AHEGAL is an anime-themed Bullet Hell in where you can not shoot back, instead you must dodge and weave through projectiles until the level completes. You play as a blue dot, and while there is no story to speak of in-game, the store page states that you are the last man on the planet and so it falls to you to repopulate. There are six girls in total, and they essentially serve as level backgrounds. While your main objective is to simply survive, you’ll also need to fly around in designated locations to remove their clothing.
Even though it is a hentai game, it would be a mistake to take it lightly. It will throw you right into the deep end from the get-go, without so much as an explanation of anything whatsoever, and you will quickly learn that the projectile patterns are pretty advanced. You are likely to burn through a lot of lives during the few minutes that it takes to complete a level, especially if you are not familiar with Bullet Hells. There are no bombs to clear the screen and your hit-box is quite on the large side, making weaving through its complex bullet patterns even more difficult.
To offset the challenge for the people just here for some lewd anime pics, they simply stock you up with a large amount of lives. You will have ten to start with and they slowly refill over time. On top of that, once you do die, you’ll have quite a generous amount of invincibility frames as soon as you respawn, allowing you to tank through the difficult sections. It is unlikely you will ever fail a level, despite how insane things can get later on due to these features. I find it to be a decent middle ground between accessibility and challenge for this type of fanservice-filled game. The fact that it lacks some kind of scoring system or leader-board does negatively impact it however, as you will have little reason to keep playing after the six levels are done.
Something I annoyingly didn’t discover until the final mission is that you can slow down your overall speed by holding down either of your controller’s triggers. That made it far easier to avoid tightly packed projectiles. The combination of the large hit-box and very high default movement speed made surviving some attacks needlessly more difficult before I accidentally discovered that. There is no way to rebind keys or even a typical ‘how to play’ screen to make that small, but important gameplay mechanic known. Nonetheless, playing with a mouse is clearly how this title was intended to be played. Your blue dot character and mouse cursor become one, making it a much more precise method of control than that of a gamepad.
Your enemies consist of a wide variety of food, all too intent on stopping your noble task. Lacking any way to defend yourself, the best you can do is to survive their onslaught until they self destruct. From rushing to your position and exploding, to trying to box you in with some lasers, these unassuming villains are quite good at murdering you. Chances are, you’ll completely forget about the anime girl in the background as you intently focus on the madness occurring at every given moment, for shame of being outmatched by a milk carton.
As a fan of the bullet hell genre, I found it all pretty fun, but the reward for clearing the level is simply a pic of the now naked anime girl. That may or may not be enough for some people, given that you can achieve the same result and then some with a quick google search. You can then view that pic and any others that you have unlocked via the main menu, which allows you to zoom in as well as put her in various degrees of clothing. All six of the girls are drawn very well and each features several different facial expressions. It should also be known that this title has full nudity and requires no uncensor patch like several other of Steam’s lewd anime titles.
In total, this game should last you around half an hour. There is little reason to replay it outside of just for the sake of it. Some kind of scoring system that takes into account things like grazing bullets, not losing a life, or any number of things like that to encourage replaying it would have gone a long way. It is worth noting that this title is only a dollar and in that respect, I do find that you get a good bit of fun for that price. AHEGAL is not an exceptional title, but it is a surprisingly challenging little romp that will have your eyes glued to the screen for the entirety of its short duration.
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