Sublight puts firing arcs on a bullet heaven

You captain a stellar battleship through a run of escalating sectors — rebel fleets, alien swarms, whatever the next wave is made of. Killing things drops salvage, salvage levels the ship, and levelling hands you a choice from a pool of turrets and passive upgrades. Shredding autocannons, piercing railguns, dozens of passives to stack on top. That is the bullet heaven contract, and Sublight signs it.

Then it adds one line that changes the genre: mind your firing arcs. In almost every game of this shape the weapons fire outward in all directions, or at the nearest target, or on a timer, and your hands only ever have one job — move so that nothing touches you. Movement is evasion and nothing else. Give the turrets arcs and movement is suddenly doing two jobs at once, and they pull against each other. The safest place to be is rarely the place your guns can reach.

That also turns the turret pool into something other than a damage ladder. A piercing railgun wants a long clean line and a swarm that obligingly queues up in it. An autocannon wants mass at close range and does not care what direction you are drifting. Take both and you have built a ship that has to be flown two ways in the same thirty seconds. The build is not a number any more, it is a shape, and you are the one who has to fly it.

Hulls work the same way. Each unlockable ship carries integrated weapon systems and abilities of its own, with multiple alternative loadouts, so the hull is the opening hand rather than a skin with better stats. What the ship already points at decides which turrets are worth picking up.

What Makes a Good Combat System? argues that combat is only interesting when it keeps asking you real questions — where to stand, who to hit first, when to commit. The bullet heaven genre made itself enormously popular by deleting most of those questions and keeping one. Arcs quietly hand a second one back. You are no longer only deciding where to be; you are deciding what your ship is facing while you get there, which is the same tension a melee game gets out of committing to a swing.

The Two Types of Randomness in Game Design draws the line between dice that fall before you decide and dice that fall after. Level-up offers are the good kind: the game rolls, you choose, and the run becomes yours. Arcs raise the stakes of that roll in a useful way, because a weapon you did not plan for is not just less damage — it is a ship that handles differently for the rest of the run. Getting a build you would not have designed is the point, as long as it stays flyable.

Roguelikes, Persistency, and Progression is about what survives your death, and Sublight is clear that plenty does: challenges unlock more ships, more weapons, more upgrades, permanently. That is the roguelite bargain and it is what keeps people coming back. The thing it costs is offer quality — every unlock you add is another card in the pool, and a pool that grows without getting sharper turns level-ups into noise. The games that hold up gate the pool by hull, so unlocking is widening the menu rather than diluting it.

Sublight is made and self-published by Codebrew Software Ltd, coming to Windows and Linux, currently listed for 15 September 2026. It sits under Action, Casual, Indie and Early Access, single-player, with Steam Leaderboards — which is the right feature for a game built out of runs, because a leaderboard is the only honest way to tell someone their build was worse than they thought.

Early Access is a fair call for this shape of game. The content in a bullet heaven is turrets, hulls and the interactions between them, and that is exactly the kind of thing that improves by being played by people who are not the developer. The parts you cannot patch in later are the feel of the ship and the readability of a screen with a thousand things on it.

If the appeal is a run-based game that hands the next attempt better tools than the last one, Mad King Redemption is the closest neighbour here — the same roguelite bargain, bolted under a beat ’em up instead of a warship.