Emerald Blue

Peak aggressive fast paced indie shmup shooting with short game duration. Game instantly closes if you press ESC like classic 200X PC doujin shooters and the overall feel is similar. Extremely high-tempo and fairly challenging, but it won't take you long to get back to where you left off so it's easily addictive. Not recommended for beginners because of its moderately high starting difficulty. The game is very short with a singular way it wants you to play so don't expect a lot of 'content'. This mission is not for the faint of heart.

Definitely a good shmup here. It reminds me of older doujin shmups like the blue wish series. I definitely dig the intense music and any game that introduces cave slowdown is great in my book. The game involves a power ship and a fast ship. Both involve using a piercing blade that almost looks like a short laser. Power has a wider range while Fast makes up for it in speed. I believe the game doesn't inherently have a set difficulty as the settings allow for rank to either be slow, normal or build up fast. The game is also somewhat short but makes up for it by being very engaging. It's definitely one of those shmups where you have to get in the enemies face or else you're cooked. Your bomb is essentially a wind shield wiper that erases bullets and can be recharged after hitting the enemies for a while. I'd say the game is an intermediate challenge which is just right for someone like me. Someone asked me to see if there was controller support and it turns out there isn't. Hopefully in the future they can throw an update of the sort. Definitely check out this shmup I had a lot of fun with it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2Jioaa6sDs

A very fine CAVE-like, hectic bullet hell stg. Online leaderboard available. (8.5/10)

What an awesome surprise! Probably the game of the year for me as a shmup and arcade head. Tough as nails and all killer no filler. I love the pace of the game, it is fast in a way that reminds me of something like dangun feveron or when you max out on speed in classics like Same3. The ship and level/enemy design make it so that you are constantly on the move, which gets me immediately into that shmup flow state, which is why I love this genre so much. The presentation is also inspired and stylish, recalling the aesthetics of classics like Blue Wish and Rolling Gunner, I was curious immediately after seeing screenshots because it really has that vibe that made me think this was going to be an "authentic STG" experience before I even played it. The game reminds me of finding those mysterious japanese doujin shmups online back in the day which had little to no english documentation (right down to fiddling around with joy to key software to get the arcade stick working). Easy recommendation for shmup fans who like x.x game room titles like blue wish and eden's aegis, cave games, and all those other cool passion projects like chou ren sha, dokingan, ring27, demonizer, kaikan, etc.

Best shmup out this year. Extremely cool presentation and music, tight gameplay, great vibes. I love it!

It's superb! The difficulty starts high and stays high but the patterns feel fair and barely manageable even through to the final stage.

Amazing, old-school, super-hard vertical shmup. Has the feel of a doujin from the late 2000s (which is a good thing!). Wonderful update, including an "Ura" Route, makes this a no-brainer pick up. "This mission is not for the faint of heart."

Juego corto pero intenso que empieza picantón desde el primer minuto así que no es muy recomendable para novatos (en un futura actualización harán un modo fácil). En el juego hay que ser muy agresivo, jugando la mayor parte del tiempo en la parte alta de la pantalla y utilizando las bombas de forma defensiva con alegría. Por compararlo con otro juego diría que es un Ketsui con ralentizaciones, en concreto el nivel 4 del Ketsui es lo más parecido a este juego que se me ocurre. Altamente recomendable. Junto a Varyznex se disputa el mejor shump del 2025.

I had a lot of difficulty getting this game set up on Linux but Emerald Blue is definitely worth the hassle. The last couple of updates definitely helped getting more of the options working and the game running more stable. Emerald Blue to me is quite a nostalgic feeling shoot em up - it reminds me of playing a bunch of janky but soulful doujin STGs when I was first getting into the genre, many of the games barely working on my computer and not knowing what was going on with the visuals and gameplay but being wowed by how cool everything is nonetheless. Emerald Blue bucks the trend of other STGs being released this year being lacking in difficulty. This game has the sauce. Emerald Blue is short even for the standards of the genre so it's still not super difficult or anything but you can definitely tell it's made for people experienced with the genre, taking a lot of inspiration from games like Ketsui and necessitating effective prioritisation of enemies and chaining to survive. The boss fights are also short like the rest of the game but have amazing bullet pattern design, with lots of bullets coming from all directions and flowing together in interesting ways.