In Incredible Ape’s Slime Time, you are the world’s richest CEO and one of your companies has created a horrible toxic mess that’s made mutants in the sewers. What happens to you? Do you just shrug off any accusations of wrongdoing, pay the fines that are incredible minuscule to your wealth and go back to what you were already doing? Do you pretend to make a stand for the environment and condemn the average person for ruining the planet when it’s actually your own fault?

No. Apparently, this is a world where CEO crimes have consequences and your character is actually taking responsibility. In fact, you don’t even rely on some middle-man to fix the problem. You take a suit capable of shooting lasers in all directions that your company was working on and head off to the sewers to fix the slime creature problem your own damn self. Truly this is a game rooted in fantasy.

Slime Time is an arcadey bullet hell type game where you try to destroy as much of the waste as possible before your inevitable death. The controls are real simple, requiring only the use of arrow keys. You move around by propelling yourself with bullets like a three-directional Downwell, pressing up or down pushing you up with a downward blast, pressing left causing you to shoot right and vice-versa.

There are four threats to deal with in the sewer. Pipes poke through the sides of the wall and they blast a wave of toxic energy, which is an instant kill like the toxic waste at the bottom, forcing you to always keep yourself hovering. Then there are the sewer monsters, who fire off a ring of bullets – they don’t kill you instantly, but they also interrupt your combos. Lastly, there are vials that hop out of the sludge, that burst into a bullet pattern when shattered. This last threat can easily be broken, even by accident, but it simultaneously makes it the most dangerous as you can inadvertently create a ring of bullets to dodge when you’re just trying to get around.

The game gets real frantic as the threats start stacking up with each other, unattended pipes choking off the space you can fly through as you inadvertently break vials, their bullets combining with the sewer monsters. Failure is inevitable, but the real challenge is getting the highest scores possible. To get higher scores, you have to build up a combo by consecutively breaking things without taking any damage – the true bullet hell experience. I feel that you have less control than you would have in an ordinary bullet hell game, with gravity constantly dragging you down and all, but it’s still pretty good.

There’s also that Extreme mode you can try out. Instead of just sort of easing you into things with a pipe like the normal game, it immediately starts throwing multiple threats at you, pretty much becoming a bullet hell from the start. I mean, it’s Extreme alright, but ultimately it isn’t too different from playing the normal mode for a minute.

I really like the palette of this game, I’m not sure why, but a combination of green and purple just makes things come off as alien. Is this a universal thing, is that why aliens are sometimes imagined as strange green men? There’s a lot of polish in the visual department, like with how gooey the waste under you and the background look when its animated and how your shots colliding into the wall blink into light while enemy projectiles splatters.

Slime Time‘s a fun time that looks good and feels good. It’s also pay-what-you-want, so I see no reason to not pick it up and give it a try.