It’s fun to go digging around sometimes. Not in the sense of trudging through soil or pulling weeds; no, in the sense of just perusing wares, diving into something that you would otherwise not give the time of day, stuff like that. For as many free-to-play games I usually skim past on Steam, every now and then, a select few grab my attention. Such is the case with today’s game, which features a particularly fascinating description on its Steam store page:
CRUST PUNK SHOOT ‘EM UP. BLAST BEAT BULLET HELL. HARDCORE ANARCHO ARCADE ACTION. BRUTAL, BLEAK, SHORT AND INTENSE. NO SCORE, NO LEADERBOARDS, NO GODS, NO MASTERS. CAVE MEETS NAPALM DEATH.
With a description like that, how could you not be interested?
CRUST SHMUP is a game that’s admittedly hard to describe. I mean, look at it. From the outset, it looks incredibly aggressive—oppressive, even. The harsh monochromatic color palette, the discordant and disconnected collages that make up its visual style, and the ear-splitting noise that bursts from your speakers promise something that not only assaults the senses but thoroughly overwhelms them in equal measure.
What exactly is this? What is it trying to do? Is it a fun shmup, or is it something best left in the small corner of the internet it resides in? For the low, low price of. . . well, nothing, let’s find out.
What Is CRUST SHMUP?
Much like the punk music subgenre it borrows from, CRUST SHMUP is as crusty as can be. In a good way.
Set in an abstract world comprised of heavily edited photographs and perturbing, abstract obstacles, you’re tasked with traversing 26 levels averaging around 20 seconds in length, all while either avoiding confrontation or blasting away at whatever approaches you with your swathes of anarchist projectiles. It’s really standard stuff if you’re at all familiar with arcade shooters or anything similar.
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Mechanically, it shares some similarities with the music and ideologies from its namesake genre. Crust, a subgenre of punk rock, essentially boils down the fast-paced riffs and blasting drums of punk into its purest and violent form, crafting its own kind of intimidating ambiance with droning static and booming percussion. “Cave meets Napalm Death,” per the game’s Steam description, is what CRUST SHMUP is ultimately aiming for: the gameplay of something like the many, many shmups developed by Cave, with the sensibilities of the prolific grindcore band Napalm Death driving its theming, aesthetics, and overall presentation.
If you need an idea of what this kind of music sounds like, Napalm Death has an extreme example. “You Suffer” is a few seconds long and consists of a single guttural screech, a sharp riff, and several thudding drum beats. Then it ends. Kinda like CRUST SHMUP.
But is CRUST SHMUP as complex as a shmup developed by Cave? Not necessarily.
Like everything else, the actual gameplay has been stripped down to the bare essentials. You can dodge left and right and fire your main weapon, which is tied to a limited ammo pool that is refilled at the beginning of every stage. That’s about it. Your projectiles are slowly upgraded from a modest stream into a wild spray of anarchy symbols, with intense drums punctuating every second you hold the trigger down. When overlaid against the harsh noise that fills your ears, you find yourself with an engrossing soundscape that goes from zero to one hundred the second an enemy pops up. The only downside is that the drumming sound eventually cuts off if you hold the trigger for too long, which is a bit of a shame.
The conservation of your primary ammunition in a shmup is a legitimately fascinating idea. Instead of allocating your resources to bombs or other powerful accessories, you may find yourself up a creek if you’re mindlessly firing away. The absence of any kind of alternative attack means you have to pick and choose your targets carefully instead of aggressively taking on everything for a higher score. Speaking of which, the lack of a score really adds something here as well.
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There was a genuine sense of unease as I played through CRUST SHMUP for the first time. Maybe it was the lack of a scoreboard or any real menu options. Maybe it was just the mix of all these oppressive design elements coalescing into a single package. Maybe it was just that feeling of the unknown, of not knowing what kind of bizarre thing would be crawling out from the top of the screen. It’s a similar kind of unease I felt when I was originally introduced to this kind of hardcore, almost manic type of music through bands like Pig Destroyer or Converge. You acclimate to it, but it’s something that never really leaves the back of your mind. If CRUST SHMUP was trying to craft the experience of playing through a similarly harsh album, I’d say it did a fantastic job.
But there are more than a few technical hiccups here as well. Unless I missed something, it didn’t seem like there was a way to exit the game upon successfully completing all 26 levels. You’re treated to a similarly disparate congratulations screen that you can’t exit outside of terminating the game externally. I found my ship stuck to the bottom of the screen for a certain stage. The ship passes over the game’s minimal UI elements instead of underneath them, and playing with a controller seemed to negate the use of any ammunition whatsoever. One of the game’s central mechanics can be flat-out ignored if you don’t want to use a keyboard.
Should You Play CRUST SHMUP?
For being a free product, though, it’s hard to really rip into CRUST SHMUP. You can’t really harp on any of its major faults since it doesn’t last long enough for them to become a pressing issue. The positives here are interesting enough to carry you along for the full journey as well, effectively encapsulating the experience of an anarcho-punk album into an interactive medium.
As a shmup, CRUST SHMUP may not offer the complexity longtime fans of the genre crave. As a collective experience, however, any fan of crust music will certainly appreciate what Safe Crackers Entertainment attempted here. It’s far from perfect, but there are ideas here that have the potential to be more fully explored in future projects.
CRUST SHMUP is currently available for free on both Steam and itch.io.
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