Thank you Veyeral Games for sending us an Early Access code for the game and soundtrack!

The Void Rains Upon Her Heart has two story modes that revolve around two naked Zaraden/alien women who are being tormented by monsters and seclude themselves into different caves to avoid conflict with them. Instead of giving up or fighting the monsters, they choose to love them in the hopes that they will learn to love them back. Even if the monsters do come around, they’ll forget in the morning and will have to be shown love all over again.

Upon launching the game you’re given an option to enable a fog around the non-sexual nudity. Even with the mist enabled, breasts without nipples are still shown in the conversations. The mist mostly covers below the belly button which does show hair between the legs if not enabled. Granted the nudity is not sexual in nature, but these women do live in a forest and have the resources available to cover themselves in leaves or animal skins if desired.

Along with the nudity there are some dark themes involving depression, anxiety, and suicide. Like other shoot 'em ups there is combat violence, but instead of firing bullets you’re projecting your love towards these hideous monsters. Each level in the four to six chapters (the numbers of chapters change with the difficulty setting) is a boss battle. There are no lower-level enemies, only bosses. The bosses have difficulty levels that increase as you play on harder gameplay levels. While you can choose to battle against lower-level bosses, the higher-level ones give you better gifts in the end.

Some of the gifts include health replenishment or upgrades to your shot pattern. I liked the gifts that altered my firing pattern to enable bi-directional streams or a single wavy configuration. Sadly, you only get one life per game and the gifts earned are not activated by default in the next playthrough. With that said, they are not completely lost either.

After every battle you earn karma and points towards unlocking tetrids which can be used to purchase gifts and enemies to become available in future playthroughs and in the Quick Play mode. The more karma you earn you’ll have a better chance at unlocking more valuable gifts.

Between unlocking gifts and monsters to battle, there is plenty of replayability in The Void Rains Upon Her Heart. I look forward to future additions as this Early Access game is frequently being updated by the developers.

The soundtrack is good and available for $3.99 on Steam if you enjoy it. The voice acting is gibberish so there’s not much to say about that.

If you’re into Steam achievements, The Void Rains Upon Her Heart has you covered with 170 of them at the time of this preview. I earned over twenty of them on my first playthrough. The remainder of them will take a lot more work.

In the end, The Void Rains Upon Her Heart is a solid shoot 'em up with plenty of reasons to keep playing it. The only thing holding me back is the unavoidable nudity. Hopefully that gets fixed before the final version is released.