Please fill my eyes with the psychedelic insects of new shmup Nidus

New arcade shoot ’em up Nidus first caught my eye with its psychedelic bug blast on Screenshot Saturday Monday. Three months later, it has now launched, and for a mere £6 we can all fill our eyes with so many colourful insects. You’d have to pay at least £57 for that sort of fun down the pet shop.

NIDUS – Gameplay Trailer

Nidus is an arcade arena shmup about a connected flower and wasp bashing bugs, blasting bosses, and just plain surviving to score mega-points on the leaderboards. It’s a twin-stick shooter usually, with the left side of your controller controlling your defensive flower and the right your offensive wasp (it does support keyboard controls too, mind). Also, it looks like that. It just does that. Those colours and critters and glows and flashes, all there, like the blacklight poster on the wall of a dingy student houseshare.

It also supports co-op (splitscreen, or over Steam Remote Play Together), where each player has separate control of their own lifeform. I suppose if you really wanted to test your symbiotic relationship with your playpal, you could go shoulder-to-shoulder and thumb-to-thumb and try to play the regular singleplayer mode on the same controller.

It’s made by Caleb Wood, who has also worked as a concept artist on the HBO Max animated series Scavenger’s Reign. He’s posted concepts for the show’s weird trees and critters and things on his site, if you’re curious.

Nidus is out now on Steam for Windows. A 20% launch week discount brings the price down to £5.99/€7.03/$7.19 until Monday the 26th of February.