Bullet Heaven & Bullet Hell

Bullet heaven and bullet hell aren't the same thing — and the difference matters more than the surface similarity suggests. Bullet hell is the older genre: Touhou, Ikaruga, DoDonPachi. You pilot one ship, the screen fills with thousands of patterned projectiles, and survival is a millimeter-precise dance through narrow safe corridors. The pleasure is mastery — learning patterns, threading needles, dying to the same boss for hours until your hands know the rhythm.

Bullet heaven flipped that on its head around 2022, when Vampire Survivors turned the camera on the player. Now you're the source of the bullets — hundreds, then thousands, sweeping the screen — and the enemies are the ones threading through your fire. It traded twitch precision for build-craft and roguelite progression: pick weapons, evolve them, watch the screen become a fireworks show, die when the math finally turns against you. Brotato refined the loadout side. Halls of Torment leaned medieval. 20 Minutes Till Dawn went minimalist. The genre exploded because it took the bullet-soaked aesthetic of bullet hell and made it accessible — and then deeply, compulsively replayable.

We make one of them. Granny's Rampage sits firmly in the bullet heaven tradition — five stages of demonic suburbia, a stubborn grandma with a minigun, and the slow turn from "I am hunting them" to "they are hunting me." If you're here to figure out which genre a game belongs to, find your next obsession after Vampire Survivors, or just want to see how the math behind these games actually works, the posts below are the rabbit hole.