Believe it or not, this is a relatively peaceful scene in BWR+

Throughout the Japanese indie scene, one genre seems shockingly prevalent; arcade shooters of the Bullet Hell (aka Danmaku) variety. Millions of incoming shots, explosions everywhere and evasion more akin to threading a needle than doing a barrel roll. It’s a daunting prospect for newcomers, but here’s a pair of remarkably accessible freeware games ideal for anyone who likes spaceships and/or explosions.

Released in 2010 and 2008 respectively by X_X Game Room, Eden’s Aegis and Blue Wish Resurrection are a pair of classic-style vertically scrolling shooters, inspired in equal measures by Cave’s arcade games such as DoDonPachi, and by Capcom’s Giga Wing series. What does this mean in English? Simple. Huge, soaring point multipliers, hard-coded (optional) slowdown to help your reaction time, constant explosions and multiple playable characters/ships. High replay value is order of the day here, with a lot of focus on raising your score and beating your personal bests again and again.

You can find and download the two games here. Of the two, BWR Plus is probably the easier to start out with. While the graphics are relatively crude (pre-rendered spaceships stand out somewhat against their hand-drawn peers), there’s a lot to like here, including a remarkably catchy Eurobeat-esque soundtrack. It’s much easier than most pure arcade shooters, and by default you don’t even need to worry about smartbombs – rather than having to manually choose to clear bullets, it’ll consume one automatically upon taking damage, effectively acting as a health bar. Manually detonating will have a larger and more practical effect than catching a shot, though, so don’t be afraid to spend them!

If the slowdown during heavy bullet barrages seems more annoying than helpful, you can also disable it in the options menu. It’s intentional, designed to give newer players a few extra moments reaction time, not a sign that your PC is overloaded. There’s a fair bit of challenge here, including a secret final boss that floods the screen with countless shots, but you won’t even be seeing that unless you play it fairly intensively.

The other game of the pair, Eden’s Aegis, is a little cuter, featuring magical girls as opposed to spaceships. Other than the change of protagonist, the idea remains the same. Avoid thousands of shots, blow up everything in your path, collect untold thousands of shiny score-multiplying items and generally do your level best to avoid getting hit.

Again, don’t be put off with how chaotic it looks. It’s much easier than it first appears. If you hold down fire (default controls for many Japanese indie games are arrow keys, Z, X, C & either V or Shift, by the way), your hitbox becomes visible. That single glimmering point of light in the center of your character sprite is the only part that can be damaged. With a little careful maneuvering, you can weave through most patterns of bullets without a scratch.

I could elaborate further on the finer points of these two games, but in the time that you’ve read this and watched the two videos above, you could have downloaded both games and tried them out for yourself. So do so. It’s free, solid, noisy, dumb, shooty fun.

And remember, above all… Don’t fear the Reaper.