This game is incredibly tight from a design standpoint by virtue of removing practically everything it doesn't need. Though a minimalistic game doing something niche will beget only a niche audience, which makes its incredibly positive reception all the more curious. We have barely seen a mix of first-person shooters and arcade game design philosophy, even though that's a massive unexplored area for innovation, and this game could very well be the first step. People are so used to good first-person shooters with large sprawling levels with tons to explore that they can't imagine how a FPS that does away with it entirely would work out. For example:
>you die in one hit, and you're not dodging any projectiles, you're actually trying to prevent enemies from swarming you
>so death isn't immediate, but your death largely results from letting enemy spawns getting out of hand with every slow action and little mistake you make
>hence why this kind of gameplay would only work in a setting where enemies will constantly spawn with no break or end which normal levels would have, otherwise it'd be like if in Tetris your field gets cleared for every 100 lines you clear, which would take away from the challenge and long-term strategy
>with cannon fodder trying to swarm you and more special types of enemies having weakspots you need to shoot before they die, it's important that you can see the whole arena
>anything but flat level geometry would get in the way, as there's no reason in this game to break line of sight since you're never getting directly shot at, nor is there anything to explore
>on top of that it gets in the way because it could result in shitty situation because you get gored by some skulls coming right around the corner which you couldn't see coming, it'd be like facing a dozen Kleers in a narrow-ass maze
>because there's always a ton of enemies, you'll always be shooting, but this begs the question of why you would ever release the fire button in this case, as there's no ammunition or anything of the like
>that's why the red crystal system exists, every time you destroy a weak spot a red crystal is dropped, which you can suck up by letting go of the fire button
>if the amount of collected crystals reaches certain thresholds, your weapon power, spread, and RoF will increase
>there's a maximum weapon level where you can't upgrade your weapon anymore which would make collecting red crystals useless after a point, however red crystals are also used as ammunition for Homing Daggers, which automatically track down enemies and are useful when you're in a tight spot
>so you're presented with the risk of not shooting at the constant onslaught of enemies in order to collect crystals, which when done carelessly might cause them to overwhelm you
>you might think to first kill the arena clean and then collect the crystals safely, but crystals despawn after a certain amount of time, meaning you need to time crystal collection every now and then for maximum benefits
>your weapon has both a streaming projectile shot and a quick shotgun blast shot, of which the latter tends to do more DPS, but using the shotgun blast pushes crystals away from you with a stronger force than the streaming shot, and overusing the shotgun blast might push them off the arena at which point they're unrecoverable
>enemies also play into this, there are spider enemies which spawn at the edges of the arena who attract all the crystals towards them in order to corrupt them and use them to spawn more spiderlings, who override your ability to collect them and thus are very high-priority targets
>enemy spawners have weakspots on different sides of their body which rotate, encouraging you to move around effectively in order to kill them as quickly as possible
>since crowd control is so important in this game, being able to know what's going on around you is essential, but in a first-person shooter your FoV is limited