Shutshimi is a 2D horizontal shooter in where you play as a fish with serious memory issues trying to tell of his role in the war. Due to his short memory every time he tells the story it turns out differently and is a neat explanation to the rouge-lite elements of this game. Why your fish has buff arms and can smoke underwater is questions better left unasked. As you may be able to tell from the screenshots this game is very weird and will constantly have you wondering “What in the world is going on?”. Well, all you need to know is that a bunch of sea creatures and cats in submarines are trying to kill you and you are going to have to take them down first if you want to survive. To do this you have a few different weapons at your disposal like a laser gun, shotgun and a cannon firing gun. These are acquired from the item shops that appear between waves and the shop has more than just weapons to offer. They are not always to your benefit and you will have to pick one of three items in the span of 10 seconds to proceed to the next wave.
That 10 second limit also carries on over to the waves themselves and that practically destroys the game from the get go. For one the gameplay is over far before you can get invested in shooting down enemies and that literally means you will spend half of your time in this game in the menus trying to rapidly read through all three item descriptions that are needlessly lengthy due to “meme humor”. That means for every 1 of game time you will enter the shop three times and at that point it felt like a game designed to help people read at a faster rate instead of a Shooter. Worse still the game itself is very easy and all of the challenge comes from whatever item you pick in the shop. These can range to something simple like increased damage and slower fire rate to stuff like flipping the screen upside down which makes it very hard to stay alive. There is another item that literally makes the game twice as fast which is absolutely unplayable and will have you watching your hard earned lives whittle down due to it. Well why don’t we just memorize the items you may be thinking to yourself. That is because many of the items look exactly the same and the only thing that changes are the vague descriptions in an effort to make you read all the text of it each and every time.
Often times you are left in a pick your poison type of situation as most of the items seem to be harmful so you must pick the one you consider the least of a threat to you. At first this gimmick was neat as it keeps you disoriented due to the speed at which you have to choose but quickly grew insanely tedious. The good items range from making your fish huge allowing him to take an extra hit then return to regular size Mario style to hats. Hats are there to modify gameplay a bit like adding a baseball skin to your projectiles or receive a giant eyepatch over the screen that obscures enemies that can easily get you killed so I suppose that hats can be bad too. Due to the waves only being 10 seconds a piece you can easily avoid all the enemies and not take damage but you won’t get any points for that. Every 2500 points you will receive an extra life and you will likely need plenty for when you get handed a bad set of items. There is nothing to say about the gameplay itself, it is your standard Shmup with nothing special to it other than the aesthetic. Controls work well, granted you don’t acquire an item that reverses your key bindings or that gives the game gravity that has your fish constantly pulled downward to name of few of the items designed to aggravate you.
This game is unique no doubt about that but the ideas implemented like the rouge-lite aspects or the fast 10 second waves end up harming the game. I giggled and was entertained by the insanity of it all during my time playing, however I never felt like I was having fun. It definitely feels like one of those games made for Youtubers and no one else. One thing that was pretty great is the soundtrack. It is upbeat and pretty catchy. Graphics are nothing special, they simply do the job and the game itself does run at a solid 60fps. Unfortunately there is no resolution support for anything higher than 1080p. After a certain amount of waves you will face one of the three bosses. They are always in the same order and are pretty easy assuming you didn’t get an item to screw you over. Like the rest of the waves you only have 10 seconds to kill a boss or he will run off and make you go through more waves until you can reach him again. Thankfully they retain all the damage you have previously inflicted on them. After defeating all three they come back as zombies and you must fight them all over again. Their attack patterns are mostly the same making it feel kind of pointless to be honest.
If you are finding the game too hard there is a “Guppy” mode that makes the enemies easier and has you facing only two bosses. There is also a harder mode you can unlock by completing 10 waves without killing anything. Both of these modes can be played with three other friends in local coop. Finally there is a boss rush mode that has you fighting only bosses with only a single life. There is a decent amount of content here though with the gameplay so unenjoyable it is all for naught. Environments range from graveyards, rave parties and a place with a bunch of floating butts. Humor can be very hit or miss and it constantly mentions Tumblr or 4Chan to the surprise of no one. This would be a great game for a Youtuber to laugh and rage at though for everyone else it is a simply not worth a purchase unless you really dig the humor.
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