Don’t Stop, Girlypop! is a beautiful subversion of the expected aesthetics of the boomer shooter genre while still falling in line with the mechanical expectations.
If you like DOOM or ULTRAKILL or similar bouncy boomer shooters, you’ll feel right at home in Don’t Stop, Girlypop! That is, unless you’re sensitive to different aesthetics. The moment I saw a trailer for this game, with all the glittery, bedazzled Y2K hyperpop vibes lathered all over my favorite genre, I had one thought: Sign me up! Nothing excites me more than a full, unapologetic commitment to style and vibes, especially when it’s something so near and dear to my heart.
The first two levels really set the tone and engulf you in a sea of amazing music, over-the-top visuals, weapons to shoot, jumps to pull off, and a little bit of overstimulation. This is a VERY overwhelming, overstimulating game – but in the best possible way. Really, it doesn’t matter if your eyes glaze over and you can’t keep track of the UI, you don’t need it. Once you drop into the flow state, the mechanics become instinctual.
Movement is the name of the game – literally – and you’ve got a variety of options including jumps, dashes, ground pound, and so on that can be combo’d to maximize speed. These are critical, as you have to keep moving (as the name implies) to maximize your damage output and your healing. This is fine and dandy, but the skill ceiling for movement seems pretty low. Sure, there are different approaches one could take navigating the map: Staying low to the ground but hopping and dashing everywhere, grappling up high and staying mostly airborne, executing glory kills from enemy to enemy, etc. But ultimately maintaining the max movement speed and output is pretty easy and the button combos are quick and easy on keyboard. I could NOT imagine playing this on a controller, however.
The game is everything I expect for a shooter of this genre, with the added excitement of the aesthetic and music choices (and integration into the gameplay) that had me grinning from ear to ear for my entire playthrough. I think anyone eeked out by the aesthetics will be missing out on a fun time if they’re a fan of this genre.
Thematically, Don’t Stop, Girlypop! presents a fun opportunity to subvert the traditional expectation of a “game for girls.” As some academics refer to “pink silos” or games that are traditionally casual, easy, and pink meant to be “for girls” – that concept isn’t useful. This isn’t a “shooter for girls”, it’s a action-packed, testosterone-filled movement-focused boomer shooter where you blow up bad guys for hours just like any other entry in the genre, just with some hyperpop makeup on top. This is how games “for girls” should be. If you’re not good at this style of FPS, the game will challenge you; and if you are good at it, it will feel like home. The game is for lovers of shooters, but it says you can love pink, platform boots, and electronic music, and still hit flawless skill-shots – which more games need to be okay with.
The game is just as aggressive and intense – arguably MORESO – as DOOM and other similar games in the genre, it just looks different. That’s how “girl games” should be. I’m tired of “girl” plus “games” being infantilizing, and so are the devs of Don’t Stop, Girlypop!.
I think there’s some interesting deeper layers of the themes that could be explored further, but perhaps I should leave it to others to make video essays on? For example, the main character Imber is basically just a floating pair of arms. Her character body is translucent and the only tangible parts are her arms. To me, this feels like an intentional nod to the traditional “male gaze” problem in male-oriented games where the main protagonist is basically just a pair of muscle-y arms for self-insert and female characters have historically been reduced to emphasis on their sexualized bodies. Obviously this has gotten somewhat better in recent years, but as a game IN the retro-revival genre of boomer shooter, this feels like an interesting commentary on that phenomenon, regardless. Maybe not.
I also love Don’t Stop, Girlypop! from the angle of its complete commitment and marriage to its style and vibes. In an era where everything around us from mainstream video games to McDonald’s and everything inbetween are homogenizing themselves, crumbling in their identity under “Blandification” to offend as few people as possible while making themselves not really FOR or appealing to anyone at all – going the opposite direction and being okay with people being turned off by your aesthetic choices is something I will ALWAYS celebrate.
My main and BIGGEST critique is that for a game who’s name contains “Don’t Stop” and is focused on keeping momentum going at all costs – it REALLY likes disrupting your momentum. Final kills in a given room completely halt the game, going into slow-mo and zooming in on that enemy’s death for a glory kill-like experience. Platforming is clunky, sometimes completely janky and broken-feeling, which is especially rough towards the end with a MASSIVE platforming section that was honestly just miserable to play and I will be skipping entirely on future playthroughs.
For your first time playing through, you presumably want to take in all the story, which means encountering and activating “Echoes.” Echoes are basically mini cutscenes that just show the silhouette of a fairy while playing dialog that builds the world and backstory to the events of the game. These require you to basically stand still, or move extra slow around the room while you listen to them, and are placed in the middle of normal levels – so it feels like you’re just yanked out of your momentum and forced to listen to audio and feels completely contradictory to the mechanical themes and priorities literally stated in the name of the game. You COULD probably just skip them, or deal with it for a first playthrough and then have a much speedier time on subsequent playthroughs, which is fine I guess. Most campaigns in shooters have their slow points for story delivery – and they do provide a nice break from the death grip you might be breaking your mouse with and give your eyes a chance to blink.
My second angle of complaint comes from the performance and production side. The main “companion” performance on the flip phone is… borderline bad at certain points, with really clumsy line delivery, often feeling like the actor’s first time reading the lines. Sometimes they clearly didn’t record enough buffer or dead air for how the lines were going to be used and you see very obvious loops of her idle camera performance in-between takes. Part of me also feels like this just contributes to the overall camp of the presentation and that it fits right in.
My most serious complaints about the production are actually much smaller in scale. Every once in a while there would be a stutter in the music looping while playing – it really felt like they only got 2 main songs produced for the game, but it would have really benefitted from a little more variety here. Also the developers really didn’t figure out how to juggle all the NPCs that talk at you towards the end, so you have the flip phone, Tamagotchi, and other floating NPCs all covering each other up in a way that just… looks bad.
ALL THAT BEING SAID… The ONLY complaint I have about the game that ACTUALLY detracted from my experience was the awful platforming section at the end.
Ultimately, the game doesn’t do anything to challenge the genre in any way. You move from room to room in a linear path, circle strafing and killing enemies in an expected arena shooter way, then fight bosses with 2 or 3 different stages, then fight the big bad and win. But that’s okay. When I WANT more arena shooter, I expect more arena shooter, not something completely different. Don’t Stop, Girlypop! delivered exactly what I expected and hoped for from the trailer, and nothing less.
