Backlog Bingo 2025: _____

How does one...write about this game? What the hell is this?

Well, okay, let's start, I guess. The title here is...just five underscores, but you'll see that the URL ends in dispositif-c87. You'll often see this game called "Platine Dispositif C87 STG", which needs some unpacking: Platine Dispositif is a Japanese doujinshi shmup developer, C87 is the 87th Comiket, shmups in Japan are called "STG", for "shooting games". So, "Platine Dispositif C87 STG" is a more readable name for the game named, uh, five underscores? Because they released it at Comiket 87. Sure, that's fine. Why are we doing all of this?

So, this is probably where I just show off this game's title screen.

Yep, uh, I can't read that either.

A while ago, I saw a Cohost thread that was basically "everyone argues about what the Citizen Kane of video games is, but what's the Voynich Manuscript of video games?" And right at the top was this game: a 2014 shmup from a small indie developer in Japan...that is entirely, cover to cover, in a conlang. Every menu, every config option, every dialog box. So that's the buried lede: the reason I can't write an actual title at the top of this entry is that no one knows what this game is named, or how to pronounce it, and the executable is just _____.exe. Five underscores. Following along? Uh, yeah, me too, for sure!

I am not really much of a shmup person: I've played a bit of Touhou, and I played ZeroRanger as a bingo game earlier this year. I'm like...okay? At them? I'm not good at them past a level of like, "generic gamer skills". I do not actually think that that matters: the experience of having an entire game be in a language that no one speaks is so surreal as to border on parody, and that's before I started extracting stuff like "the scoring system is in base 12" and "there's an in-game shop that you can use to buy items, but the only one that does an immediately obvious thing is the extra life, and even that is in a conlang" or...everything about the weapons system, which I'll get to in a sec.

This game is just cover to cover mystifying, and I believe that that's the point. Over time, you just sorta...figure things out: you can change weapons (all of which are named in a single conlang character) but what weapon you get is determined by what direction on the controller you're pressing when you hit "change weapon", one for up, down, left, right, or neutral. But there are 20 weapons, and only five d-pad directions, so what you're actually doing is...shifting forms of your ship, from which you can then shift to other forms. By the time I realized "oh, the weapon I like is represented by a sideways D with a tail, that's left+weapon, neutral+weapon, up+weapon from the default, I'd found another weapon that changed what button combination I needed to press to get to that one, because...the mystifying nature of this game is the point. As mentioned, there's a shop, and the items do...something. I bought a thing that quickly became obvious was a shield of some kind, but I also bought a red orb and have absolutely no idea what that did. Oh, yeah, how do you get new weapons? They're all invisible, clearly. Just go to where they are and shoot them a bunch. Yay, you did it! You unlocked the...upside-down omega...gun...

By a wide margin, the funniest thing that happened while playing this was that I got to level 5, at which point the game throws a boss out that is an enormous difficulty spike (she's the first boss to come with her own cutscene! with dialogue! that no one on Earth can read!), but who I finally beat after multiple attempts. At this point I learned two things: one, that you can press left on the title screen to start at a level other than level 1 if you've beaten the level after that (so you can beat the game by only playing the penultimate and final levels), but that I couldn't tell that because I couldn't parse any of the things in that list as "this is a level name", and then, more importantly, that I'd been kicked to the title screen unceremoniously. Huh, weird, did I beat the game? No, the youtube video of it has a lot more content after that. Is there something else I'm supposed to have done on that boss? Did I need to kill her with a certain weapon, or in a certain time limit? Try this, try that, try these. Huh, weird, actually, this person's main menu options are different than mine.

You will not be terribly surprised to know that the version of the game I was playing was the demo, downloaded from the game's website, because I did not attend a Japanese doujinshi convention a decade ago to by this game on an actual CD, the only actual way to play it, but that I could not parse any of that because the credits and "this is a demo" screen are in a conlang. I legitimately do not know how I figured it out? I think I read a comment somewhere saying like "oh yeah if you grab it from their website it's not the actual game but you can get the actual game from this other website because they just put it up free after a certain amount of time had passed since no one was going to buy a years-old convention-exclusive CD to play this."

Anyway, uh. This game is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the doujin shmup equivalent of multiple fever dreams. I legitimately cannot explain almost anything about it, other than "it's not really a bullet hell"; the game it reminds me of most is actually Star Soldier for the NES, just with anime girls that are doing...something? for some reasons? that not only I but no one on Earth will be able to derive by playing this game.

It's difficult to state how unmooring it is to play a game and ask myself "I wonder if the person who wrote the plot to this game knows what the plot is, or if it's just conlang keysmashing?" and similar questions. 3/5 game, but a 5/5 experience: I am never going to play another game quite like this, and neither is anyone I know.