Greetings fellow sleeper agents, this month’s spotlight game is Everyday Shooter by Jonathan Mak. For Hand Eye members, your Steam Key comes at the low price of absolutely nothing. Not a member? To join, head here!

Everyday Shooter And The Art Of Stripping

You’re a white dot patrolling the confines of bullet hell, against backgrounds like those pulsing Windows Media Player visualizations. You hit shapes, get points, and go onto the next level. That’s all there is to it, really. If shoot-em-ups were supermarkets, Everyday Shooter would be No Frills.

What’s striking about this exercise in back-to-basics design is how simplicity honed this game. Bruce Li probably once said, you should be afraid of people who can execute one move flawlessly rather than a million moves half-assedly. Everyday Shooter is a full ass kind of experience. Playing it feels good period. Your pale vessel glides like a dream across expanses. You shoot and shoot and shoot at your geometric enemies, be they blobs that organically sprout onscreen, orbs that slowly fade into vision, or vessels marching in from beyond your screen’s confines. Each level has different enemies, with their own behaviour patterns and chain commands that set off satisfying strings of harmless explosions around you.

This is not a visually pretty game where high-def graphics and intrinsic details rule. Instead, it’s got a sensible kind of beauty, where there’s loveliness in how shapes smash and collide. The legions of fleets and lights spinning around you are elegant in their plurality, gorgeous in their strict outputs and timed attacks.

Creator Jonathon Mak started Everyday Shooter after jumbling with his more complex work Gate 88. Mak told Game Sutra the development taught him he only knew how to make games from a technical standpoint. Simplicity became Everyday Shooter’s goal. It shows, given how stripping a shoot-em-up to its core elements allowed every abstract deviation afterwards to stem from an already comfortable gaming experience.

It’d be remiss to mention how the music takes this game into album territory. The rad guitar strumming throughout the game, courtesy of Mak, is pre-recorded, but hitting enemies produces sound. Instead of the jarring pewpewpews shoot-em-ups are known for, gentle guitar twangs signal direct hits. You’d expect discord, but pulling off chain commands harmonizes a victorious multi-layered hymn orchestrated by your sharp shooting.

While playing the game is accessible, losing all your lives means starting from the very first level. You can increase your capacity of lives with points you get in the game, but those can be a hassle to collect enmasse. They materialize after you defeat an enemy, but they don’t automatically move towards you. It can get irritating to manually pick them up, especially because they disappear eventually, but taking the extra steps to do so made me realize how spoiled I had gotten on games where currency or points would immediately fly in my direction.

And that’s the crux of it. Like the thought process behind New Year’s resolutions, or the nagging feeling that you should make your bed even though it’s going to get all messed up again later, Everyday Shooter is a refreshing rehash of what’s tried and true. It reminds you why you enjoy playing a game and resets what standards you hold them to. Using traditional mechanics well sheds light on newfangled approaches. NostalgiaVision can varnish what Back-In-The-Day was really like, but games like Everyday Shooter show that old school still holds up.

You can get Everyday Shooter on Steam or through the PlayStation Network. Oh yeah, please check out Everyday Shooter’s website. It made me yearn for Geocities aesthetics. There’s also Mak’s follow-up game Sound Shapes, which ain’t as much a solo project musically, what with Deadmau5, Beck, and Jim Guthrie featured on it. You may have heard of them. That Beck guy’s going places.