This bullet hell shooter mixes retro and modern in all the right ways

Star of Providence is like a retro game I would have loved as a kid. But the roguelike bullet hell shooter is also a modern twin-stick shooter, and the melding of the two eras results in a fun, fast, and challenging experience.

In Star, you control a ship and explore randomly generated dungeons. As you navigate room by room — similar to an old-school Legend of Zelda game — you’ll pick up powerful weapons to fight the many enemies you’ll stumble across in your dungeon crawling.

The weapons are a delight, filling your screen with bullets and lasers. Sometimes, you’ll get cool effects like the ability for your bullets to phase through one side of the screen and appear on the other. But enemies can also spew out huge amounts of bullets, and that means many rooms turn into chaos as you weave through attack patterns to line up a perfect shot. The game’s narrow aspect ratio makes rooms feel pretty small, too (though I appreciate how it adds to the retro vibe).

Star’s controls are tight, so it always feels like you can thread the needle to escape danger. A useful dash can get you out of rough spots. And you can deploy bombs to clear bullets from a room, but they can take a while to recharge.

As you explore dungeons, you’ll have to make a lot of typical roguelike-y choices, like what to buy at a shop or what upgrades to pick. Arguably the most important choice is what weapons you’ll pick up along the way: they’re much more powerful than your basic gun, but they also have a limited amount of ammo. But I found that made for some fun strategy. Do I buy a weapon right when I come upon a store but risk running out of ammo before I really need it? Or should I try to survive a floor without it and instead buy the weapon when I’m about to take on the floor’s boss?

Speaking of bosses: they’re awesome. They’re typically giant, taking up a good portion of the square screen, and they spew bullets in all sorts of unpredictable and nail-biting patterns. I’m a particularly big fan of the huge green skeleton with horns.

Perhaps my favorite thing about Star is that everything is fast. Rooms typically take just seconds to clear, meaning you can zip through a whole dungeon floor in a few minutes. The game’s map lets you instantly teleport to rooms you’ve previously been to as you’re exploring a floor. Even boss fights usually only take a minute or two. And when you want to start a new run, all you need to do is go through a door at your home base.

There’s a constant sense of forward momentum that I think more games should emulate. That actually might be where Star is most like the old-school games it’s inspired by: jumping into the action is almost as easy as adding another quarter to an arcade machine.

_{Star of Providence is available now on Nintendo Switch and PC.}