Impressions | Vital Shell - Digital Daydreams, From Software
I love short video games, because I’m a father on the go. I’ve read a lot of stuff like that about video games. Tawdry little articles about balancing fatherhood or motherhood and the life of a Gamer. I’m not a father though, and I biologically can’t be. Let me finish the lede here: Vital Shell is quick and snappy enough you can play it while your baby finishes crying.
Vital Shell is a bullet-hell style roguelike arena shooter and every time I open a startmenu.co.uk article talking about the way we slam genre codes together for SEO like virgins at an orgy I slightly mentally disassociate. The game actually released over the holidays, and I spent an extended Christmas break playing it anyway until maxing out the enjoyment I could get from it.
Microbubbles of Game Culture pop up on social media, Reddit, et al and can disappear overnight as players move on to the next thing. I’ve done my best to keep abreast of interesting-looking games through Discord conversations, strange YouTube channels with 500 subscribers, and doing a type of doomscrolling involving itch.io in an attempt to cast a wide enough net to drag everything I can to the surface.
What caught my eye and kept Vital Shell on my radar is that I’m currently obsessed with the ease with which small development teams (and the rare solo developer) can create a 3D game with low poly graphics. The shorthand is “PSX” style — Vital Shell might not actually look out of place running on any other console, but is keyed to a kind of aesthetic that links back to a memory of the Sony Playstation.
Immediately players are hit with a choral noise and static startmenu. It breaks into a rotating, ring-based menu calling back to things like Tomb Raider or Ape Escape. The save icon is not an abstract floating glyph or even the hallowed Floppy Disc, but a Playstation Memory Card. It’s a small touch. There are many games keyed to this graphical style released in constant deluge on itch.io, but I’ve not seen many specifically call back nostalgic memory that weren’t doing so out of irony to create horror.
A pulsing Drum & Bass soundtrack propels the action forward, stunlocking the brain into a kind of trance-like meditation. Vital Shell slowly builds pressure on the player with each wave making them prioritize both staying alive and collecting the crystals used as upgrades. Arenas are small, discrete interstellar beaches or ice caverns. Enemies are evil crystal-shaped robots or sneering misshapen heads that vomit spiked projectiles.
For their best efforts, players are always rewarded by an unlocking series of star-maps that paint mythological figures tied to worship or death. While there are only a handful of short stages to play, almost every run I had in the early hours of the game ended in absolute failure by the 18-minute mark. That in part is due to the fact that the stat growth part of the game is slightly obscure: it will take a dozen or so runs before the player can grasp how each weapon the game offers can grow in different directions.
There is no tutorial in the game besides not dying. There’s something edible about the presentation — all that tightly packed polygonal snack is something to eat like candy in short bursts before putting it down. It's not a bad idea to be won over by how a game looks or sounds, just like you wouldn't feel bad for asking someone out on a date because they're beautiful, hoping the rest of it clicks afterwards.
Every time I fire up Vital Shell I'm asking it out to dinner and every time it ends in a little bit of suffering and a little bit more getting to know each other. The tense pace of an evening with someone you're not entirely sure you like, but who has something that can't be resisted either way. There might be a crying child in the background in real life, but you can take care of it after a game over screen.
