Video Game / Angel at Dusk

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"The last remaining sin on earth was "Intelligence".
Mankind enveloped the world in a barrier designed to inhibit the development of neurons.
At long last, a perfect world devoid of all sin had been brought to fruition.
All creatures on the planet were instilled with beatitude, and reborn as higher beings.
This was the birth of angels."

Angel at Dusk (夕暮れの楽園と赤く染まる天使たち, Yūgure no rakuen to akaku somaru tenshitachi, "Dusk's Eden and the Crimson-Touched Angels") is a Shoot 'em Up game by Akiragoya (also known as Akira Hut Original and Artesneit) released in the 12th of January 2024. The player controls a creature called an "angel" as it goes into battle against numerous other kinds of angels, devouring their remains and growing larger and stronger. Each stage completed reveals a small amount of story, and putting together the full plot of the game requires beating over 150 individual stages at various difficulties. The game is also notable for it's artwork which carries a heavy H. R. Giger influence.

The setting is Earth in the extreme far future, around the year 2.3 billion AD. All life on Earth has been turned into grotesque amalgamations of human body parts known as "angels". Angels were meant to be mindless, capable of feeling nothing but happiness, but the expansion of the Sun and the cooling of Earth's core has resulted in them re-evolving intelligence and developing a civilization. Now cognizant of their impending extinction, various angels have different ideas on how they should deal with this, leading to conflict.

The game encourages an extremely aggressive style of play: there is no Collision Damage and the closer you are to your target, the more Green Blood Cells (heart-shaped powerup items) it produces when damaged. Furthermore, the player is equipped with a "heavy weapon" that can cancel bullets in addition to their standard shot. Learning when to charge your heavy weapon to cancel the largest and densest groups of bullets is crucial to survival.

The game has two modes: Arcade and Original. Arcade mode allows for a variety of different angels to be chosen to play as, but they can never be permanently strengthened, meaning the player starts at zero each game. Original mode, meanwhile, has only one angel available to play as. In this mode, the stages gradually increase in difficulty, and it's all but certain the player will eventually be overwhelmed... however, as they play, they will unlock new and stronger weapons with which they can customize and strengthen the angel, allowing them to reach further and further each time. Accomplishing certain tasks in Arcade will unlock features in Original, and vice versa.

Tropes:

• Adjustable Censorship: The options menu features a "R15" setting, which hides all exposed breasts behind an Organic Bra when enabled.
• Angelic Abomination: Every single creature in the game is one to a greater or lesser extent.
• Artwork and Game Graphics Segregation: During gameplay, the playable angels appears to be viewed from the top down perspective with their heads, wings and tails being clearly visible. However, their more humanoid features can't be seen, even those where it should by all accounts be visible.
• Attack Drone: Come in two flavors.
  • A number of angels from the Lanmo and Laz-dba lines are accompanied by three butterfly-like drones which provide extra firepower and serve as storage for V.o.M. charges.
  • The Polenm line's defining trait is the ability to spawn an effectively unlimited amount of tadpole-like schizoplasts, which function similarly to the aforementioned butterfly drones minus the V.o.M. storage.
• Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad: The playable angels are named after negative terms like "Pain" and "Catastrophe", while bosses are named after ideals and positive terms like "Clear Streams" and "Empathy".
• Battleship Raid: Stage 30 of Chronicle Mode and stage 3 of the Angel of Eternity campaign pits the player against Didbelbarl, the Angel of Calmness, a gargantuan serpent-like monstrosity which has to be dismantled piece by piece, tailtip to head. Boss music doesn't play until the end of the stage, when Didbelbarl's head detaches itself from the rest of the body and turns around to face the player.
• Beauty Equals Goodness: The playable angels are all depicted as rather conventionally attractive Cute Monster Girls in promotional artworks, contrasting starkly with the sheer Body Horror displayed by their enemies. Justified. The playable angels regains their humanity including intelligence and sense while the enemies are not and thus the enemies doesn't realize that they appear as grotesque monstrosities when perceived by human eye.
• Bishōnen Line:
  • The most powerful and advanced boss angels tend to start developing more recognizably human bodies, albeit with disturbing additions. Two of them stand out in particular:
    • Klavhula-Velicss, the Angel of Bonds is effectively a giant woman with brain tissue for hair, riding around on what appears to be an organic throne with six arms and a centipede tail.
    • Lanmoliwf-mopopo, the Angel of Eternity presents herself as a giant Winged Humanoid with a visor-like mask and a pair of Backpack Cannons. This is subverted in her final phase, when she's reduced to a skeletal head.
  • In a non-humanoid example, Pyocoletos falls into this trope as it levels up. It starts out as a small winged creature similar to the starter angel Lanmoliwf, gradually grows larger and more monstrous like all other playable angels... before shedding most of its body to become what's basically a bigger version of its initial form. And then it evolves into a fluffy silver moth-like being with two long antennae trailing behind it.
• Body Horror: As one could expect from an Akiragoya game. Player characters, enemies, backgrounds and even the HUD are all made of strange combinations of human flesh and bone.
• Boss Rush: One of the game's unlockable modes.
• Boss Warning Siren: A purely visual one - the screen gets covered in dark red mist, after which a slowly rotating rosetta appears in the center, displaying the boss' title and name before fading away.
• Brain Food: One of the main power-up items are the ganglia of killed angels which are basically their brains which the playable angel so happily devours.
• Bullet Hell: The screen can easily get flooded with enemy fire, especially during boss battles. Thankfully, the player is given plenty of options for getting rid of them.
• Cain and Abel: The final battle of Chronicle Mode pits Pyocoletos and the Angel of Eternity against each other, both of whom are schizoplasts of Lanmoliwf. One of the ending illustrations shows the former's triumph, with her sister's decapitated remains in her grasp.
• Cannibalism Superpower: Angels grow stronger by devouring each other. The more they eat, the stronger they become. Very large angels cannot effectively defend themselves against smaller angels, though, so at a certain point they divide themselves as a form of reproduction. This is reflected in gameplay, where player angels grow larger and stronger by destroying enemies and collecting the lipids and skull medals they drop.
• Cast from Hit Points: The earliest Polenm angels need to sacrifice a bar of health to spawn a schizoplast. This leads to a high-risk, high-reward style of gameplay, as the player can obtain greater firepower at the expense of durability. Later angels in their line instead spawn schizoplasts by detonating a V.o.M. charge.
• Charged Attack: The majority of heavy weapons, particularly ones used by Lanmo-line angels, must be charged before they can be fired. The few that don't possess much weaker bullet-cancelling power, but can be spammed to mitigate this.
• Clothing Appendage: Present on a few of the more humanoid angels, mostly in the form of masks, gauntlets and leggings made of some bone-like tissue. Special mention goes to Polenmy-ma-mo, who is shown in official artworks to have what's basically an organic jacket.
• Collision Damage:
  • Notably absent in the main game. Touching a wall or enemy will not damage the player at all, instead making them harmlessly bounce off... potentially sending them straight in the way of enemy fire, thus making it harder to avoid. Furthermore, getting caught between a wall and the bottom of the screen is still a valid way of taking damage.
  • Played fully straight in the general tutorial, where touching a training drone deals just as much damage as getting struck by a bullet.
• Combat Tentacles: Manya-Ladlanze is armed with four pairs of fleshy tendrils growing out of the front of its carapace. They serve more of a defensive role than an offensive one, protecting the main body from player bullets.
• Covers Always Lie: One of the promotional artworks (appearing in the game itself as the loading screen) shows what appear to be five of the playable angels side by side. The leftmost one with flesh hair and a forehead eye isn't playable, instead serving as the Final Boss of the Awakening arc in story mode.
• Didn't Need Those Anyway!: Most of the larger enemies and bosses have destructible parts with lifebars independent of the main angel. The player can either focus on destroying these optional parts for greater rewards, or focus on destroying the main body to kill the angel faster.
• Disc-One Final Boss: Klavhula-Velicss, the Angel of Bonds and last boss in the Awakening arcade campaign, which initially appears to be the only playable content in the game. She's encountered at the end of a fortress-like gauntlet, is substantially tougher than all preceding bosses and has a unique battle theme to boot. Defeating her leads to an ending scroll... and unlocks nearly the entire rest of the game's content.
• Downer Ending: The Exodites intended to use the ramscoop spacecraft to find another planet to settle on and rebuild their civilization. However, the pilot angel comes to realize that, even travelling at near-lightspeed, by the time the spaceship actually gets anywhere, that place will have decayed and died just like Earth did. Ultimately, it resolves to simply fly as far and as long as it can, and bear witness to the end of the universe as the final intelligent being.
• Equipment-Based Progression: Original Mode's primary gimmick. Certain enemies drop new weapons for the player upon defeat, which can be swapped out between playthroughs. The game also heavily encourages regularly replacing lower-level versions of weapons with higher-level ones by making opponents significantly more durable and deadly as the gap between the player's weapon levels and the stage number increases.
• Eternal Engine: The final two stages of both Chronicle Mode and the Angel of Eternity campaign both take place in strange high-tech facilities.
• "Everyone Dies" Ending: The story ends with everyone on Earth devoured by the dying sun, and the ones who escape the destruction would soon join them as the universe fades from existence.
• Face Death with Dignity: The universe is ending, so the remaining survivors meant to start their civilisation anew are doomed, yet instead of panicking, they choose to fly high and see the end.
• Fan Disservice: A number of angels take the form of beautiful, mostly naked women... however, there's always something off about them, such as flesh for hair or large bone-covered claws in place of hands.
• The Federation: The Popolenmoi Co-Prosperity Sphere is described as the dominant angel nation, ruled by the Polenm-type angels' Hive Mind and controlling most of the habitable world. It also forms the core of the Regressionist faction, which put them at odds with the playable Exodite angels.
• Fling a Light into the Future: The "Wicked Ones" of humanity did so, preserving as much human knowledge as they could on Billion-Year Bricks so that someone, somewhere, sometime, might benefit from it. It's what allows the angels to develop advanced technology in the far future.
• Flunky Boss:
  • Popolenmy-pi-pi, being a Polenm-type angel, is always aided by a group of six smaller Polenm angels which serve as Attack Drones.
  • Zabwlan, Marlioy-Diolharsa and Lanmoligrrma all gain their own flunkies on Extinction difficulty.
• The Fog of Ages: Even though the angels are biologically immortal, their memories start to become fragmented the older they get with most of the stuff they remember being from the last century or so.
• Fun with Acronyms: The V.o.M. system's name is explained by both Lanmoliwf's description and the second tutorial as standing for "Vohinuwl-oOon-Mmwiotniw". What that stands for is anyone's guess.
• Genre Shift: The very first tutorial, meant as a tutorial for basic Shoot 'em Up controls, eschews the game's usual Body Horror style in favor of more traditional sci-fi aesthetics, complete with giving the player a Vic Viper-esque Space Fighter to control.
• Harder Than Hard: Final Extinction, a difficulty level unlocked after completing all Arcade campaigns on Extinction. The most notable change is that the bullet-erasing effect of destroying enemies is completely absent, while bosses gain even more weapons and armor which can be shot off for extra skull medals.
• History Repeats: The conflict between the Regressionist and Exodite angels mirrors that between the majority of humanity and the Wicked Ones almost exactly, with one side wanting to eliminate intelligence and awareness to live in eternal bliss while the other wishes to preserve individuality and knowledge.
• Hitbox Dissonance: As is typical with shmups, only a very small part of your angel is actually vulnerable to damage. This begins to get silly as your angel grows larger and stronger, as at full development its body can take up a large chunk of the screen, yet still only that one tiny part can actually be hit.
• Hive Mind: The Polenm Tribe of angels develops a telepathic network as they expand and reproduce, and ultimately nearly all angels on Earth become united under it. There are varying degrees of individual will and thought among the angels within it.
• Humanity's Wake: The human race is long since extinct by the time of the games, having re-engineered all life on Earth, including themselves, into angels.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: The difficulties go Very Hard, Extinction, and Final Extinction.
• Ignorance Is Bliss: The guiding principle of angelic nature. If the angels do not possess a concept of suffering, then by definition, they cannot suffer.
• Individuality Is Illegal: Angels were made to be unintelligent and possess no sense of self. The humans who created them (or more accurately, who was once them), considered individuality to be one of the main sources of unhappiness and conflict, and so sought to eliminate it. Among the angel civilization, the ruling tribe, the Polenmoi, largely lack a sense of self and are united under a Hive Mind, though there are other angels with stronger senses of self, particularly those that live in the Scorching Heat Belt.
  • Subverted in later storylines, which revealed that all Angels preserve their own basic individual identities, with the later Exodite-Regressionist split showing that the hive mind is more of a decentralized Internet.
• Interface Spoiler: Checking the Leaderboard, even in the demo will show various game modes and characters you haven't unlocked yet.
• La Résistance: The Exodites are a faction of angels which fights back against the Polenmoi Co-Prosperity Sphere, opposing the latter's anti-intelligence ideology and intending to leave Earth before it's destroyed by the expanding Sun.
• Last Stand: In a final battle known as Armageddon, the Regressionists attacked the Exodites launch facility where the latter fought tooth and nail to defend their last hope from being crushed by the overwhelming assaulting forces of the former. While the Exodite defenders where annihilated, they bought enough time for the Bussard Ramjet to launch safely with the surviving Exodites onboard.
• Lemony Narrator: The narrator for the tutorial is significantly more snarky and even a bit malicious when compared to the main game.
• Limit Break: The V.o.M. system, charged by collecting blood cells and triggered by a dedicated button. Its effect varies from angel to angel, ranging from a traditional screen-clearing Smart Bomb to spawning a schizoplast or even recovering some health. That being said, some of the Lanmo-line angels don't have this ability at all.
• Losing Your Head: Happens in two endgame Chronicle boss battles: first the giant Battleship Raid angel, then the final phase of the True Final Boss.
• Loss of Identity: As the angels regained more and more of their individuality they also started to fear the old ways of fusion. As they assimilated more and more of other angels, their sense of self would degrade as more memories that weren't theirs were integrated. As such, they would begin to selectively absorb ganglia containing only the most essential survival knowledge and instincts. But even this was not a perfect solution as it could start to warp their perception of reality.
• Lost Technology: The angel civilization gets about as far as steam power before they discover humanity's ruins and begin reading up on humanity's scientific knowledge. It ultimately culminates in the Exodite angels developing fusion energy and a ramscoop spaceship to escape the Solar System's death.
• Magikarp Power: The Polenm line of angels starts out extremely weak, but can gradually spawn schizoplasts to increase their power. If the player is able to keep themselves alive long enough, they'll have a small army of schizoplasts behind them that collectively produce more firepower than other forms of angels.
• Meat Moss: A good deal of level backgrounds that aren't some kind of wasteland are instead some kind of fleshy mismatch of body parts.
• Mecha-Mooks: The first tutorial pits the player against mechanical training drones distinguished by yellow cores in the center of their blue hulls.
• Mercy Invincibility: A unique variation - taking damage causes a red force field to briefly appear around the player angel, erasing all enemy projectiles within range. Levelling up, recovering a unit of health, using a Limit Break and defeating a boss all produce similar barriers, albeit blue in color.
• Mirror Boss:
  • Popolenmy-pi-pi is one to all the Polenm-line angels, using a similar fighting style involving a squad of six schizoplast minions.
  • Lanmoligrrma is essentially a giant Lanmo-line angel, and its attack patterns utilize similar wavy spread shots and charged energy blasts.
  • Lanmoliwf-mopopo, the Angel of Eternity utilizes many weapons similar to the player angels: at first she relies on spread shots, homing missiles and bullet-blocking fireballs like a Lanmo-type angel, then moves on to Laz-dba-like lasers and circular explosions, before becoming a disembodied head which spawns lesser angels (even draining her own health while doing so) and fires homing lightning bolts exactly like a Polenm-type angel. At least the first part is justified due to Lanmoliwf-mopopo being a heavily augmented schizoplast of the playable Lanmoliwf.
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous:
  • Klavhula-Velicss has three pairs of destructible sub-arms growing out of the sides of her carapace below the main arms, greatly increasing her firepower.
  • Similarly, Zabwlan and Keken-Dojalacos both have six arms which they use to fire bullets at the player.
  • Lanmoligrrma and Abiwloimobiwrai both gain three pairs of arms in their Final Extinction forms.
• My Species Doth Protest Too Much: Some of the playable angels include members of the Polenm Tribe, angels that are otherwise among those leading the Regressionists, suggesting not all of them are on the same page.
• Narrator All Along: The final snippets of plot reveal that the one who recorded all this information is the very first angel the player could use in the game, Lanmoliwf the Angel of Pain, who survived through the entire couple billion years of angel history and ultimately became the pilot of the Exodite spaceship.
• Natural End of Time: The finale involves the witness of the universe's inevitable end.
• Nipple and Dimed: Many angels have exposed breasts, and they are anatomically correct. The player can censor them in the options menu.
• No Biological Sex: As the angels are biological amalgamations of all life, designed with the purpose of breaking down all barriers and divisions that could cause strife, they lack any sort of gender as we understand it. Instead they reproduce by asexually splitting themselves. Even after they formed individuality and civilization, it is uncertain if they would even understand what gender is.
• Non-Indicative Name: The "Very Hard" difficulty level is in fact the easiest, and even a novice shmup player should not find it very challenging.
• Organic Bra:
  • Setting the R15 option causes all instances of exposed breasts to be covered up by bras or tops made of some kind of bone-like tissue.
  • Every Polenm Tribe member has this akin to their Planet of Hats, judging from the observation that none of Polenmy-ma-mo's official artwork show her with uncovered breasts.
• Our Angels Are Different: Every creature in the game. They are genetically engineered by humanity themselves as the tail end of the evolution of humanity, and later every life on Earth. Their senses and intelligence are artificially inhibited to achieve peace and happiness for all life on Earth. Then, as the Solar System and Earth itself is dying in 2.3 billion A.D., they rediscovered sense (especially pain) and intelligence, reigniting conflict.
• Player Death Is Dramatic: Taking damage causes the screen to shake and flash a dark pink frame along the borders while the player angel deploys a bullet-erasing force field. Getting a Game Over, meanwhile, is accompanied by the craft going down in a massive, over-the-top chain of explosions not unlike a boss.
• Posthuman Nudism: The more human looking angels that are not subject to Organic Bra's are always shown to walk around in the nude.
• Power-Up Letdown: The final angels unlocked in each line are "regression-types" and are weaker than even the original, as their heavy weapons lose the ability to block bullets. Playing as them turns the game Harder Than Hard.
• Purposefully Overpowered: The second-to-last angels unlocked in each evolutionary line all start out fully developed and with great firepower that makes even the hardest difficulty levels easy. The downside is they are not likely to get much stronger even as they level up.
• Puzzle Boss: Abiwloimobiwrai is first shown with a big, obvious face... whose destruction does little to harm the boss. The real weak spot appears behind the player, and must be accessed by rotating the boss' body around, which is done by shooting the large spherical pieces in the corners.
• Ragnarök-Proofing: One the last things human science created was the material known as the "Billion-Year Brick", which as the name suggests, is ludicrously durable. Its engineers expected the material to last 300 million years, but it far exceeds their expectations, and much of it is still intact even 2 billion years later.
• Ram Scoop: The Exodite spaceship is powered by one, as they quickly realized that standard rocket fuel wouldn't get them very far in interstellar travel.
• Roboteching:
  • All Polenm-type angels are capable of launching volleys of homing lightning bolts as their secondary weapon. The Angel of Eternity's final form makes use of this attack as well.
  • One of Klavhula-Velicss' attacks in her first phase is to shoot out two beams from her shoulder spikes before making them bend ninety degrees towards the player once their vertical position lines up. Her higher-difficulty forms trade that for actual homing lasers, at least until the weapon extensions are shot off.
• RPG Elements:
  • Instead of collecting dedicated power-ups, the player's craft evolves via levelling up, which is achieved by earning Experience Points from destroyed enemies and the collectibles they drop.
  • Original Mode goes even further, giving the player access to a shop where they can exchange nutrients gained from salvaging unneeded weapons for various upgrades to their ship.
• Sad Battle Music: While most of the music in the Angel of Eternity arc consists of thrash metal, the final battle against the Angel of Eternity herself is a melancholy-sounding piece that conveys the final days of the Earth, and later the universe.
• Science Is Bad: Humanity and later, the Regressionist Angels came to believe that intelligence itself is the source of all evil and sin. Thus, the products of science must by definition be evil and sinful.
• Sequential Boss: Lanmoliwf-mopopo goes through a total of three phases: first she throws massive bullet-blocking fireballs from the palms of its hands and shoots missiles from her Backpack Cannons, then she trades her arms for cannons which fire giant lasers, and eventually detaches her head from her body and starts summoning schizoplasts and throwing homing lightning.
• Shown Their Work: The story creatively integrates authentic scientific topics—including nuclear fusion, stellar evolution, entropy, relativity, genetics, astrophysics, and theoretical propulsion systems—into its narrative.
• Story Breadcrumbs: You get a paragraph or two of exposition upon finishing each stage. It's almost all non-linear, and it's up to the player to piece them together into a narrative.
• Tamer and Chaster: Despite how gruesome the game is, it is in fact somewhat toned down compared to the creators past work with both the gore and sexual imagery not being as pronounced as most of the creators preceding works bar the already lighthearted Steel Vampire.
• Tank Goodness: The boss of the first tutorial's final exam stage is Fierce Elephant, a giant jet-propelled tank armed with four support turrets in addition to the central cannon.
• Title Drop: At the very end of the story, Lanmoliwf witnesses the end of the universe, thus becoming the "Angel at Dusk" of all reality.
• Token Mini-Moe: Well as moe as a game such as this can be, but one of the regularly recurring humanoid angels visible in the games artwork appears noticeably smaller and far less physically mature than the others. It is the only one appearing as a young teen as opposed to the others that appear like grown women. It is also the only one who always have their privates covered regardless of censorship setting.
• Torpedo Tits: Some of the female looking bosses will fire projectiles out of their breasts.
• True Final Boss: Lanmoliwf-mopopo, the Angel of Eternity and boss of stage 32-A is the true final challenge in Chronicle Mode, only made available after completing every other dead-end stage. Completing that also unlocks the Angel of Eternity campaign for Arcade Mode.
• The Unpronounceable: The names of the angels and weapons seem like this at first, though this is avoided through the katakana.
• Unrealistic Black Hole: Releasing the Julwshwit V.o.M. creates a crimson-tinted black hole which sucks bullets and weaker Mooks in before exploding in a burst of energy. The Angel of Eternity's final form makes use of such black holes as well, except they explode into several rings of bullets instead of simple raw damage.
• Video Game Tutorial: The game contains two optional tutorials, one serving as an introduction to shmups in general and the other focusing on gameplay mechanics of this game in particular. Of particular note is the general tutorial, as it explains and demonstrates basic shmup strategies that can be applied to a wide variety of games, and it is extremely rare that a shmup will feature a tutorial at all.
• Was Once a Man: The "angels" which is every life form encountered and played as in game, are the tail end of the evolution of humanity (and every life on Earth).
• Wave-Motion Gun: Many of the heavy weapons available to the player take the form of either charged blasts in the vein of R-Type or straightforward wide laser beams.
• Wild Card: Pyocoletos, the angel the player controls during Original mode, is noted to be psychopathic and attacks anyone and everyone she comes across, regardless of what faction they belong to. This is implied because the Angel of Evil is the imperfect third schizoplast of the starter angel Lanmoliwf, the Angel of Pain
• Yank the Dog's Chain: After numerous losses and hard fought battles, the Exodites finally manage to launch their ship that serves as an ark for their kind and their intelligence to look for a new world to settle down on. Unfortunately, they discover that the death of the universe is accelerating and that the Milky Way is now too old to have any resonable chance of finding a habitable world with the same story being true for all other galaxies. As such, they are left to drift in the endless expanse of an ever emptying universe as their individuality melts away and they become a single super organism.
• Your Mind Makes It Real: The Regressionist Angels come to believe in a variant of this: existence is shaped by intelligence. Things like "time", "end", "past", or "future" did not exist before intelligent beings conceived of them. Therefore, they reason, if intelligence is completely wiped out across the universe, time will stop flowing and everything will exist for eternity. Though the fact that time advanced even during the 2 billion years when angels possessed no awareness would suggest they are wrong about this.