Asterika: Phantom Rose Refrain dodges to the beat

Forget falling notes. In Asterika, you move around a 6x6 grid on the beat while bullet patterns rain down, so it plays like a rhythm game and a bullet hell had a very demanding baby. It comes from makaroll, maker of the Phantom Rose games, and it brings that lovely art along, plus an illustrated story mode told in page-by-page prose following Klare, a Soul Rose Engineer caught between a Phantom Hunter and a mysterious thief.

The music and charts are the stars: catchy piano and electronic tracks, patterns that turn chaos into a perfect combo once you learn them, and nightmare-level charts for masochists. A Rank mode lets you see where you stand globally, there's a built-in beatmap editor for making and sharing your own stages, and plenty of options help you dial in the difficulty. If Crypt of the NecroDancer is your jam, this scratches a similar itch.

It's hard, and it means it. Launch week brought frame drops and a memory leak that hit the toughest charts hardest, but a patch a few days in tackled the leak and performance. Some still find the accuracy and hold notes a bit off, and the tracklist is on the lean side for now. Controller support is partial, and it runs on Windows and Mac.