Heaven Seeker – The Savior of This Cruel World

Genre: Top-Down 2-Stick Shooter / Roguelike

Players: 1

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Review:

Heaven Seeker is a Top-Down 2-Stick Shooter and Roguelike with occasional Bullet Hell elements released on PC, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch in 2024. In this game, players take the role of one of a few different witches with magical tomes looking to brave the dangerous castle in the sky, a multi-level dungeon with room layouts that warp and change each time you enter.

The game’s story is poorly-localized, and in fact, before you even start the game, you’ll want to go into the game’s options menus and change the language to English because it defaults to what I’m guessing is Japanese (it’s not hard to feel around for this option, at least – it’s the first option of the first sub-page of the first options menu).

The presentation here is decent, using simple 2D pixel art visuals with anime-style 2D portrait art for the characters. It gets the job done, but it’s nothing impressive, and in fact, when the action starts to get heavy you’ll encounter plenty of slowdown. All of this is backed by a synthesized soundtrack that’s reasonably energetic enough for the action, though it gets repetitive before long.

Heaven Seeker isn’t too different from the multitude of other 2-Stick Shooter Roguelikes that are out there, but it’s hook is that as players progress through the dungeons, they gain the ability to alter their magical attacks with upgrades that change how they act, such as splitting them into more bullets or increasing their speed, power, range, etc. There’s not much here that feels truly creative, but what is here works well enough.

When you inevitably lose all your health in a run, you can turn in mission goals for “spells” that allow you to get permanent upgrades, giving you a better shot in your next run. Again, nothing too crazy here, but it works.

Apart from the slowdown, I suppose my biggest complaint here is the way the game limits how many upgrades you can have in a run, forcing you to pick and choose which upgrades to keep and which to leave behind. Over time, you get a greater capacity for these upgrades, but having a limit at all seems to run counter to the powerful feeling players generally want to get when they play a game like this.

In the end, Heaven Seeker is a decent 2-Stick Shooter Roguelike, but the Nintendo Switch has a wealth of 2-Stick Shooter Roguelikes, and I’m not sure being merely “decent” is going to cut it with this amount of competition. I don’t think you’ll be terribly disappointed with this game (at least, once you change it to English), but you have far too many better options to bother with it.

tl;dr – Heaven Seeker is a 2-Stick Shooter Roguelike that has players altering their magical attacks with upgrades they collect in each run. While it has its flaws, this isn’t a bad entry in the genre. unfortunately, being merely “not bad” hardly seems like enough when there are tons of better alternatives on the Nintendo Switch. I suggest playing one of those better games instead.

Grade: C+

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