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Spooky game for spooky month.

PsycheMetal is a freeware bullet hell shmup from 2004 that goes all in on the guts aesthetic the likes of R-Type and Splatterhouse.
It's also kind of hilariously metal.

Nightmare mode is the hardest difficulty in the game and is really brutal for a horizontal shmup.
Had to resort to rotating the screen 90 degrees in order to beat it.
The jump from the other difficulties to Nightmare is pretty extreme, it's like three times as hard.

System
Collect red skulls to increase your DARK ENERGY.
This powers up your shot and lets you fire more MURDER NEEDLE.
Using two red skulls worth of DARK ENERY lets you use ADRENELINE MODE. During ADRENELINE MODE the game slows down to 30 fps for like 5 seconds.
Grazing will increase the ANGER METER. Once it's full and you get hit, you unleash RAMPAGE MODE, a hyper that increases your shot power and cancels bullets. Gives a screen cancel upon activation.

Items
- Red skulls: Collect these to power up your shot and use ADRENELINE MODE. Maximum you can hold is 20.
- Blue skulls: Gives a one-hit shield that you can stack twice. These do not give any i-frames though, so you'll get owned if a bunch of bullets hit you all at once.
- Green skulls: Red skulls turn into these after you reach the cap of 20 red skulls. Keeps giving more score the longer you stay at max. This goes from 10→20→40→80→160→320→640→1280→2560→5120→10240.
Resets if you drop the maximum by using ADRENALINE MODE or by dying.

Extends
You get an extend every 1 million points.
It's kinda not really possible to score on Nightmare so you only get like two extends.

Rank
The game has survival rank.
Rank goes up the longer you stay alive and goes down when you die.

Scoring
- Big part of your score comes from the green skulls. Gotta no-miss, no-adrenaline and keep collecting them at max value.
- Grazing gives score. At max shield the amount of points per graze increases and you also accumulate more ANGER METER.
- Cancelling bullets during RAMPAGE MODE gives score.
- End-of-stage bonus for red skulls and end-of-game bonus for red skulls and remaining lives.
- MURDER COMBO BONUS: the crucified enemies in stage 2 give more score the more of them you kill in a chain.

Scoring seems to be not really be doable on this difficulty because you -need- to use the ADRENALINE MODE to survive. A lot of parts are simply not possible without it.
You also need to be careful to not overdo ADRENALINE MODE too much, or else you'll just end up with no power and you do like zero damage to bosses and enemies.

The design of the game is somewhat peculiar. There are a tooooon of bullets but they are all incredibly slow, even more if you use the ADRENALINE MODE.
The RAMPAGE MODE is is also peculiar in that it's a bomb you can only use when you get hit, which can mess with your route if you get hit earlier than planned. Very hard to carry these to the hard spots you want to use them on.
Stage 3 is also waaay harder than anything else in the game. Stage 4 and 5 are noticeably easier.

The bullet visibility is pretty bad, but the readme does mention you can turn the bullets green by swapping some files around.

Download the game here:
[ Ссылка ]

00:00 - Intro
00:12 - Stage 1
02:16 - Stage 2
05:58 - Stage 3
10:31 - Stage 4
15:52 - Stage 5

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Twitch: [ Ссылка ]

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