Steredenn showed up in the Humble Monthly for June 2016. Since I'm still behind on the games in several monthlies, I installed this one for being one of the shortest to get some details up for.

It is a horizontal bullet-hell'ish shoot'em'up with some nasty levels of RNG, but overall not as hard as I would expect out of a game like this.

When I started the game, I was thrown right into the tutorial. No menus. No settings. No warning. Suddenly I'm a little pixel ship and a green'n'black dude is giving me instructions on how to move and shoot. I do so by pressing arrow keys to move and the green 'X' button to shoot.

Thankfully my default keyboard key with the 'x' also makes my ship shoot. Even if it is not green. I'm then taught how to pick up weapons 'Spacebar' and swap them out.

That's it. That's all the story and controls this game has. And as I continued to play, this started to become a problem.

The pacing of Steredenn feels slightly off in the same way that the Raiden games have felt to me. I feel like there should be a "thrusters" key to give me a little emergency dodge when I'm about to be hit, with the knowledge that it would be an emergency jump and I may land close by but worse off. At the very least, I kept hitting L-Shift and CTRL expecting it to happen.

At one point I did try the game pad I have, which Steredenn recommends to play the game with. While I could navigate the menus I could not select anything, and it does not work well trying to use the keyboard in tandem, getting stuck with which input it should be using and toggling between the two. Exploring the mappings settings just had preset toggles, rather than allowing true gamepad binding.

The ship you have can take a dozen or so hits but moves just that little bit more slowly than I want it to. It's not a 1-hit KO like in Darius-II/Sagaia thankfully. Points to that. And even though the majority of enemies don't outpace you, and the ones that do just aim for the other side of the screen, I feel like I'm sluggish, rather than a fighter pilot.

This movement would not be so bad if the game was more predictable. But the RNG then comes up.

Enemies themselves do follow predictable and learn-able patterns. Once you see them you can quickly figure out how to counter them, and even guess their methods by the way they appear on screen and give you signals of their attack. Such as little lights, motion, or the way their own mostly slower secondary weapons work.

Unfortunately the sequences of enemies per each wave is random. Or at least how I experienced it, I've seen forum threads saying the opposite. Sometimes I'd start level 1 and know after the first few ships that a laser wall would appear in the lower right corner. Sometimes this did not happen and a totally different type of enemy pattern appeared.

For a game genre built around learning enemy and wave patterns this is a rather glaring flaw.

To top it all off, weapon drops are random, and not in a fun way. Some of these are more 'expert' style bullets with a very low range, and others are very VERY OP. One time I encountered a screen width filling blue-laser secondary and just wiped all the mooks on the way to the boss from levels 2 and 3. Sure, boss 3 beat me, but by the time I reached level 4 again I knew that laser would of helped me clear that with ease too.

After beating each boss, you have a choice of 1 out of 5 selectable drops. Some relate to the weapon you have, others feel equally useless, and at least one is just a score boost. If you're going for high scores, then great! That's really great. But there are several runs I had in this game where there was just no advantage and I grabbed one on the small chance that a more powerful secondary weapon would drop on the next wave.

Oh yeah. If you die? Game over man. Game over. You start right back on level one.

The levels are very short, most only a couple of minutes in length and the game can apparently be completed in one sitting with ease. I do believe that. Aside from the individual sequences per each wave and some RNG funkiness it is honestly not that hard. Just... Potentially unfair.

Flat pixel graphics and dime-stop movement make it simple enough to process what is on the screen in this game. There's enough challenge to it to engage the player but not enough to keep me at it due to superior titles available in a growingly crowded market.

If you like really this genre, then check it out. If only a passing interest in the arcade styles I'd say wait for a sale, even though it is only 13USD at the time of posting. But there's unlikely to be much here to draw in and keep first time players.

A few things I did not try were 'Arena' mode, which I understand to be Boss Battle trainers that get unlocked after a few plays, and the 'Daily runs'. Something to keep you coming back if you enjoy it enough.

The music is rather good though. I had it playing while writing these thoughts up.

Game Acquisition: Humble Monthly - June 2016.
Platform Used: Steam
Tweet Threads: 1 - 10 September 2016
PC Used: Scorptec Venom 2009 MK2

OS: Windows XP
Processor: Dual Core CPU 2.4 gHz
Memory: 2048 MB RAM
Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 3000, Nvidia GeForce 8000, ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series
DirectX: Version 9.0
Storage: 350 MB available space