finer control while in “focus” mode.
These upgrades feel somewhat similar to the items you find in games like The Binding of Isaac. Each new stage of progress has multiple potential bosses to select; the higher the level, the better the gifts. This means you have to choose between easier fights and minimal rewards or tricky battles with potentially awesome loot. It’s just enough variance to make new runs worthwhile.
The bosses offer a good mix of challenges as well. Giant enemies fill the screen with large projectiles that you’ll need to quickly damage in order to clear a path. Coordinated groups send lasers sweeping around the screen, and others hurl out countless projectiles in true bullet-hell fashion.
They even added more monsters in time for Halloween! It might not require the extreme concentration of something like Ikaruga or Danmaku Unlimited 3, but The Void Rains Upon Her Heart is a good game for getting acquainted with some of the tricks of the genre.
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