The beginning of each new year is a tough time if you’re looking for brand new gaming experiences, if you just don’t want to dive deep into the ten dozen games recently purchased during the latest Steam sale. While it didn’t take long for 2024 to give us a banger of the game with Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, we are still waiting for more titles to drop. In the meantime, let’s give Nephenthesys, whatever the hell that name means, a look… whilst absolutely struggling to find anything to talk about it.

I vividly remember an older issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly showcasing the shortest reviews ever written in the history of the magazine, with one of them just reading “this is just another martial arts game”. I honestly feel like could have been able to review Nephenthesys by just saying it’s just another bullet hell shooter, and it wouldn’t have been considered lazy writing. This game is just that, yet another bullet hell shooter. You control a starship, and you need to destroy everything in front of you, all while avoiding an onslaught of laser shots and missiles. At the end of the the stage, a boss fight will test your shooting and dodging skills. Rinse and repeat until you’re done.

Again, it’s not like this game is poorly made. It might have repetitive visuals and an atrocious soundtrack (it does sound like a subpar game from the TurboGrafx-16 at best), but it controls fine enough. It’s really hard, borderline impossible even, to ruin the control scheme and responsiveness of a bullet hell shooter, so I’m glad Nephenthesys does the bare minimum and feature great controls and a steady framerate.

It also features a selection of different ships to control, each one with a specific secondary shot, which takes away one chunk of your energy meter. For instance, one of the ships might use this shot to unleash a screen-clearing bomb attack. This might be the closest this game might feature as “innovation”, as your health, shot strength and amount of ultimate attacks you can unleash are all tied to the same energy meter. Besides this one little detail, you’ve played hundreds of similar games like Nephenthesys in the past.

Nephenthesys is a painfully by-the-books bullet hell shooter that might not do anything wrong, but fails spectacularly to innovate in any single front, to the point that any memories of playing it would immediately vanish upon turning the PS5 off, the game’s name included. I suppose fans of the genre might get some fun out of it for about thirty minutes to an hour, but given the deluge of other indie shooters and classic arcade re-releases flooding console libraries at nearly a daily basis, I doubt even they will remember it exists after a while.

 

Graphics: 6.0 Low-poly, repetitive, but also flashy and colorful. It’s not impressive, but not outright terrible, either.	Gameplay: 8.0 The controls are simplistic, but very responsive. All you do is shoot, avoid getting hit, and use your special attack every now and then. The energy meter system is a smart feature, but not very groundbreaking.
Sound: 3.0 I cannot confirm is the game’s soundtrack was intended to sound retro, but this just ended up being as bad as the soundtrack of a subpar TurboGrafx-16 title from 1992.	Fun Factor: 5.5 There’s nothing inherently bad about Nephenthesys, but it’s really generic and forgettable. I can barely remember a thing about it right after playing it.
Final Verdict: 6.0

Nephenthesys is available now on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Nintendo Switch.

Reviewed on PS5.

A copy of Nephenthesys was provided by the publisher.