Cloudphobia

By: Derek Yu

On: December 16th, 2008

Cloudphobia is a gorgeous horizontal shoot ‘em up from Marsbound that’s been in development a few years and just came out yesterday. As MischiefMaker (thanks!) pointed out to me, it’s one of the few doujin shareware titles that comes as a download rather than in a CD (for 1575 Yen or around $18). And since the game and its website are in English, it’s pretty accessible to non-Japanese.

CP is broken up into five 3-minute stages (two included in the demo). There are three ways you can lose in each stage: 1. by losing all your health, 2. by letting too many enemies get by you, and 3. running out of time before you defeat the end boss. To succeed at the game, you have to balance the use of your boost, which lets you get to the boss faster, but makes it more difficult to destroy the enemies who are after you and your mothership.

Like many good shoot ‘em ups, you have to play each stage over and over to get a feel for your abilities and the enemy patterns. But with the life bar and short stages, Cloudphobia pretty forgiving for beginners. And did I mention that it’s a really pretty game? The illusion of speed that CP manages to pull off with relatively minimal production is pretty astounding, in my very humble opinion.

To top it off, there’s a second character option that uses a “vibroblade” instead of a gun. His name is Núllpunktur. Wow.

TIGdb: Entry for Cloudphobia