In Terror Squid, you are your own hell.  You create your own bullet hell that you have to try to avoid. This reminds me of the old day when Snake was the mobile game around, trying to avoid your own tail. The game is like a mix of Snake & Asteroids with an 80s neon style look. But weirdly there were no squids involved.

High-Scores are the name of the game

Terror Squid is like an old school arcade-style game, focused on getting the High-Score. This game falls under the category “easy to understand hard to master”. In Terror Squid you go around a globe will shooting bullets behind you. The goal is to survive as long as possible.

You can only take one hit which makes it even tenser. This also makes the playtime of each live pretty short, of course depending on your skill level. This makes it nice to pick-up for a short while but makes you think: “just one more try”, to get a higher High-Score. Your High-Scores are displayed globally. There is daily, weekly, and all-time leaderboards for you to compete in and show off your skills to the world. There is nothing to do besides getting the best score and making it as far as possible. This makes it a very creative but novel bullet hell game.

Psychedelic fun you can’t get enough of

The game has quite simplistic controls. Besides the control stick, you have only two buttons, dash and detonate. You can map the buttons to a couple of different buttons as well to suit your playstyle. Dash lets you dash through the bullets without getting hit, but you can’t spam the dash button. The dash button has cool down so make sure you are in the clear after the dash when using it.

When you survive long enough, you get excess to detonate. This will detonate the bullets near you which makes them disappear. Which makes it way easier to survive longer. When the exploding bullets are close enough to each other, it will make a chain reaction which can clear all the bullets present on the entire globe. Detonating will not only clear the bullets but will also change your bullets patterns as well. Here is where there is a bit of learning curve. Learning the patterns of the different bullet phases to crucial to get further and further. Every bullet has a different color as well which makes it feel like a psychedelic trip.

Conclusion

If you like some quick, silly fun and beautiful visuals this might be the game for you. If the game had some extra modes sprinkled in that build on top of the excellent gameplay, this would have been a real contender for bullet hell of the year.

7.5/10

-Tested on Nintendo Switch