is a bullet-hell twin-stick shooter created by Facepunch Studios, where you can defeat destructible bosses by shooting their pixels and taking them apart. Most of said bosses have multiple forms, each with a core protected by additional guns that must be removed by either shooting them directly or severing them from the boss.The main game consists of 14 challenging bosses for you to fight. There are also various powerups for different offensive and defensive strategies, a simple scoring system (beat the stage as fast as possible), and recorded replays for every fight. The game even has Steam Workshop support with several custom levels.
A redux of the game with many new features; such as an overhaul of Prospector's three forms, Hermit being placed before Goliath in the Invasion campaign, main menu Easy and Nightmare versions of the main bosses, overall rebalancing of the gameplay, the addition of modified versions of Quartet and Crossfire to the main menu, and Co-Op Multiplayer; was released on March 23rd, 2022.
A Nintendo Switch port, complete with these changes, was released the same day.
You can buy the game on Steam here.
This game has Steam Workshop support. Due to the sheer amount of content produced by fans, and its ease of accessibility in the game, additional tropes were split into several pages:
Chippy's official gameplay provides examples of:
Tropes applying to the main menu stages
- All the Worlds Are a Stage: The guns encountered in the Credits stage launch attacks used by various official bosses.
- Anti-Frustration Features:
- If you restart the first stage of a facilitated speedrun, your timer will reset to 0 seconds.
- Since the redux update, containers' time limits pause while you're shooting them, so shield containers won't expire and time bombs won't burst when you've already reached them.
- The 7/20/2022 hotfix prevented cancelling loading between stages during a speedrun; such was once known to remove players' entire progress in speedruns.
- Anti-Hoarding:
- Most single-use attack and defense powerups are capped at 3 or 9, to prevent you from saving them all for blasting the last boss form's core, or spamming a forcefield around yourself.
- Shield containers spawn less frequently if you have more Shields on you, making it inefficient to shy away from the boss to farm them.
- Arbitrary Weapon Range:
- All kinds of bullets fired by you, turrets, drones, and Airburst projectiles dissipate upon traveling far enough.
- Most of said bullets are weaker at point-blank, and they (especially Barrage and Broadside bullets) are stronger when close to, but not bordering on, their maximum range.
- Armor-Piercing Attack: The Slice and Carve items can turn pixels into "explosive", fuse-like ones, which are the only other things that can penetrate certain armor of your enemies.
- Attack Drone: You can control the drones you deploy. They will fire while you do so, move forward while you aren't firing, and change direction to mimic your aiming direction while you aren't braking. Just don't get yourself hit or shot by them.
- Attack Reflector: Projectiles that hit protected parts bounce cleanly off them. This includes bullets from drones, so it's best to be careful with them.
- Awesome, but Impractical: The Factory pickup causes you to slowly generate an infinite supply of Cannon items and sometimes other offensive powerups, making it the game's strongest powerup in the long run. However, it is cursed in its only official appearance (the Quartet stage), and it will cause a lengthy and damaging trail to be constantly emitted by you.
- Balance Buff: The redux update increased the power of a few items and bosses in certain ways:
- In the normal difficulty level of official campaigns, you now start off with one shield (whereas in legacy versions and Nightmare mode, you start with none).
- The Convert powerup used to turn a very small area of bullets in front of you into Damage pickups, but now it spends a few seconds applying that effect to any bullets that would normally hit you.
- Anomaly's diamond pulse attack always appears late in its first form.
- Two Time Bombs spawn much earlier in Hermit's third form.
- Goliath's second form possesses a once ill-known attack where it spawns lines of bullets with toggling circles throughout the openings — invariably once it loses enough guns.
- Storm is scripted to launch long walls at you when enough of its first form's guns are destroyed.
- Body Armor as Hit Points: You can protect yourself with up to three Single-Use Deflector Shields.
- Boring, but Practical: Once passive pickups are obtained, their effects occur without player input. The two most common ones make it easier to destroy things and avoid getting destroyed, with no drawbacks:
- Shield pickups massively augment your survivability; they function as Hit Points. You start normal-difficulty stages with only one, so eschewing more varied attack items for more Shields will prevent you from dying in a measly two hits.
- Damage pickups are helpful even if you're not going for fast times — they permanently increase the amount of damage your gun deals, allowing you to spend less time fighting a boss and struggle through fewer enemy attacks. They're also the only powerupnote that cannot be expended or lost until death.
- Boss Arena Recovery: Almost every part destroyed will drop at least one powerup to choose from. Some bosses even shoot out damage powerups and/or spawn powerup sets for free on occasion. Containers with powerups (usually a Shield) also spawn on occasion (though some of them are merely Time Bombs that invert this).
- Boss Bonanza: In the Quartet stage, you must defeat four one-form bosses, with them being stronger for each one you've defeated. Four gold medals must be earned elsewhere in the main game to unlock it.
- Boss Game: The stages consist of multi-form bosses for you to fight.
- Broken Armor Boss Battle: Some of the bosses' armors are very tough or even immune to conventional fire, serving to complicate your methods of attack.
- Breakable Power-Up: The Spawner effect if lost if you take a hit. You can get an achievement for essentially no-hitting Medusa's second and third forms. The Credits-exclusive Laser Sight pickup can also be lost this way.
- Brutal Bonus Level: The Nightmare versions of the main campaigns house ridiculously tough extra stages, with attacks being fasternote and more varied, you having no Shield to start with, and your gun dealing slightly less damage.
- Bullet Hell: Lots of bullets are fired by the bosses.
- Cap: Each player cannot have more than three Shield pickups at a time. All offensive and many defensive powerups also have noticeable limits on how high they can be stacked, and rare pickups are impossible to stack.
- Challenge Run: Seven achievements are unlocked for completing certain stages with special conditions met:
- Defeating Neophyte after attaining the 3-Slice secret curse
- Defeating Kraken without getting hit by a single bubble
- Seeing through to the Execution without firing a single shot
- Defeating Overgrowth with at least 50 Damage pickups
- Defeating Medusa while holding the Spawner pickup
- Defeating Hermit without collecting any powerupsnote
- Defeating Xulgon after destroying at least one each of all three minion types in the same run
- Collision Damage: On contact, the pixels of all units not only deal damage to you, but also destroy turrets, drones, and Airburst projectiles.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience:
- Guns of Kraken's and Hermit's that protect the respective core are more brightly colored than ones that do not. Curiously, the non-protective guns of Storm's last form and the green-eyed Quartet boss avert this trope.
- The game's powerups also apply as follows:
- Shield pickups are blue.
- Powerups that augment your direct firepowernote are medium slate blue.
- Attack itemsnote are teal.
- Summon itemsnote are pink.
- Piercing itemsnote are plum.
- Defense itemsnote are indigo.
- The Slowmo item is periwinkle.
- Bullet-removing itemsnote are aqua.
- Mobility itemsnote are phthalo green.
- Miscellaneous powerupsnote are magenta-violet.
- Status ailments also have their own colors as effects in the pause menu:
- The secret curse briefly found at the top left corner of the screen after skipping the tutorial fast enough in Neophyte's battle is displayed as vermilion in the pause menu.
- The Confused ailment is fuschia.
- The Tethered ailment is olivine green.
- The Webbed and Petrified ailments share a simple gray color.
- The Frozen ailment is light aqua.
- Continuing is Painful: In full-campaign Speedruns, just like in the sort of time-attack playthroughs they accommodate, your time spent on fighting and then losing to any boss other than the first one is added to your total time.
- Co-Op Multiplayer: The main game's individual stages support local two-player play. With two players fighting together, splitscreen is active if the two are far from each other, their guns deal slightly less damage to pixels and much less damage to parts, and a lone player can break a respawn pod to revive their comrade.
- Cores-and-Turrets Boss: The two categories overlap for most parts, with many of them shielding larger ones.
- Counter-Attack: Bombs and stronger cores spawn attacks directed at you while they are taking damage.
- Critical Existence Failure: Your ship flying and shooiting fully functionally until defeated is justified by the use of Single-Use Shields as Hit Points. Most bosses you fight are another story, though.
- Cursed Item: Certain powerups (with red borders) spawn an extra hazard for you to avoid. Some are far from practical to collect, and some others' advantages are well worth the increased difficulty.
- Deflector Shields: Protected parts have these. You can also (and most likely need to) use Single-Use Shields as these.
- Difficult, but Awesome:
- Drones are more dangerous and complex to control than turrets, but they are also more versatile, long-lasting, and powerful.
- The Airburst item spawns a projectile that shoots powerful shrapnel everywhere, which can damage both you and your enemies.
- Using the Barrage item generates a rotating sequence of bullets that get more powerful as they travel farther. Shooting at a fair distance with it is hard to do accurately, but such yields a much higher damage output.
- Easy-Mode Mockery: Aside from Chippy sporting a red bow in the Easy difficulty, cursed powerups, Drone items, and time bombs are absent from it.
- Endless Game: Uniquely, your goal in Crossfire is to survive through waves of Roboteching bullets and various other dangers. Furthermore, the timer in the stage's mode is affected with the in-stage flow of time.
- Energy Absorption: Using the Convert item causes you to temporarily turn any bullets you touch into Damage pickups that zip towards you.
- Energy Weapon: Quite some enemies use laser beams in their attacks.
- Fast-Forward Mechanic: The Fast Forward item, as opposed to the Slowmo item, temporarily speeds up time.
- They allow impatient players to reach higher Crossfire scores faster.
- Due to the Credits stage's time-attack mode preventing the timer from being affected by the in-arena flow of time, each use of the item will ultimately shave a couple seconds off your stage time there.
- Final Boss: Phobia of the Crusade campaign, and Xulgon of the Invasion campaign.
- Flash Step: The redux update changed Dash items into miniature versions of this trope. Whereas the older version provided a fairly short burst of speed in the direction you're facing, the newer ones are more numerous and zip you forwardnote a small distance, granting you finer control over your movement.
- Flunky Boss: Kraken, Guardian, Execution, Medusa, Hermit, Prospector, Storm, and Xulgon are accompanied by smaller enemies throughout their respective fights.
- Friendly Fireproof: Zigzagged. The Drone and Airburst items are the only weapons you can use that can damage you, and only many kite-shaped bullets fired by your enemies can hit and damage other units as well as you.
- Gameplay Grading: Medals are awarded based on how fast a stage is completed.
- Gameplay Randomization: As part of the game's heavy emphasis on precision and planning, the bosses' orders of attacks avert this trope — a rarity amongst modern Boss Battles. The resources you are able to obtain and how your environment functions are wholly dependent on your own behavior, so players' skill and ingenuity are all that are required to beat stages quickly.
- Hard Mode Perks: Certain items' time-slowing effects being weaker on higher difficulties causes their use to drag out the respective stages to a smaller degree.
- Health/Damage Asymmetry: Played with. Pixels and parts of units have many more hit points than the number of Shield and Teleport pickups combined that one player can hold. However, the amount of damage enemy bullets that aren't Friendly Fireproof deal to other units is defined differently than what they do upon hitting a player ship.
- An Ice Person: The Freeze item halts nearby bullets this way.
- Idiosyncratic Difficulty Level: The harder versions of the main campaigns are known as Nightmare mode.
- Intangibility: The Fade item temporarily prevents the user from colliding with attacks or pixels they overlap with.
- Kaizo Trap: Getting hit with no shields causes a Game Over, which prevents you from winning even if the boss's last form has taken lethal damage to the core.
- Laser Sight: The boss fought at the end of the Credits stage can fire a unique namesake pickup, which causes you to emit a thin beam that deals very light damage and assists in aiming.
- Lead the Target: Many enemy guns, to varying degrees, slightly adjust their aim to the direction you are travelling.
- Marathon Level:
- Getting a gold medal in Crossfire requires you to survive for almost 15 minutes.
- Getting a gold medal in the Credits stage (a difficult feat which requires the use of Fast Forward items) requires the stage the be beaten in under ten minutes.
- Mercy Mode: Easy Neophyte is the first Easy mode boss that can be accessed, and it is unlocked by dying 10 times in the main game.
- Meta Multiplayer: Players can compete for top times on the leaderboards, and watch replays of others' runs.
- Mini-Game Credits: The Credits stage allows you to battle units that contain the names of the Chippy development team and the top 10 players of the latest legacy version.
- Multi-Directional Barrage: The Credits stage has the Omnislice item, which launches a 360-degree spread of nine Slice projectiles.
- Multistage Teleport: It is possible to use multiple Blink items in quick succession to pass through obstacles quickly at great distances, combining the mobility benefits of the Dash and Fade items.
- Nerf: Some changes in the redux update made certain game elements weaker:
- The Double Gun effect has your guns fire at different angles unless you are braking.
- Each Dash item now thrusts you a shorter distance. Luckily, official levels have them in somewhat greater numbers to compensate.
- Bombs' countdowns are paused while they are being shot.
- The asteroids around Phobia and Prospector are now unable to move as fast as before.
- Monarch launches homing projectiles at you much less frequently, and its second form drops some Shield pickups.
- Prospector's laser beams that aren't from the main core now toggle periodically.
- A set of Blink items that can allow you to defeat Xulgon much faster is more difficult to obtain in normal difficulty, and outright absent from Easy mode.
- Xulgon's guns do not drop turrets or drones.
- Never Trust a Trailer: Downplayed with the release and Nintendo Switch trailers, which have clips with sound effects and powerup icons from pre-release versions of the game.
- No-Damage Run:
- Non-Damaging Status Infliction Attack: Certain bosses can temporarily knock back, confound, tether, web up, petrify, or freeze you, but the attacks they use for such cannot directly harm you.
- No-Sell: While parts have damage numbers displayed at where they are hit, bullets that hit shielded parts are stated to deal 0 damage.
- Notice This:
- An icon (near you or otherwise) indicates what item you are about to use and where it is aimed (if such is necessary).
- A large shockwave indicates where and when a bomb or container appears or bursts.
- If you shoot a protected core, the ones that protect it will be highlighted.
- Opponent Instruction: If you try to shoot a shielded core, the boss will tell you of the guns you must destroy beforehand.
- Pacifist Run: Because lasers automatically kill the Execution boss (though really slowly without your help), you can get an achievement for beating the boss without firing a single shot.
- Power-Up: There are numerous different ones across the game.
- Purposely Overpowered: The Omnislice item takes a Slice projectile, lengthens its effect, and turns it into a radial burst of nine, rendering an already useful function obscenely strong. However, it is exclusive to the Credits stage, there being just one secluded to an inner gun of one unit. Use it wisely.
- Quad Damage: Using the Double Gun items temporarily grants you an extra gun, doubling the damage you can deal in the next few seconds.
- Recognizable by Sound: Containers make certain noises when they appear or burst, in addition to their visual cues.
- Recoil Boost: You can move faster by shooting behind you, and Bumpers and Cannon shots can be used as miniature dashes.
- Recursive Ammo: The Airburst item launches a projectile that shoots shrapnel throughout the surrounding area.
- Red Is Violent: Harmful bullets, Time Bombs, and borders around cursed powerups have different shades of this color.
- Red Sky, Take Warning: This happens to the background during some pinch moments and upon the defeat of each form.
- Sentry Gun: You can deploy turrets, which can be manually rotated to your aim whenever you brake near them.
- Sequential Boss: Most of the main bosses have multiple forms for you to fight, with each bigger and more powerful than the previous.
- Shielded Core Boss: Pixels connect parts and act as armor, while most of the bosses' guns double as shielding.
- Shows Damage: Units and pixels exhibit the color-change variety, and numbers pop up to indicate the damage each bullet does to a part.
- Single-Use Shield: Each Shield pickup protects you from one hit.
- Sound-Coded for Your Convenience: Collecting or selecting an item makes the same or a similar sound to when the respective item is used.
- Sound of No Damage: Protected parts make a unique sound when bullets are reflected off of them.
- Splash Damage: The Cannon item fires a projectile that deals heavy damage to nearby pixels and parts.
- Spread Shot:
- If your gun is temporarily duplicated via use of Double Gun item, their aims will be at different directions whenever you aren't braking.
- Broadside items allow you to fire spreads of bullets from your sides.
- The Triple Cannon, an item exclusive to the Credits stage, fires a spread of three Cannon projectiles.
- Stationary Boss: Severely downplayed. Many bosses very slowly amble about the center of the stage, but most don't move about enough to largely impact the fight.
- Status Buff: Damage pickups permanently increase the amount of damage your gun does as long as you're alive.
- Subsystem Damage: Each individual gun, core, and pixel of your enemies.
- Teleportation: The Blink item allows its user to teleport a short distance.
- Time Bomb: Red-colored containers burst into particularly dangerous attacks should you fail to defuse them in time (though there are more clear-cut timers on them).
- Time Dissonance: Using certain items, taking a hit, grazing bullets, and some other player actions temporarily slow down your perception of the stage's flow of time.
- Timed Power-Up: The Double Gun, Convert, and Fade items work by giving the user a temporary status effect that aids them.
- Time Master: The Slowmo item lets you temporarily slow down time, in order to dodge tight attacks more easily.
- Time Trial: Stages can be replayed in order to get a faster time. There's also a mode that accommodates full-campaign speedruns.
- Trick Bomb: Said Time Bombs do not create explosions around them, but turn into tough attacks instead.
- Turns Red: Not only do most bosses have multiple forms, but some dole out tougher attacks as more and more protective guns are destroyed.
- Unlockable Difficulty Levels: Each Nightmare campaign can be unlocked by defeating its normal difficulty counterpart's Final Boss.
- Variable Mix: The game's music gains more melodies late in certain fights, and more percussion plays while main cores are under attack.
- Video Game Dashing: The Dash item allows you to make a burst of velocity in the direction you are pointed. Using any while braking nudges you in the opposite direction.
- Wake-Up Call Boss: Overgrowth. The Gradual Regeneration of its organic pixels (including guns that prevent you from hurting the core) pressures you to go on the offensive, even with no huge openings in enemy attack. This effectively hammers in the importance of defeating bosses quickly.
Tropes applying to the Ball Pit
- All Webbed Up: The reusable Web item allows a player to fire a web that can anchor the two players towards each other.
- Awesome, but Impractical: The Gutter Money pickup permanently gives some chance of your balls hitting your gutter to turn into money pickups. The pickup, however, costs so much money to get that making an actual profit off of it is very unlikely to occur. And your opponent may even grab some of the money pickups...
- Comeback Mechanic:
- More Shields are given to the respawning player if they are losing.
- Additional coins as "pity bonuses" are given to any player who loses at least three rounds in a row.
- Mid-round powerups' sinusoidal trajectories are closer to whichever player is losing.
- Competitive Multiplayer: This mode is the Bullet Hell equivalent of 1v1 dodgeball combined with air hockey, where you must be the first to score 10 points. Each point is scored and the round won when one's opponent is hit by an enemy ball while they have no Shield or Teleport pickups.
- Counter-Attack: The Revenge pickup causes the bearer to fire balls in all directions upon losing a Shield.
- Crosshair Aware: Snipe items allow the player to place a damaging burst at a displayed crosshair that moves with the user.
- Death or Glory Attack: Downplayed with the Ultimatum item, which stops the user's movement (but not direction) and makes them continuously fire balls forward. While this attack can be extremely powerful, the user becomes more vulnerable to a well-aimed attack from their opponent, and the item's effect will stop if its user gets hit.
- Energy Weapon:
- The Laser item spawns a temporary laser beam from the player's location at the item's use.
- The Railgun item fires a short-lived blast from the user.
- Grapple Move: The Tether item spawns a circle on the opponent's side that anchors their movement on contact.
- Highly Specific Counterplay: The Scatter pickup can make ball movement more dangerous for its user just as easily as it can make them safer. Its sole reliable use is to counter the opponent Redirecting their balls in a vertical direction.
- Homing Projectile: The Homing item sends a homing orb the opponent's way.
- Interface Screw: The reusable Confuse item allows a player to launch a projectile that temporarily inverts the opponent's controls.
- Launcher Move: The Bubbles item launches knockback-inflicting bubbles from the user.
- Loot Boxes: Using the Booster Pack item spawns several powerups for the user to collect.
- Luck Manipulation Mechanic:
- The Luck pickup increases the odds of the bearer's pickups' random outcomes being desirable for them.
- The Bigger Shop pickup gives each shop kiosk one more powerup to choose from, increasing the odds of you being able to get a certain powerup you want.
- Money Multiplier: The stage has four purchasable items that are solely used to obtain more money. They are, from most to least common: Insurance, Endow, Abundance, and Gutter Money.
- Multiplayer-Only Item: The majority of this 2-player-exclusive stage's powerups are unique to it.
- Projectile Webbing: As opposed to the beam used by Phobia and Nightmare Goliath, the Web item shoots a small projectile.
- Red Sky, Take Warning: The closer the winning player is to victory, the redder the background is.
- Simple, yet Awesome: Each Insurance pickup grants you one dollarnote every time you lose a Shield with it. For each pickup level, losing a Shield three times after buying it is enough for you to make a profit. Also, if you end up behind in the game, at least the extra shields you respawn with will compound this simplistic buff, allowing more cash to roll in without a press of the item use button.
- Single-Use Shield: The Teleport pickup acts like a higher layer of Shields, but with almost no Mercy Invincibility and the player teleporting to a random spot on their side upon getting hit.
- Sprint Shoes: Downplayed with the Faster Movement pickup, which ever-so-slightly increases the bearer's movement speed for the remainder of the game.
- Unstable Equilibrium: At the end of each round, the winner earns five more dollars than the loser does, allowing them to buy more and/or better items to aid them further. However, this is tempered by multiple Comeback Mechanics.
- Video Game Stealing: The Steal item allows the user to teleport a powerup from their opponent's side to their own.
