On the surface, Ballpoint Universe is a masterstroke in creativity. Everything has been hand-drawn, from the environments to the characters and their animations. This game is beautiful in a mind-bending way, with an aesthetic that could be described as intricate doodles in your notepad come to life. Unfortunately, the game wastes most of that creativity on tedious shoot ‘em up gameplay that gets old and frustrating very quickly.

You play as a bird-like doodle who springs to life one day and is immediately recruited into a war between creative doodles and the abstract “Logicians,” who I can only imagine want things to be proper, dammit, and don’t appreciate the levels of abstraction that even they themselves exhibit. Bird-boy runs around a 2D, horizontal world with minor platforming elements but no combat. His only purpose seems to be talking to other doodles, finding Golden Sketches (this game’s one collectable) and being sent traverseing the shooting segments, which are the bulk of gameplay.

Every other creature you interact with pulls you out of an otherwise whimsical experience and thrusts you into a confusing and frustrating shooting mission. Before taking off, you must customize your paper ship’s loadout, which is a confusing process with no instructions (the game doesn’t even have a digital manual). Essentially, you equip two weapons, a special attack, and a body type. New parts in each category can be purchased or upgraded with Ink. You’ll need a lot of Ink to progress. There is some strategy in that guns tend to be weak, but spears and blades are auto-activating melee weapons that are incredibly powerful but require you to get up close and personal with enemies.

Then it’s off to the races, in which you go through a short horizontal shooting segment populated by doodles that shoot at you with an often multi-segmented boss at the end. Kill enough enemies and you can activate your ship’s special attack, but if you die, your hit counter resets, which is kind of irritating. The game’s aesthetic is the biggest barrier here—enemy shots are red, and if you’re stuck with a background that’s in the red spectrum, you’re kind of screwed. Some areas are heavy on object avoidance, but the exact bounds of your ship’s hitbox are not at all clear.

As charming as the aesthetic is initially, the buzz wears off once you realize that the platforming segments are really just filler—a way to get from shooting mission to shooting mission. And the design of the overworld somehow manages to be confusing, despite the fact that it’s entirely horizontal (there’s a lot of moving to and from different planes). The aesthetic doesn’t work well in the shooting missions either, as the gross details disappear at any distance. The music is either terrible or dull, and some of the sound effects make me want to stab my eardrums—like bird-boy’s jumping sound, which you hear a lot.

Ballpoint Universe: Infinite is certainly interesting, but it’s also extremely repetitious and kind of boring. The platforming falls flat, and even fans of the genre will find it hard to like the frustrating shoot ‘em up segments