This is a game I personally worked on localization for, in a small way, some years ago. The process of updating and bringing it to Steam took something like 9 or 12 years? It's been a while, I left the team a while back, not much of my personal work survives in the Steam version, and the original game is entirely the work of one person, who goes by Tonnor, or hiranyon, depending.
The other media I've posted about so far have been general recommendations.
Hellsinker, not so much. Probably most or all of you will not be interested in playing this for yourselves. It is a very niche, very weird and difficult to describe video game-ish art piece shaped thing.
As you may or may not be able to see, it is a scrolling psychedelic cyberfantasythemed (sometimes) shootemup. It is not, technically speaking, a "bullet hell" shooter (Tonnor insists!), but it's pretty close in the neighborhood. It's also a rhythm game, puzzle game, there's a card game at one point, some ARG elements in the manual, and there's a secret poetry collection.
More than anything, it exists in the conceptual space of "multilayered interface confusion->secrets discovery puzzle game," vaguely similar to titles like Baba is You, Fez, and Cultist Simulator, where figuring out
how to play and exploring what you can do among its vast array of systems can be called the real meat of the game. First time players spend an average of 10-15 minutes staring at the psychedelic cyberinterface menus before figuring out how to even boot into an actual gameplay level.
Hellsinker is a game for people who
enjoy that experience and layers upon layers of "what is even going on" and "what does any of this mean" slowly transforming to "oh... I wonder if I do this here..."
The actual execution of the shootemup part is quite easy (for the genre), once you understand your five buttons and 30+ UI elements. But don't play this game unless you enjoy complex shooters and... complex everything. I mean, once you understand the controls you can start finding the secrets in the actual levels, and the secret levels, and then the secret menu screens to access the
real levels and... you get the idea.
Hit up Youtube and watch videos instead, if you're intrigued. The music is excellent, the visual experience is great, the atmosphere is very good (albeit impossible to capture), you won't get the poems in context but that's all right.
Oh, and of course, it's pretty gay. Nonbinary protagonist Minogame has excellent fashion sense, and strong homing lasers.
We've got life, death, gender, agender, theology, the nature of humanity, theological partical synthesis via mechanical karmic compression, five different conflicting apocalypses, trans cybermagical fairies rebelling against their creators in 7 minute fully psytrance-choreographed mindscape battles, all that good stuff. The queer themes are not often terribly upfront, but, well, that just makes them better, very little is upfront in Hellsinker. (I have some regrets here about the localization, being ~10 years old it is not as good as it could be, we didn't use singular they consistently, but all things considered I daresay it ain't bad.)
Anyway it is pretty cool and probably the most largescale In An Actual Official Thing I've been a part of. I guess it is more a glimpse into Stuff Ran Likes than anything else here, Mist was asking for more of that at some point and I thought hey let's show this off a little. Also trying to show a range of things and it's one of the earlier nonbinary reps I've got in the stable. None of this has anything to do with mafia, neither does any of the Good Queer Stuff I've been linking, but ehn, morale.