Shütshimi is both a game with a comforting level of familiarity and something with unique gameplay elements that set it apart from other titles in the genre. It’s a horizontally-scrolling shoot ’em up that started out on Xbox Live Indie Games but was recently made available for PS4 and Vita owners via the Instant Game Collection of PlayStation Plus. However, rather than presenting you with conventional levels that take between five and ten minutes to complete and have a natural sense of progression, Shütshimi is close to Wario Ware in terms of gameplay – it’s USP is that the player must survive ten-second “waves” of enemies broken up by shopping excursions between waves where the player picks a gameplay modifier from those on offer. Some of these modifiers are helpful, others can prove to be problematic, and the vast majority of them have text descriptions that are near-useless in telling the player what they do during waves. Even this shop has a timer that’s only a few seconds long, so you often find yourself picking the first thing that sounds like it might be useful and then hoping for the best.

The happy unpredictability of Shütshimi

On paper, it sounds like it should be a recipe for disaster that results in a mess of a game, but the hopeless perk descriptions and variety of waves turn what would be a run-of-the-mill shoot ’em up into something that’s a lot less predictable. One perk taks about the opportunity to have “way more friends” in the next wave, and I thought that this might be a positive – maybe the description meant that I would have Gradius-style Options with me or something – instead, this perk ended up flooding the screen with even more enemies than usual. Other descriptions are a bit more blunt and easy to predict, particularly the ones that grant you traditional power-ups such as rapid fire, laser shots or a shotgun, and eventually if you play the game enough you start to see through some of the more misleading descriptions. However, even when you know what’s coming the shop timer forces you to make quick decisions and these can lead to mistakes when selecting modifiers – consequently, the gameplay rarely becomes stale. Outside of the shop items there is extra variety in the music, backdrops and enemies, but the overall style of the game is consistently charming and has a sense of humour that’s inclusive and rarely crass. (One modifier does replace the background and some items with “butts”, although even this is presented in a simple cartoon fashion and can’t really be considered overly offensive.)

Shütshimi – a chaotic novelty

Shütshimi might sound chaotic and haphazard but there is some form of structure and progression in the game – every few waves you encounter a “boss” with a large health bar, but since you only have a few seconds to do damage, you sometimes have to wait for the boss stage to come around a few more times before you can drain the health bar completely. This makes “learning” the shop item descriptions valuable in the long-term, since you eventually learn to know when a boss encounter is coming and try to select high-damage or rapid-fire modifiers in anticipation of the encounter. Even when you’ve defeated all of the bosses there are extra difficulty modes to unlock and try out, so there’s a bit more depth to Shütshimi than the cheap and cheerful indie stylings might suggest. At the same time, I imagine that the novelty of the game will wear off quicker for some gamers, and anyone looking for more structure and progression in their shooters might be disappointed. For those people, there are games such as Velocity 2X and Resogun, but if you’re subscribed to PS+ there’s no harm in trying this out.

Shütshimi is currently available for free during April for PlayStation Plus members