Video Game / Angel At Dusk

"The last remaining sin on earth was "Intelligence".
Mankind enveloped the world in a barrier designed to inhibit the development of neurons.
At long last, a perfect world devoid of all sin had been brought to fruition.
All creatures on the planet were instilled with beatitude, and reborn as higher beings.
This was the birth of angels."

Angel at Dusk is a Shoot 'Em Up game by Akira Goya, with artwork reminisicent of H. R. Giger. The player controls a creature called an "angel" as it goes into battle against numerous other kinds of angels, devouring their remains and growing larger and stronger. Each stage completed reveals a small amount of story, and putting together the full plot of the game requires beating over 150 individual stages at various difficulties.

The setting is Earth in the extreme far future, around the year 2.3 billion AD. All life on Earth has been turned into grotesque amalgamations of human body parts known as "angels". Angels were meant to be mindless, capable of feeling nothing but happiness, but the expansion of the Sun and the cooling of Earth's core has resulted in them re-evolving intelligence and developing a civilization. Now cognizant of their impending extinction, it's up to the angels to decide what they should do.

The game encourages an extremely aggressive style of play: there is no Collision Damage and the closer you are to your target, the more Green Blood Cells (powerup items) it produces when damaged. Furthermore, the player is equipped with a "heavy weapon" that can cancel bullets in addition to their standard shot. Learning when to charge your heavy weapon to cancel the largest and densest groups of bullets is crucial to survival.

The game has two modes: Arcade and Original. Arcade mode allows for a variety of different angels to be chosen to play as, but they can never be permanently strengthened, meaning the player starts at zero each game. Original mode, meanwhile, has only one angel available to play as. In this mode, the stages gradually increase in difficulty, and it's all but certain the player will eventually be overwhelmed... however, as they play, they will unlock new and stronger weapons with which they can customize and strengthen the angel, allowing them to reach further and further each time. Accomplishing certain tasks in Arcade will unlock features in Original, and vice versa.

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Tropes:

• Attack Drone: some angels have the ability to spawn "schizoplasts", smaller angels that follow along behind them and augment their firepower.
• Bishōnen Line: The most powerful and advanced angels tend to start developing more recongizably human bodies, albeit with disturbing additions. The Angel of Eternity resembles a winged human being.
• Body Horror: naturally, being based on the works of HR Giger. Both the angels and the landscapes are made of strange combinations of human flesh and bone.
• Cannibalism Superpower: angels grow stronger by devouring each other. The more they eat, the stronger they become. Very large angels cannot effectively defend themselves against smaller angels, though, so at a certain point they divide themselves as a form of reproduction.
• Cast from Lifespan: The earliest Poplemnoi angels need to sacrifice a bar of health to spawn a schizoplast. This leads to a high-risk, high-reward style of gameplay, as the player can obtain greater firepower at the expense of durability. Later angels in their line instead spawn schizoplasts by detonating a VOM.
• Charged Attack: The majority of heavy weapons must be charged before they can be fired. The few that don't possess much weaker bullet-cancelling power, but can be spammed to mitigate this.
• Collision Damage: Notable by its absence. Touching a wall or another angel will not damage the player at all. However, it will cause them to "bounce off" a bit, which can be dangerous when trying to precisely navigate a dense swarm of bullets.
• Final Boss: The Angel of Eternity is the final challenge in both Original mode and the most difficult story arc of Arcade mode.
• Fling a Light into the Future: The "Wicked Ones" of humanity did so, preserving as much human knowledge as they could on Billion-Year Bricks so that someone, somewhere, sometime, might benefit from it. It's what allows the angels to develop advanced technology in the far future.
• Hive Mind: the Poplemnoi Tribe of angels develops a telepathic network as they expand and reproduce, and ultimately nearly all angels on Earth become united under it. There are varying degrees of individual will and thought among the angels within it.
• Humanity's Wake: the human race is long since extinct by the time of the games, having re-engineered all life on Earth, including themselves, into angels.
• Ignorance Is Bliss: the guiding principle of angelic nature. If the angels do not possess a concept of suffering, then by definition, they cannot suffer.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: The difficulties go Very Hard, Extinction, and Final Extinction.
• Individuality Is Illegal: Angels were made to be unintelligent and possess no sense of self. The humans who created them considered individuality to be one of the main sources of unhappiness and conflict, and so sought to eliminate it. Among the angel civilization, the ruling tribe, the Poplemnoi, largely lack a sense of self and are united under a Hive Mind.
• Lost Technology: the angel civilization gets about as far as steam power before they discover humanity's ruins and begin reading up on humanity's scientific knowledge. It ultimately culminates in the Exodite angels developing fusion energy and a ramscoop spaceship to escape the Solar System's death.
• Mirror Boss: the Angel of Eternity utilizes many weapons similar to the player, including giant bullet-blocking lasers and VOM blasts. It even starts spawning shizoplasts in its final stage.
• Narrator All Along: The final snippets of plot reveal that the one who recorded all this information is the very first angel the player could use in the game, Lanmoliwf the Angel of Pain, who survived through the entire couple billion years of angel history and ultimately became the pilot of the Exodite spaceship.
• Nipple and Dimed: many angels have exposed breasts, and they are anatomically correct. The option exists to censor them in-game.
• Non-Indicative Name: The "Very Hard" difficulty level is in fact the easiest, and even a novice shmup player will not find it very challenging.
• Organic Bra: what turning on censorship does. Any angel with breasts develops some kind of covering over them, made of bone or chitin or something.
• Our Angels Are Different: For one thing, they're the product of human science, and are a "perfect" lifeform made of random human body parts. They are said to be free of sin because they are mindless and incapable of feeling anything other than happiness, no matter what it is they're doing or what is done to them. At least, before they re-evolved intelligence, that is.
• Purposefully Overpowered: The second-to-last angels unlocked in each evolutionary line all start out fully developed and with great firepower that makes even the hardest difficulty levels easy. The downside is they are not likely to get much stronger even as they level up.
• Ragnarök Proofing: one the last things human science created was the material known as the "Billion-Year Brick", which as the name suggests, is ludicrously durable. Its engineers expected the material to last 300 million years, but it far exceeds their expectations, and much of it is still intact even 2 billion years later.
• Ram Scoop: The Exodite spaceship is powered by one, as they quickly realized that standard rocket fuel wouldn't get them very far in interstellar travel.
• Science Is Bad: Humanity, and the Regressionist Angels, came to believe that intelligence itself is the source of all evil and sin. Thus, the products of science must by definition be evil and sinful.
• Smart Bomb: VOMs are weapons that can be detonated to make the player effectively invincible for a short time, clearing away most if not all of the bullets on the screen. Once used, however, they must be recharged by absorbing ganglia and blood cells before they can used again (and some angels can't use them at all).
• Story Breadcrumbs: You get a paragraph or two of exposition upon finishing a stage. It's almost all non-linear, and it's up to the player to piece them together into a narrative.
• Title Drop: At the very end of the story, Lanmoliwf witnesses the end of the universe, thus becoming the "Angel at Dusk" of all reality.
• Wild Card: The Angel of Evil, the angel the player controls during Original mode, is noted to be psychopathic and attacks anyone and everyone it comes across, regardless of what faction they belong to. Why this is the case is unclear.
• Your Mind Makes It Real: The Regressionist Angels come to believe in a variant of this: existence is shaped by intelligence. Things like "time", "end", "past", or "future" did not exist before intelligent beings conceived of them. Therefore, they reason, if intelligence is completely wiped out across the universe, time will stop flowing and everything will exist for eternity. Though the fact that time advanced even during the 2 billion years when angels possessed no awareness would suggest they are wrong about this.