Paper Nebula Review

Have you ever dreamt about flying a paper aeroplane in space, specifically through a nebula shooting down the alien crafts trying to destroy your ship? In Paper Nebula, you fly over a giant multicolour cloud made of gas and dust; this roguelike game will challenge you to upgrade your craft so you can take down the enemy and escape from this nebula. When you get destroyed, which will happen a lot, you start back at Zone One. The enemies will fly in the same pattern every time this will allow you to anticipate exactly where the next threat will appear. If you survive long enough to get to the end of the stage, a boss battle awaits you.

When Paper Nebula begins, we see Vela, the main character in the Drone Lab, talking with the AI named TR — short for T00K11L - R, who is in charge of the drones. Drones are paper aeroplanes that you will be flying and frequently destroying. He is working on restoring the previous functions that the drones had, so he does research based on the alien crafts you destroy on your runs. After multiple attempts, you will unlock upgrades for your drone. There are six different areas of the ship that you can power up: Front Mount, Wing Mount, Tail Mount, Ultimate, Shields, and Hull Plating. Each has three different levels to unlock, as you equip each one, the game will become a little bit easier. For the first hour, I was stuck on Zone 1, only making it to the second area a couple of times, but the more I played, the more stuff I unlocked, making the run a bit easier.

You don’t need to have all of the upgrades to complete the game; it is advantageous to play around with each one you unlock to see which works best for you. During your run, if you pause the game, you can turn on the auto-fire. I would use this setting to save your fingers instead of constantly hitting the fire button; your hands will thank you! Watch for shots coming at you, as you can only get hit a few times before you are destroyed but you can fire at them to take them out before they hit you.

The graphics in Paper Nebula are cute 2D characters. Your drone looks just like how you expect a paper aeroplane to look, but it doesn’t fly the way you would expect. Instead, it flies just straight forward like other flying shoot ‘em-up games. You can move it side to side and avoid the enemy and bullets coming at you but it won’t float through the air. The enemy ships look like stickers with their white outlines and move through the levels trying to get in your way and destroy you. Some look like cartoony UFOs, some like a doll with a paper origami skirt, and others like flowers; they don’t seem too scary, but the constant waves coming at you are. The bosses are more unique and have a variety of attacks to use on you. One of the hardest to avoid is the poison gas attack that the first boss, named Molly, uses against you. If you get hit, you die and have to start over. If you are successful, there is an explosion of colour and you are rushed off to the next zone to continue your run. No rest for you!

Paper Nebula has great music while you are flying through the zones taking down the enemy, it’s upbeat, and even after hearing it constantly repeated over and over as I was destroyed, I wasn’t sick of it. Though the music that plays while you are in the lab talking to TR is super serious and sad sounding. It was a downer compared to the music that plays while you were flying. The sound effects you hear during the game were quite good. The exploding enemy ships had a very satisfying sound, especially when you destroy the ones that look like flowers; it sounded like what you hear at a fireworks show when they set off the smaller fireworks.

Paper Nebula isn’t a very long game; there are seven stages to complete to get to the ending. It took me a little less than four hours to get through, and if you don't have the auto fire on, be sure to take breaks to give your hands a rest from the constant hitting of the fire button. There are no other difficulty options available, but if you really want to challenge yourself, you could try to complete the game without equipping all the power-up options. This is a fun roguelike shoot ‘em up title that will keep you busy for a while and not overstay its welcome. If there were more zones, having to start back at Zone One, every time would get incredibly frustrating.