Good gravy! This is one bullet hell of a game. While I have certainly seen worse in some side-scrolling shooters from Japan, Thy Creature is nonetheless a pain in the ass in a different way (and purposely so). It’s got a good mixture of a creepy story, some minor puzzle solving, and a heavy amount of pick the right strategy as enemies rain bullets down on you in a patterned fashion.
It’s a lot, but isn’t that what bullet hell-led games are supposed to be?
Let’s dig right into this.
Story
Thy Creature has a story that follows investigators into a broken-down, terrible mansion that is filled to the brim with stuffed toy parts, caged flying creatures, and a horrifying nun. From what I can tell, the investigators, who are children, have had their memories fragmented and are on the search to bring them back. You, the creature, who is sewn together in a disfigured manner, must help them in their plight to get their lives literally back together. Along the way, you must defeat vile beings and put together exactly what the heck has happened in this house of horror as you return memories to the investigators.
The story is mildly jarring, where you are just thrown into the narrative without rhyme or reason. As you progress through the story, you start to figure out what happened, and it’s horribly dark in some corners. Truth be told, I had a hard time following the story pieces and parts, but what I did grasp was unsettling. Children missing their father, a father that is an alcoholic, and something horrific in the mix. For a bullet hell game, this is oddly thick with plot points and intriguing narrative connections that surprisingly draw and lock you into the gameplay. As you progress in the story, everything gets heavier and heavier, and some alarming parts will certainly grab your attention in full force. The story is effective as it is scary.
The story was more than I thought it would be and a good change of pace for a bullet hell game. Typically, bullet hell games are more about what the developers can insanely throw at you at once. With Thy Creature, it simply wants to tell you a good story while throwing things at you all at once. It’s a strange way to do a bullet hell, but I will take it.
That Bullet Hell Hell
Bullet Hells are generally not my gig. I have reviewed a few of them over the last two decades, but typically I try and stay away from them. It’s like when I play any Dark Souls titles, I don’t understand exactly what draws people to these types of experiences where you just are more miserable than entertained. My thoughts that you didn’t ask for on the subject are that video games should be entertaining and not frustrating to the point where you absolutely despise the experience. I’m sorry, Souls fans. You’re a rare breed of gamers.
Anyway, Thy Creature is to bullet hell games as Elden Rings is to Dark Souls, where it contains the essence of what most people like about it, but makes room for the rest of us with slight ease of use. I appreciate that design and it doesn’t come cheap with thought. The good folks at Growing Seeds Corporation have somehow put together the best of all worlds in this game. The enemies you encounter will give you a lovely bullet hell variety of patterns, so you don’t get bored with enemies. The game also lends some puzzles and strategy to the process through enemy fights and non-fight scenarios. In other words, there’s more to it than just dodging enemy fire, which at times can get overwhelming to the senses in typical bullet hell experiences.
With Thy Creature, you go into a match with an enemy on a restricted, blocky path and are asked to do several tasks to unlock obstacles that lead you to fragmented memories. The goal of these encounters is to pick up the memory fragments and banish the enemy to bullet baddie hell. The restricted blocky paths, while purposely cumbersome in their design, contain several different puzzles. Some involve you putting puppets in the right seats, some involve you moving flames to a given center point, and others could be collecting memory fragments scattered across the map. This puzzle mixes in with sets of patterned bullet hell dodging, which doesn’t carry the swagger that most bullet hell games deliver. That isn’t a bad thing at all, rather it’s a balancing act that gives you just the right amount of puzzle, strategy, and dodging to juggle as you get through the level. If it is balanced, and it mostly is with this game, minus the higher levels, especially the one with that nun is crazy difficult, then you’re in for a good time. For the most part, Thy Creature Is balanced in this way. For most of the game, I just tried to find the right patterns the enemies were giving off while navigating the best path to get to the memory fragments to complete the level. The game in good fashion ramped up the difficulty gradually as I progressed in the game, which made sense within the context of what the game was trying to do. The fighting is the best part of the game, as it should be. It is certainly the most cognitively engaging of the gameplay design.
As for the non-fighting parts, it’s more story than anything else. You get to learn and figure out where you need to go, and what you need to do to progress to the next fight, all while being small spoon-fed the story to help you keep focused and engaged. It works for the most part, and the puzzles the game throws at you during these non-fighting parts are good. My biggest issue with the game is that it takes a little bit to get a grasp of how it works and what you should be keeping an eye out for in the game. The beginning of the game had me trying to figure out how to get to the next part for a longer time than it should have. I was waiting for a key to drop or a random item to bump into to lead me to the next part. It didn’t happen immediately and the game allows you to figure out your steps on your own. That works sometimes but having to do that at the beginning is frustrating. It almost lost me at the start, but thankfully it all cleared up after I got into the game’s groove.
There were also issues with backtracking and trying to remember side quests. At times, the separation between tasks asked and tasks accomplished seemed quite distant. For example, some items mentioned in the story that create quests are thrown in early on but aren’t obtainable until later in the game. One of the early examples of this is finding an investigator’s bag, which, Justin, mentions he lost on the first level of the game. About 1-2 hours later on a different level, I find said bag. The separation time between request and discovery feels big and disjointed. I nearly forgot about that bag, but thankfully it shows up and I was like, “Oh! Yeah. That thing. Mission accomplished. Where is Justin?” Ah, problem number two. Getting thrown into the story without much to go on and being asked to do tasks that aren’t in an orderly fashion can be a bit jarring at times. That doesn’t mean this is a huge issue, but it is a slight road bump, at least for me.
Anyway, it also feels like a lot of fluff and time consumption between fights, but the story makes that fluff far more intriguing. It truly does help put a layer of interest over the not-so-interesting set of tasks asked of our creature. It works in the long run, but if I’m being totally honest with you, the fighting is far more engaging and thrilling. Again, that’s expected gameplay design and should be delivered in such a manner.
Overall, I like the balanced gameplay of Thy Creature. I loved the fighting parts, even when it got difficult, and I enjoyed the story and downtime in between. While I was chomping at the bit to get to the next fight, the journey between wasn’t bad at all. It all felt very well thought out.
Visually fun
While this certainly won’t require a huge amount of GPU power to play, Thy Creature is a gorgeously gruesome game with its visuals. It matches the unsettlingly tone it creates through the story with its child-like models, and provides some good cutscenes that don’t give away too much, nor does it really immediately point back to a particular player. It’s a mixture of anime characters with a horror show atmosphere that you would find in other indie games of its type like in the game Scarred Stars from Tuomo’s Games. It all looks innocent but there lies a dark undertone with dialogue and environmental design that propels that cute exterior into something wholly unsettling.
In short, it’s a gorgeous game with a horror undertone to it that matches what the game is trying to accomplish overall.
On that note, let’s wrap this review up.
Conclusion
Thy Creature is a beautifully woven horror show with a balanced puzzle and bullet hell component. The addition of an unsettling narrative brings it together to make for a more robust bullet hell experience. While more hardcore fans of bullet hell games might find this an easy go around, the less seasoned gamers will get right into the game’s balanced design quickly and without much fuss.
