Now, I bought this expecting it to be a shooter - something in a similar vein to Treasure’s other releases. Then I realised that I had it round the wrong way, and that ‘Treasure’ is in fact the title not the developer. My hopes for another Radiant Silvergun were dashed (although I wouldn’t put it past Cocteau Twins to use that for a level title). As it is, the Twins’ development team (think a boy/girl Bitmap Brothers from Grangemouth), have been around for a while, and this was their third release of 1984.

Frankly, first impressions aren’t good. The cover artwork is all vague and frilly. Even the Japanese import copy we have here, looks nothing special (I expected a couple of giant mech robot things at least), although it does feature some badly translated instructions – which is a darn sight more than you get with the UK, or US, releases.

Radiant sir. The elusive yet playable prequel to today's featured game.

In a bold step, each of the ten playable levels has been given a girly name – perhaps to appeal more to female players? The level contents are strictly for the hardcore gamer though. From the opening of the first, “Ivo”, we are negotiating a minefield of phonetic bullet-hell. The voice comes at you from all angles but is oddly indistinct and quite disconcerting, but then I realised that I had no idea what I was doing.

The instructions are, at best, vague. In all honesty, I’m not entirely sure they are even written in English. The gameplay is deliberately misleading and each level ends as abruptly as it began, leaving the player none the wiser. That said, your progress through the levels is a very pretty journey, and you can’t help but commend Cocteau Twins for the effort they have put in. This does have its downside though. Many is the time that I’ve been caught out admiring the detail, only to be killed by a shimmering stalactite of sound that has accidentally fallen from the sonic cathedral’s ceiling. At least the explosion was pretty.

Backroom game coding is alive and well thanks to this
band of merry programmers.

Level Five, “Pandora”, sees a much needed change in pace before, the Boss battles of “Otterly” and “Donimo” that end the game. “Otterly” is a strange one, just a bit of ethereal meandering before you get to “Donimo” – a particularly disappointing level. It does nothing, bar whisper a few consonants in the player’s direction, until it is about a minute or so away from death, at which point it gives you everything it has. If you can navigate your way through the yelps and shrieks for that final minute, you’ll be rewarded with…. nothing really, not even a credits screen. That’s the problem with these indie developers: always shunning the publicity.

You’ll have this played-through in less than 42 minutes – although it’ll take you a few goes to really get the hang of it. Mind you, I’m not convinced that we’ll ever understand what it’s about. Full marks for the team handling Japanese conversion though – despite the obvious 90% miss rate they did attempt to translate the in-game instructions, which is more than can be said of the UK release.

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