What’s that flutter in the air? A fly? A bee? Oh, a galactic space bug. You’ll see more of them in Caleb Wood’s Nidus, a twin-stick bullet hell filled with the craziest looking bugs you’ve ever seen.
Nidus is challenging. No, seriously. The first couple of playthroughs you’ll have no clue what is happening. It’ll kind of feel like pressing buttons without a cause. You know you need to destroy these bugs, but how? The tutorial gives a little nod as to what should happen and what you need to control, but it’s all picture-based and abstract. I would suggest going straight to the tips so you actually know how the game functions. As a twin stick game (it’s not really a “shooter” as many twin sticks are), you’re controlling two completely different players at the same time. One player is the flower, which is slow moving and is what you need to keep alive. The other player is the hornet, which can zip around the screen and attack enemies. In the beginning levels can moderately easy, but the waves of bugs immediately jumps difficulty, especially depending on how the bug behaves. The waves also don’t stop coming, even if you’re not done destroying all the previous bugs, meaning your screen will get more and more crowded. There were a few kinds of bugs that I never could defeat because they were so tricky.
Coordination is key in Nidus, hyper concentration is necessary. Did I mention Nidus is hard? Perhaps I’m trash at twin stick shooters, but playing only on easy felt impossible. Moving your players to hit attacks with one while avoiding enemy attacks with the other is difficult to sync up. My biggest trouble was getting the two players to team up and meet one another, as the wasp is dragged along by the flower. The wasp changes speeds when it loses energy, which causes more problems with coordination. I think to improve on gameplay there should be a way to automatically call the wasp to the flower to regroup. Because everything is so exact, trying to get your thumbs to sync up can be a struggle, and all the struggle turns into hand cramps. Recovering from a hand injury, this was NOT the game to play. You need to be constantly pressing and releasing ability triggers while also coordinating your thumbs around. It all feels like a mess with little feeling like you’re getting a hang of things.
Nidus has both a leader scoreboard and a level progression system. Having both of these systems seems unnecessary. If I’m trying to “beat the game,” score really doesn’t matter because the feeling of success is when the game is completed. True, you could try to complete it better next time, but besides the point score on the bugs, there’s no other kind of scoring. So since there are the same number and kinds of bugs per level, the score doesn’t matter because it’s merely how far along you got in the game. So theoretically, if you beat the entire game (which may be next to impossible), you will have the most points on the leaderboard, along with everyone else who also beat the game. Nidus is made of multiple levels that you have to complete in a single run, otherwise you start over. The starting level is the same every time, which I was hoping would mix up now and then because otherwise it becomes monotonous. When you go into your next playthrough you hype yourself up to be focused to grind through the first level, but journeying to the next leaves your brain withered as you spent it all on the intro levels. Maybe the trick is to take a break for each level. There’s also an optional two player, which changes the game greatly, and probably makes Nidus a lot easier to play.
As challenging as Nidus is, the art is astounding to watch. There’s so many moments in the game where I’ve said “it’s so pretty, but I don’t know what it means!” As beautiful and decorative the entire environment is, Nidus has a difficult time orchestrating to the player what effect their choices make on the world. Seeing the art process of the developer was great, as each flurry of color is placed pixel-by-pixel to make a swirling kaleidoscope. I also had a problem where I focused on the players and the background at the same time and it started to give me vertigo, so not the most accessible game, but there are settings that lower the color blasting effects.
Here’s a pro tip on the audio: dim the sounds and up the music. The sounds are a cacophony of screeching and grinding bug sounds that becomes instantly irritating to listen to. They’re barely indicative of what’s happening in the world, besides when your flower gets hit or when your hornet runs out of power. The background music is dark and rhythmic, and more energizing to help you focus on what’s happening. Unfortunately, the sounds and the music don’t blend well together, so I muted the sounds after a while.
In summary: Great art to look at, but confusing instructions, tricky controls, and mish-mash audio.
Jordan played Nidus on PC with a review key.
