One day, while looking around for anime/manga updates on Tokyo Toshokan, I spotted a game known as exception. Apparently the full version was posted around a month ago, but tagged as something that I have not set my filters to see, so it was ignored.

So what is exception exactly? Well, it is yet another doujin shmup game, this one produced by primitive and is the third game they released. But what makes exception special?

Well, first off, it seems to be inspired by programming, which may or may not make it appeal to people in CS like myself. Bosses are named after common things like constructors, functions, iterators, threads, and more. I would be listing off more, but the game is pretty challenging and I only got up to level 4 (with thread as the boss) before I got the game over.

The visual theme is 3D abstract, which is reminiscent of noiz2sa. However, some of the concepts are different.

For one, the control scheme is different. Players can have their ship face any direction they want, shooting at blocks on a 2D plane, so as a result, using the mouse for aiming and keyboard for movement makes gameplay quite natural.

As well, the concept of dealing damage is quite different as well. Players can dish out damage the usual way with a normal shot, which is a blue stream. You can also do a massive lock-on shot which you can hold onto to aim at enemies, then release to shoot out a lot of blue lasers to kill the enemy. Now, depending on the difficulty level, when you destroy an enemy, they leave a bunch of blocks floating around in space. The third way to deal damage, which is by far the most effective thing to do in exception, is to propel blocks at enemies at a fairly reasonable speed. However, this attack requires a charge up, which does so automatically, but is increased faster when you destroy more stuff.

The thing that really makes this game stand out is that it is something you can play with friends. exception has a co-op multiplayer mode, where a group of players can take on the game together, because, you know, Japanese shmups are insanely hard.

And here’s obligatory videos – these are the same ones that are on the exception website.