Imma be real, I don't care about the story here at all. Not even because it's bad, I couldn't even tell you if it was, I just wasn't gonna do all that reading. And while there's strong art design and level design here, the game still has that vibe of an indie studio's first attempt at something at this scale.

But none of that matters because this is one of my favorite souls-likes of all time. The combat here is the exact style of melee I prefer from games like this. I enjoyed my 40ish hours of Elden Ring, and I like the little I've played of Bloodborne and Dark Souls. But I grew up on Platinum games, like Bayonetta and Nier Automata. These titles NEVER make you wait for an animation to play out. The animations are the point of many Souls-likes, but after falling in love with The Surge 2 way back when I was made aware that this does not have to be the case. This is the first souls-like I've ever played that is similarly satisfying to play.

The combat is a mix of Sekiro's parrying and the perfect dodges of something like Bayonetta. And enemies have two health bars to deplete, or really one with a layer of armor on it. Your main dagger does damage to the white bar, which reveals a green bar underneath that can only be damaged with your secondary claw attack. Instead of fights feeling stretched out due to this, the balancing of bars forces you to keep the pressure up, because the while bar will cover back up the green if you don't keep applying damage. However, perfectly dodging or parrying can also keep the white bar from returning as well.

There are also a number of plague weapons/abilities you can use as well. You have a separate meter that allows the use of a giant axe swipe, scythe swing, hammer smash, arrow throw, life leech, or other abilities ever so often. Think of these as ultimate abilities that you need to earn the right to use with successful hits, parries, and dodges.

Also, there are a BUNCH or upgrades. You can bump up your core attributes like health, and you can even upgrade the number of healing charges you have, as well as how much they heal and what additional bonuses they can give you. They even give you multiple types of healing charges to equip, so you can spec for faster, smaller heals or longer, bigger heals. A lot of this game shines due to its customizability. The skill trees let you spec out towards a slower combat pace or a faster one, and when you hit the end of some of these trees, you truly feel powerful.

Now as for why this game rules so much. This game is all about animation canceling, especially after you amass later upgrades. There's not even a stamina bar, so you can really just go ham on your actions. Every time an enemy got a hit on me, it ALWAYS feels like my fault because I'm paying for a mistake I made milliseconds ago rather than several seconds ago. It makes the call and response of combat feel much more immediate, and frankly, more friendly towards spamming. Because you can parry and dodge so fast, I often was able to avoid entire attach strings just by keeping my parries and dodges going constantly. And thank god for it, because just standing back to avoid damage will put you out of melee range and make it harder to keep that necessary pressure up.

But the combat itself couldn't hold the game up alone without great enemy design. Every single fight is worth engaging with, especially after you level up and gain some perks. Once you do, fodder enemies could refill some of your health on execution. And there are a regular amount of more intimidating mini-bosses that all test your skills in new and intense ways. And the bosses, the bosses! All of them are incredibly fun and even the hardest ones were difficult for fair reasons. I never felt like the game was cheap, I could always immediately tell the ways in which I messed up, and it made me even more excited to jump back in to try again.

I just really dig this game. I do feel like it is very gamey, in a way that might be off-putting to people who crave the immersion of Fromsoft worlds. Unlike many of their games, there's less of a sense that upgrades are optional to the experience. You could, in theory, beat the game with just the base character. But many of the unlockable abilities, like counterattacks and new melee moves, feel vital to the experience. In a game like Dark Souls, the core of combat stays the same, but your stats increase and the variety of ways to respond to strikes increases. Thymesia is, on paper, the same, but it doesn't always feel that way. But this is one of my favorite things about the game, as that's an approach more common to the character-action games that I love.

It took me many months to finally beat this one, despite reaching the end in less than 10 hours. It really is challenging, and I took many breaks and backtracked into remixed versions of previous levels to farm more memory shards and upgrade materials. But even when I was away from it, I found myself craving its combat. I really can't wait to see what these devs do next, because this game shows that they are really cooking something special.

You know how sometimes a game gets remade and it looks exactly how you remember the original looking, but then you look at the original and the remake looks WAY better in nearly every way? Prodeus is that for Doom. That's the short of it.

The long of it is that this is one of the best bomber shooters of the last 5 years. It doesn't lean into movement as much as something like Dusk, Ultrakill, or Turbo Overkill. When I say it's like the original Doom, it is almost just as grounded gameplay-wise. But what it lacks in any focus on platforming or areal combat it gains in satisfying secret hunting and gunplay. Not only are secrets well hidden, but many of them are easily found, but are behind high ledges and far jumps that later abilities will allow you access to.

And the gunplay itself is just SO good. It's chunky in the way shooters of the Build engine were in the early 90s, but enemies just POUR our blood to an absurd degree. Even the smallest dudes shoot geysers that literally end up dripping from the ceiling. I'm no gorehound, but the extreme violence makes the gunplay feel all the more satisfying, with rooms and arenas being covered in various fluids at the end of every combat.

And the game does look like Doom, but it's not strictly pixel-based. I read somewhere that the game uses 3D models but puts pixels around them. Its effect makes it so that each side of every model looks a bit like a 2D image, but has multiple 2D images to show for each possible angle you look at a model at. It's hard to explain, but striking as soon as you see it. But beyond this novelty, there are a lot of really neat visual setpieces to see throughout the game, and despite skipping though all of the text and ignoring the story, these visual flairs were more than enough to keep me engaged until the end.

There's nothing all too unique about the game mechanically, or artistically, outside of what novelty is gained by sticking so much to its old-school shooter roots. But it does a lot with this tried and true formula, and I was very happy to eat this whole bag of comfort food down to the last crumb.

Just picked this up in the Spring Steam Sale, really enjoyed it! Very goofy characters and story, and the movement mechanics are as silly as they are fun. It's a super truckated (I'm talking 70 min to beat) collection platform, and it's a fun ride despite the length. One or two trickier moments, but pretty easy once you get in the flowstate of the movement. Basically, you can slide really fast and turn yourself into a bullet, and they manage to squeeze a decent amount of gameplay out of just those two actions. Each of it's 5 short levels has a time trial attached, which really highlights the potential of these mechanics for speed. The humor is very 2010s Cartoon Network in an endearing way more than an annoying way. I would love to see an expansion on this game's comedy and gameplay in a future game, but this one was satisfying, cheap, and short, everything I could want from a game.