Graze Counter

I've played enough bullet hell shooters to know that most of the genre's complexity is just noise around a single idea: don't get hit. Graze Counter flips that contract on its head. Skimming past enemy fire deliberately fills your Graze Counter Gauge, which then fires a full-screen laser beam that shreds enemies and cancels incoming bullets simultaneously. Those cancelled bullets drop stars. Stars fill a second meter called Break Mode. Break Mode turns your ship into a brief, screaming engine of destruction. The whole loop runs in parallel, constantly, and it rewards the player who stays in the danger zone over the one who plays it safe. The original 2017 PC version ships with two unlockable pilot classes on top of the starting pair. Ginyose Uzuki flies a wide-spread, slower ship good for coverage; Furuyama Satsuki trades spread for speed and punishes anything in close range. Hayate brings auto-firing bits that trigger whenever you graze, rewarding pure aggression, while Kiriko's blade-bit loadout suits close-quarters knife fights with enemy clusters. Each pilot changes how you manage both gauges and forces you to learn a slightly different risk calculus. Add the selectable Skill Cards that tweak mechanics per run, difficulty tiers from Novice (rank system disabled, forgiving) to Expert (suicide bullets on every enemy kill, relentless), plus a timed Boss Rush mode and a mission mode for structured practice, and this short game has a lot more to chew on than a quick glance implies. The Unlimited difficulty toggle that locks rank at maximum and never lets it drop exists solely for masochists, and you will probably not touch it until you have embarrassed yourself thoroughly on Arcade. The 16-bit pixel aesthetic is unambiguously retro, which is either charming or dated depending on your relationship with 1990s arcade cabinets. The chiptune soundtrack earns genuine praise across community discussions, with its intensity calibrated to match the on-screen chaos rather than just looping in the background. The main campaign is short, roughly an hour to clear on a competent first run, and that brevity is the game's most legitimate complaint. But the scoring system, with a multiplier that can climb to four digits and collapses the moment you stop grazing, pushes the replayable-run model hard. Each clear unlocks more ships, so the content widens the more you invest. Where the game stumbles is in boss encounters. Some feel like sponges early on, particularly before you have internalized the graze rhythm, and that can make the middle of a run drag before everything clicks. The story wrapping all this, a sci-fi premise about fighter pilots liberating hostages trapped in a virtual network called EDEN, is thin enough to ignore comfortably. This is mechanical depth dressed in a light narrative coat, and that is fine. If you are shmup-curious but intimidated by the genre's steeper entries, the Novice mode and Pacifist Mode toggle make this a surprisingly accessible starting point. If you are already a genre regular who has exhausted Crimzon Clover or Psyvariar, the Unlimited Expert settings are waiting to ruin your afternoon in the best possible way. A 96% Very Positive rating on Steam after several years on the platform suggests the community settled this debate without much argument.

Alex · Scout Team

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