The zero-gravity nuns are insane! Is “Guns and Nuns: Hellstorm” worth jumping on?

Let me start with a little detail I really love: the nun portrait at the bottom of the screen gradually “tilts into madness” as you fight, until she ends up grinning like a Celeste player high out of their mind—wild and manic. This single design choice binds the character’s condition, the player’s rhythm, and the game’s mood together. You don’t even need to look at UI numbers to feel that you’re just a few bullets away from total collapse.

Speaking of this “madness,” the game’s core is basically two words: weightlessness. Guns & Nuns: Hellstorm is made by solo dev RM120, launched on Steam on April 4. It currently sits at 84% “Very Positive” reviews. The numbers aren’t explosive, but for a high-speed indie FPS it’s pretty solid. Its main feature is fully zero-gravity aerial combat. You can zip around like doing double jumps in ULTRAKILL, but here you’re outright free-swimming in 3D space, with no limits up, down, left, or right. Combined with a dash that feels a bit like a blink, you end up like a floating Neon White holding dual pistols.

The protagonist nun, Angelica, has a core system called “Holy Time,” somewhat like an indie take on DOOM’s Blood Punch mode. Chain kills on demons to build a combo; once triggered, the character lets out a slightly unhinged cackle, your weapon power goes through the roof, your score skyrockets, and you can even heal. I really like this: it makes the “the better you play = the safer and more exhilarating it feels” feedback loop extremely direct, with a bit of that Vampire Survivors flavor—except this time it’s a one-against-many aerial ballet with demons.

Interestingly, the game doesn’t bombard you with content right from the start; it’s more like a tight arcade package. You pick a mode, then weapons and a level. There are currently three types of gameplay:

Hellstorm Mode is a bit like a timed variant of Devil Daggers. You try to kill as many demons as possible before the timer runs out; shattering hourglasses along the way extends your time, and maintaining high-speed multi-kills keeps your combo going so you can push your score higher. Time Trial is more about routing and mastery: your goal is to clear all designated demons on the map as fast as you can. This part reminded me of some small-scale FPS mods focused on high-score speedruns. Survival Mode goes the classic route—kill as many enemies as you can before you drop. But here, “Holy Time” no longer heals you; it only boosts your damage, forcing you to seriously mind your positioning instead of just brute-forcing everything.

Judging from the weapon and level setups, this game feels more like a carefully polished action demo. Right now you can only bring one primary weapon and grenades at the start, and unlock more gradually. There are 7 weapons and 7 stages in total. That’s not a huge number and sounds a bit like an expanded game jam project, but in practice every map is built around aerial mobility. There are “air corridors” ideal for high-speed weaving, and danger zones that require repeated dashing and careful positioning. If you’re used to indie games like Cyber Hook that take one idea and squeeze every last drop out of it, the density here should be right up your alley.

The pity, for someone with my appetite for high-speed FPS, is that for this system to truly ascend to legendary status, it needs to be “dug into” more deeply. The three modes differ in rules, but the core loop is almost the same: “take off, chain kills, trigger Holy Time.” After a while it feels a bit like only grinding a single world in Risk of Rain. If future updates added more stages focused on mobility puzzles, or environments that require creative use of zero gravity to solve, then it would feel more like Celeste meeting ULTRAKILL, instead of just a pure score chase.

Price-wise, the game is 42 RMB at full price, with a 25% discount until April 18, so you can get it for 31.5 RMB. Given the current amount of content and level of polish, I’d be more inclined to recommend it to two groups of players: first, those who have already played high-tempo indie action games like ULTRAKILL and Battle Chef Brigade to death and are chasing mechanical skill ceilings and leaderboard grinding; second, players who like minimalist HUDs and “insane-feeling” indie FPS aesthetics, and are willing to pay for a promising core mechanic while tossing a drumstick to an indie dev. If you care more about rich storylines, long-term progression, or flashy unlock trees, this one might leave you wanting more.

Overall, Guns & Nuns: Hellstorm feels like taking a very smart core mechanic from prototype to “replayable,” but not yet all the way to a fully fleshed-out big game. It’s creative, it’s well-executed, and it’s definitely not one of those half-finished projects that only look good in promotional gifs. If you enjoy tumbling through the air, listening to a nun cackle while wiping out waves of demons, this 31.5 RMB “Hellflight 101” is quite worth taking a day off for. From here on out, it depends on whether the developer is willing to take this strong foundation and push it toward something like Undertale’s “chain of surprises” approach.