The PlayStation Store is about to get a little more radical this week, as Berzerk Studio has announced that Just Shapes & Beats: Hardcore Edition will be available to download for the PS4 on May 10.
Just Shapes & Beats originally launched for the PC and Switch in 2018, and it’s probably best described as a “dodge ’em up.” Players are attacked from all sides by a variety of Shapes, but as long as they survive until the end of each level’s chiptune-like Beat, they’ll move on. You could watch the new trailer embedded above, or see how Berzerk’s Mike Ducarme tried to explain it to the PlayStation Blog:
Just Shapes & Beats is a musical bullet-hell-ish? It’s weird to explain… you play a shape, you dodge beats, which are also shapes, you can play with up to three friends, who are also shapes. It’s not a bullet hell in the pure sense of the term since it’s a lot more based on dodging and surviving than attacking. It’s more like a dodge ‘em up I guess?
As you might have guessed from the new subtitle, Just Shapes & Beats’s PS4 debut will introduce Hardcore Mode, which ratchets the difficulty up to “dog owners not cleaning up behind their animal” level. Again, I’ll let Ducarme explain:
Of course, my good sir, you’ll be happy to know that the PS4 release also introduces HARDCORE MODE. We made our designer watch videos of things that anger him, like people cutting in line at the coffee shop because they know the staff, and dog owners not cleaning up behind their animal, and then let him loose in the wild. Every stage has been redesigned in some form or another to give you a whole new experience that will make even seasoned Souls-like players weep, longing for their mother’s warm embrace.
According to Berzerk, Hardcore Mode will be coming to the PS4 “first,” so PC and Switch owners will (hopefully) be able to try it out sometime soon.
