Angel at Dusk

Angel at Dusk is a vertical-scrolling shoot-em-up with a setting unusually disconnected from its genre. Humanity has long since erased crime, pain, desire and finally intellect itself, ascending into angels, and the date on screen reads 2300000000 AD. The sun has been expanding for a long time, and the world is now wrapped in a permanent late twilight populated almost entirely by the descendants of that ascension. The art swings between extravagant beauty and grotesque surrealism without apologising for either register.

Mechanically the game inverts the usual shmup distance rule. The closer you press in on an enemy, the more pickups they drop — health and bomb charge appear right next to you, not safely out in midfield, so the aggressive play that gets you killed in other shooters is exactly what the scoring economy rewards. A charged attack obliterates incoming projectiles, and most of the kit pushes you into close-range scraping rather than pattern-dodging from the bottom of the screen.

Alongside Original mode, which adds a hack-and-slash-style upgrade system with no ceiling on how strong your ship can become, the game ships an Arcade mode with multiple unlockable ships and a tutorial the developer describes — credibly — as the most beginner-friendly in shmup history. In-game achievements layer goals over the core campaign for players who like to chase mastery on top of survival.