Deathsmiles

Deathsmiles is a goth-cute-em-up-that-went-to-hell-and-innocently-flirted-with-Satan bi-directional horizontal arcade bullet hell by Cave. The Steam port includes Mega Black Label, a remixed mode with an additional character, as well as arcade and 1.1 arrange modes. You control 4 to 5 young girls who blast their way through a Halloween-landscape of ghouls and ghosties to stop a madman from opening a gate to hell or something something, there’s a tyranno-devil at the end.

This was the first modern horizontal shooter I really got into and a bit of an oddity for Cave. A full run of the main 6 stages is about 30 minutes and it’s a fun game with creative boss designs. Mary the Cow provides an example of the game’s eccentricity. You can select level order via an overworld map, and depending on the mode you can choose between difficulty levels 1 to 3 or 999 (MBL’s God mode, essentially). Infinite continues make this game accessible to newcomers and arcade/normal with slowdown probably makes it one of Cave’s easier shooters, though 999 difficulty + the bonus stage provides a solid challenge for veterans to say the least.

The cheevs are all over the place. There are cheeves for all the ending variants (each girl has 2) and 1CC, so you have to beat the game a minimum of 15 times (realistically, you’re not going to 1CC your first or second run) for the ending cheevs alone, and the “vanilla” cheevs don’t trigger at all in 1.1 or MBL which is kind of annoying. There are also a handful of nonsense cheevs that need to be researched, and I repeatedly failed to trigger some of them, so if you’re a perfect game kind of player this one may have you pulling your hair out.

I quite enjoy this game, but I’m not inspired for 1CC or scoring, it’s really just a fun way to blow off some steam. If it were shorter I’d probably run it more often. As it is, it’s long enough to feel like a commitment; the way the cheevs are set, I feel like I need to do a full run each time to chip away at my completion percentage.