An heart on his sleeves, swashbuckling action adventure that is fun from start to finish. The simple combat system is elevated by putting the focus on arena design and the use of environmental hazard, instead of one on one duels. This creates a back and forth between using the environment to crowd control and isolate enemies, and then engaging with the remaining ones with a parry and dodge system similar to the Arkham games.
Arenas are generally well thought out, offering boxes to push into enemies, buckets to throw on their heads and chandelier waiting to be dropped.
The enemy roster is a bit lacking but what is there works well, with weak harassers, bomb throwing area controller and aggressive melee enemies and "elites".
Bosses are not an hoghlight, being simple hit and dodge affairs. Though the fact that they almost always are accompanied by adds, at least reinforces the focus on crowd controls.

The main campaign is short and to the point, with level secrets and challenges that incentivize replaying. There are some pacing issues however, with basic platforming session that, especially in stage 2, drag down the level design and don't offer anything substantial. It almost feels that they were put in out of an obligation to have breather section between combat encounter, without thinking abou the overall pacing.
Where the game really shines however is in the Arena Mode. Here enemy compositions and crowd control options are at their best, and positive and negative modifiers push you to experiment and try different approaches. The last encounter of the higher difficulty arena being an highlight.

The game isn't the deepest action title and it has been clearly made on a budget. A better focus on pacing would have made the campaign more interesting to replay, a couple more enemies would have improved the enemy roster and some more varied hit reaction would have made the crowd control system even more engaging.
With that said what is here is solid and creates a game that delivers on his premise and is a ton of fun to play. And sometimes that is all you need.

Edit 3/29/24: Reduced to 7. Too formulaic, especially in level design. Souls stuff continues to sour on me.
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Probably the funniest game this year. A ridiculous dark fantasy Pinocchio setting is played completely straight and infused so deeply with all the modern Fromsoft trappings that it almost comes across to my bitter heart as parody. Everything from general game structure, to the level up lady in the hub zone you warp to, down to even individual animation cadences, is lifted wholesale.

If that's the setup, then the punchline is that Lies of P is better mechanically than everything it's ripping off. For a more exhaustive overview, check out this writeup, but let me throw some out myself:

* You can restore lost HP by attacking, like in Bloodborne, but only the chip damage from blocking
* The mana used for weapon arts from DS3/ER is gained by hitting enemies
* If you are out of Estus flasks, you can gain another by hitting enemies
* Enemies can be "posture-broken" through perfect guards and damage, but to actually trigger the downed status you must land a charged heavy attack
* Parrying and dedicated ranged weapons have been completely removed (these systems have always been broken and/or cheesy in Souls)
* Red attacks cannot be iframed or blocked, and must be perfect guarded or outpositioned

The general flow of the game is: perfect guard on predictable attacks that are easily timed, block or dodge when you are unsure, and try to outposition and attack when possible to restore guard chip and land charged heavies. Red attacks are a somewhat natural extension to this dynamic, in that they encourage you to anticipate them and get out of the way, which is really what you should be doing for a lot of attacks. There's no need to play this like a parry simulator, and the fun of the game is in trying not to!

The best examples of this are the large bosses, who generally offer a lot of options for getting in hits during strings. My favorite is the Green Monster, whose AI can be somewhat predicted based on spacing and whose attacks have a lot of different arcs and blind spots to consider, almost like a weird Souls-ified Valstrax from Monster Hunter.

That being said, this is still a Sekiro-brained game at its core; you've gotta be buying what they're selling, even if this is a far better implementation than its inspiration. Occasionally the devs will fully succumb to the evil whisperings of the Sekiro demon on their shoulder, and use heavy tracking and obtuse timings to force brute memorization. A few red attacks in particular (Black Rabbit eldest, Laxasia) earned disapproving glares from me for this.

I was going to comment on weapon systems, level design, etc. but honestly you should just read that writeup from before.

Let me make a general point about the Souls series. The selling point for me is their holistic quality: they do a bunch of things passably and a few things well, but combine them into a greater cohesive whole. Dark Souls 1 is an insanely flawed game, more than most would admit, but the way the world design, level design, resource management, and themes wrap into each other makes me willing to overlook a lot of issues. Later Fromsoft Souls-type games are frustrating to me because they place an emphasis on combat that the mechanics aren't strong enough to support, while either failing to improve the persistent shortcomings of other elements or outright regressing in them.

Lies of P is nice because it improves the combat enough to justify a Dark Souls 3/Sekiro balance to me, while everything else is at least good enough. Bosses in Souls type games are pale shadows of Monster Hunter fights, and player toolkits and expressivity are pale shadows of Nioh 2; I would even say those games are "better," because I value their excellence in those single areas enough to overlook their flaws. But Lies of P is a solid, respectable, enjoyable overall package that actually iterates on its inspirations. It's fun!

I think your mileage with this will heavily depend on how much you can forgive it for being so derivative, but I think in this case it’s worth forgiving. Personally, I have no problem with stealing souls systems like bonfires, estus, stamina management, parries, rallies etc. but there are points where I think Lies of P crosses a line: talking to sick people through windows, a not-fire-keeper calling you “clever one”, slowly pushing open heavy double-doors, the same damn item pickup and menu sounds, I think these kinds of choices are needlessly derivative and will only serve to remind people of other, better, games. A more thrifty approach could have taken the meat of souls without also taking the chaff. Even things like attacking, running and dodging animations are uncannily similar to fromsoft titles, which is a bit of a double-edged sword: On the one hand, this is one of the precious few souls copycats that actually feels great to play, because it takes the finely-tuned animation cadence of fromsoft so wholesale (the other souls copycat that feels good, Nioh, relies on the years of action game experience that Team Ninja has, so it’s maybe preferable for an inexperienced dev to simply steal in this case). The negative side of this is that everything which feels “off” or out of place will stick out all the more severely. Level design is pretty obviously inferior to fromsoft’s games, as linear as it is with a bunch of superfluous shortcuts, lacking the overlapping and layered tracks that define the best souls levels (ds3 undead settlement is a perfect example) and lacking any real side areas. But elsewhere I have to say that as the game went on, I found remarkably little to complain about: Environmental design and the art direction is alarmingly good for a debut game, enemy variety is surprisingly great - one of the critical things that separates good souls from mid souls, I was really taken aback by how the game has unique minibosses that are only used once or twice whereas basically every other souls copycat is defined by excessive reuse. The quality of the animations is universally top-notch, everything flows great and so many weapons have enjoyable movesets and bosses have subtle variations in their combos to signify what they’ll do next.

All creativity is about stealing to some extent, though this is admittedly on the more extreme end of that spectrum. Still, I think a fixation on its similarities - both superficial and meaningful - can cover up the actually original things that are here: Glossing over the neat durability and weapon-fusion mechanics, I love the parry/blocking system in this game and think it's an ingenious fusion of Sekiro and Bloodborne that actually improves both. The boon of Sekiro’s posture and parry mechanics was that it allowed bosses to have flashy, dynamic, extended blockstrings without feeling like you were just waiting for the boss to be done (i.e Elden Ring), because parrying those blockstrings did damage to the enemy. The flaw of Sekiro’s mechanics, for some people at least, was that parry was the only meaningful way to engage with a lot of situations, which Lies of P solves by requiring posture breaks to be activated by a charged heavy, forcing you into finding an opening and not just reacting with parries. Bloodborne, on the other hand, was all about hit-trading, thanks to its rally mechanic, and the boon of this was that getting hit was equally an opportunity just as much as it was a punishment, the flaw, however, was that in some cases it could promote mindlessly aggressive play, where you just hit-trade a boss to death without even trying to avoid their attacks (Bloodborne mostly got around this with clever enemy designs, but some bosses still have the problem). Lies of P fuses these two by locking the rally mechanic behind blocking, while retaining the parrying mechanics of Sekiro. The result is an interesting risk-reward pipeline: Risk a parry to get their posture down, if you miss and get a regular block, now you’re encouraged to go on the offensive to get that health back, getting hit is unequivocally bad and dodging remains very relevant as a repositioning tool. It’s interesting and, for me, very satisfying to engage with, though I wouldn’t say it’s perfect: It’s a little too insistent on parrying with the armour and tracking that bosses/elite enemies sometimes have, the fact that it doesn’t show you the posture bar so that you can’t factor in how close an enemy is to staggering into your decision-making also seems like an odd choice, and the “perilous attacks” beating both block and dodge can get a little ridiculous, but for the most part I really like the systems here.

The deciding factor for me is that the bosses in Lies of P are genuinely fantastic, all with loads of varied, amazingly animated attacks and interesting gimmicks, there are some lacklustre ones, especially the two lategame rematch bosses, but the run of bosses from Andreas with his side-switching gimmick, the Black Rabbits aka "O&S but with 3 different Ornsteins", King of Puppets, Victor and the Green Monster with the clever reuse of the Watchman is just banger after banger, they're all so creatively designed, and if I could commit some blasphemy real quick, I think this boss lineup is better than any other soulslike game, fromsoft included.

It comes with the caveat that this is a very difficult game. I love that, personally, the level of difficulty means that encounters demand you respect them and learn their moves rather than stumbling through, but it won’t be for everyone, and I think if you go in with the mindset that it’s just a copy, you’re not going to want to give it that respect. It’s a little sad that the general reception seems to be so lukewarm, and it’s hard to pinpoint whether this lies in the difficulty, the feeling that it’s a “knockoff”, a vindictive idea that any good soulslike is a threat to fromsoft, or just general fatigue with soulslikes. Regardless, a lot of the takes about how the game is unfair or feels “off” just don’t ring true to me at all; I think this is the real deal, it’s a damn good game, and I honestly find myself feeling that it’s going to be my GOTY, but hey, I loved Bloodborne and Sekiro, so it was probably a given that I would love a fusion of the two as well.

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GOT A JOB FOR YOU 621

A tip to enjoy this game:

If you want a challenge, don't use shotguns; if you're having trouble with it, use shotguns.

They're kind of broken rn and I imagine they'll get patched. My arena experience wasn't that memorable thanks to using a dual shotgun setup early on. 🙃

Armored Core 3 was a captivating experience that was unfortunately brought down by a struggle to find an internally consistent logic in its game design as well as a distracting, game-long search for authorial intent in determining what the “Armored Core Experience” is. I take partial blame for this, as AC3 is my first AC, but not the entirety of it. I think AC3 is a very thoughtful game, but I can’t help wondering if it's so thoughtful that it illuminates the parts of its design that fail to measure up.

At first blush, Armored Core 3 is focused on balancing: (1) heart pounding, exhilarating mech combat with (2) the stress and seeming mundanity of managing the costs of battle with (3) extensive preparation to mitigate those costs, and hopefully finding satisfaction in all three. I think Armored Core 3 succeeds and struggles in multitudinous ways with all three of these, but I find the second and third parts of this equation generally confounding.

There is a tremendous sense of weight and consequence to having thoughts like, “goddammit, that missed howitzer shot cost me $400,” monopolize your mind during missions over the course of the game. More than any explicit text about complicity in a three-way corpo war crime turf battle, placing a mental price tag on everything that happens during a sortie substantially enhances the game’s thematic prioritization of war from a cost equity perspective over an ethical one. From the top down, on a macro and micro level, by the corporations and by you, armed conflicts are viewed primarily through the lens of: what do I stand to gain or lose and how likely am I to gain or lose it. Missions open with a screen that, among other things, estimates your success, blatantly feeding you into a meat grinder of a cost analysis calculator. Even as your estimated success percentage plummets well below 50%, you are still thrown feet first into the fire because you are cost effective. Your life represents an opportunity to realize expected value for someone with their own best interests in mind, and the same could be said of your relationship to many of the environments you plow over.

So actually, I was just kidding about all of that. What actually happens is that you enter the arena and make a bazillion dollars and then can operate at a loss for comfort the whole game and then you win. There isn’t really a way to expand on this point, I think the problem with the arena is fairly obvious: it gives you too much money and ruins the economy of the game. That’s kind of a massive issue in a game like AC3, as it detracts from what makes the idea of a strict economy appealing, but besides all that I’m a really big fan of the arena! It does a great job of making the other AC pilots feel like people with personalities, reflected in their fighting styles. It makes the world feel larger than you, that it continues moving and shifting without you. When you fail a mission, these are the people that step into your place and take your lunch money. And yet, unfortunately, it single handedly ruins any sense of balance or stress monetarily. I could suggest a bunch of fixes: fighting in the arena costs money like missions do, losing in the arena sets you back a couple ranks but doesn’t refresh the rewards, etc. but the point is, the arena doesn’t work as it stands, and it's kind of a big deal.

Now that money is a complete non-issue, what’s left to consider? Mech assembly of course. Unlike AC3’s economy, which I believe has one glaring problem, mech assembly is harder to pick apart and I’m more conciliatory to the notion that I just don’t “get it.” To put it in as plain of terms as I can: AC3 contains missions that are either very difficult or have fail states that are easy to trigger without certain builds, but also systematizes defeat by making it an expected part of the game so that once you fail a mission you can just continue on. The reason I take issue with this is that the game absolutely does not signpost in any way what a good build for an upcoming mission would be, and as a result, I would often start a mission and recognize pretty immediately that I don’t stand a chance. Oh this is a really long mission I need way more ammo than this, oh this is a boss level I need something more powerful, oh I need to be better at flying for this level, and so on. A seemingly easy response to this issue would seem to be exercising my extrajudicial authority to save scum and customize my mech to fit the levels after scouting them out, and indeed, for most of the game this is what I ended up doing. It was fun and seemingly supported by the lack of an autosave feature forcing you forward, but I couldn’t help but feel a little bit bad about imbuing myself with knowledge I was not supposed to have, and weaponizing it to cleanly execute missions in a game designed around managing your losses.

This dynamic gets at what makes AC3 a little hard to grasp, an experience that sort of slips through my fingers; what is the point of customizing my mech? To personalize it? But that clearly doesn’t work. As mission preparation? But that feels like cheating. The only way through AC3 I can think of that feels like it conforms to my half baked perception of the “spirit of Armored Core” would be to play through the game without ever loading saves whilst taking notes on all the levels, then playing through again, using those notes to hopefully actually beat it the second time. Buddy, I got a lot of games to get through, you're going to have to live with me time traveling a bit with a couple self imposed restrictions. I can imagine someone reading this and thinking “it isn’t that serious, dude, just load a save,” and sure, maybe I’ll feel the same way when looking back years from now, but I can’t shake the feeling that AC3 only has a save feature because it cannot reasonably be beaten in one sitting and that therefore using that feature in a strategic way feels like going out of bounds. It feels like I’m manipulating a restriction of the medium more so than engaging with a system, and that's a shame.

Despite this review being largely critical, I thoroughly enjoyed AC3. Although it's my first AC game, I’m pretty encouraged to dive deeper into the series, though I suspect when I emerge from the other end, AC3 will not be my favorite. Also, if you are reading this and are an AC vet, feel free to chime in with something you think I missed or would be helpful in alleviating my anxiety about the gameplay loop, I’m very green.

hellsinker: hello! welcome to hellsinker. would you like to learn how to play?

me: sure!

hellsinker: alright, so first things first, this is a bullet hell shoot'em'up with three unique playable characters: DEADLIAR, FOSSIL MAIDEN, and MINOGAME, plus one unlockable character. hellsinker has a unique emphasis on strategy and problem solving with a special scoring system and different routes.

me: cool!

hellsinker: you have a weapon, which can charge, a subweapon, and a special move. there's also a slowdown button. you can combine and time these to do different special attacks. when youre holding down fire you'll also have a SUPPRESSION RADIUS around you where some enemy bullets slow down and you can even delete some! if you get close to an enemy, you can SEAL them, which stops them from firing.

me: got it!

hellsinker: on the left side of the screen, you're gonna see a bunch of HUD info. let's break it down. first, you can see how many lives you have left. you can also earn more lives. pretty self explanatory

me: right. so if i lose them all it's game over?

hellsinker: yeah. well no, you'll get a chance to continue. but it's not like a normal continue, you only get one and it changes the game significantly, and you can lock yourself out of a continue. anyway let's get back to the bars. next from the top is SOL. SOL determines the strength of your main shot but is also your DISCHARGE gauge, so you have to balance that. LUNA just below it determines how fast you fire.

me: alright

hellsinker: okay so next up is STELLA. the more STELLA you have, the more bullets enemies will fire. your score will also scale with STELLA. you can increase and decrease STELLA with item pickups, or by aggressive/defensive play respectively, that kind of stuff. you can acquire APPEASEMENT that will help you decrease your STELLA if you graze the requisite number thus spawning two OLD RELICS

me: hm

hellsinker: finally, TERRA starts at 240. you lose TERRA if you die, but also if you avoid LIFE CHIPS and stuff like that. oh, also, it goes down if you finish a level. if it hits zero, as the next segment, you'll be sent to the Shrine of Farewell

me: what

hellsinker: on the other side of the screen, we have at the top your autobomb status, which can be set to ASPIRANT, SOLIDSTATE, or ADEPT. as a reminder, your DISCHARGE and Subweapon will behave differently based on whether you're holding the fire button down, the state of your gauges, etc. after that, you have the Spirit score, one of the three separate scoring systems in hellsinker. it's represented by three bars which represent the base 10 decimal digit values of your Spirit score. you can get a BREAKTHROUGH at 5200 Spirit, unless youve triggered the other BREAKTHROUGH in Kills, in which case it takes 6200.

me: wait

hellsinker: there's also a Kill score, which can also trigger a BREAKTHROUGH at 2500 or 5000 kills. BREAKTHROUGH will reset the threshold of LIFE CHIPS necessary to earn an IMMORTALITY EXTEND (80+40n pts) and sets said bonus to 200. Below that is Token score, which is like the other two but has no BREAK, and is earned by collecting LUNA DROPLETS (which have inverted gravity mind you), which also slightly increases your LUNA, and DROPLETS increase in value arithmetically.

me: uh

hellsinker: okay, so remember TERRA? so the Shrine of Farewell is a bonus stage boss rush but you get infinite lives. STELLA is constantly rising. there are four bosses, and one extra. your Spirit score drops to zero though. oh, also, BOOTLEG GHOST doesnt work while you're here.

me: bootleg ghost????

hellsinker: because your Spirit score is reset (m=0) you're probably worried about your score, but don't worry, you get the chance to earn your Spirit back in the Shrine of Farewell by collecting Crystals. after this, TERRA is disabled for the rest of the run, so make sure to maximize your spirit-to-crystal ratio if you're chasing a Spirit based high-score route, but its also useful if you're going for survival. hard limit of segment 7

me: wait but

hellsinker: as i’m sure you inferred by now, along with executive fire, the primary engagement of HELLSINKER regardless of which GRAVEYARD EXECUTOR you’ve selected (and agnostic of MISTELTOE configuration) is one of: α) management of SOL (DISCHARGE when necessary), LUNA, and SUBWEAPON gauges by destruction, collection, and timing β) safely managing proximity between mutable projectiles while evading needletype and other immutables γ) proximity protocol beta applied to adversaries to reduce production of danger δ) judiciously balancing STELLA with RELICS and transubstantiation of mutables into STELLA, in order to synthesize needs for evasion and for Spirit/Kills ε) maximizing destruction (Kills), Spirit, and Token ζ) achieving IMMORTALITY EXTENDS through BREAKTHROUGH (5.2k(+1k)m || 2.5k(⋅2)d) and LIFE CHIP acquisition η) again, doing all this while evading and using the proper attack protocols contingent on your EXECUTOR and/or MISTELTOE θ) managing TERRA reducing actions in order to deploy the visit to the Shrine of Farewell strategically, such as to maximize Spirit (m) prior: 1 Crystal (i) = 0.5% m1, upper bound of n = 424i (disambiguation: non-summated) ergo maximal execution miΣ(n424) = 2.12 * pre-Shrine.

me:

hellsinker: alright! that just about covers the basics. ready to start playing?

me: i'm still working on the left side of the screen

Voivod is my favorite band ever. While their whole discography is awash with greatness, the run of 1987's Killing Technology, 1988's Dimension Hatross, and 1989's Nothingface is unreal. The band took its otherworldly cold-metal dystopian phantasmagoria vision, spearheaded by guitarist Piggy's signature bizarre dissonant riffs, and channeled it through 3 masterpiece albums that each feel distinct yet interconnected, breaking new ground with a deftness that makes it seem trodden a thousand times before.

When thinking about Hellsinker, I am struck with the same sense of awe. Hellsinker, impossibly, manages to be both wildly experimental and meticulously refined, bursting with new ideas yet grounded in strong fundamentals. Made by a single person over years of hard work, but that's the cost: something of this nature can only exist in a compact idea-space, and an individual's mind is the most compact of all.

I hesitate to talk about the mechanics too much, because the process of discovery is so core to the game's soul, but I'll mention a couple as both a cross-section and to entice you.

One of the game's main mechanics is the suppression field, a small aura that appears when you aren't using your main shot and slows down nearby bullets. In contrast to rounded bullets though, pointy-looking bullets are slowed down less, or not at all. And an interesting and deadly emergent property is how slowing bullets causes them to clump up together, suddenly denying you space and breaking a pattern's natural symmetry. Hellsinker takes these as an opportunity to construct frenetic patterns of push-and-pull between player offense, space control, and dodging, and flicks them on and off with whiplash pacing.

Like many shmups, some enemies will be blocked from firing if you are close enough. But unlike almost all other shmups, touching an enemy won't kill you, but instead bounce you away erratically. These two factors, combined with most characters having some sort of melee ability, make Hellsinker one of the most aggressive shmups I've ever played. Like when locking-on in Crimzon Clover, knowing when to get up in somebody's face vs. when to back off is a critical skill. But instead of the calculating sound of "click-click-click," it's a rusty knife rushdown, standing in stark contrast to the game's alien aesthetic and evoking the same electrifying chemical reaction between cold metal and fiery aggression that Voivod harnesses in their music.

Once again, music comes to mind. Music, especially instrument-driven music, is actually quite an abstract medium, since it doesn't rely on traditional storytelling/narrative. Instead, it excels at creating complex mixes and flows of feelings by interfacing with the subconscious. Much like the lyrics of many songs, the literal meaning of Hellsinker's story isn't important. The connotations and the delivery are the substance, mingling with the cold blues and lonely techno-religious environments. The synth trance is deliberately synced with the events of the stages, a la fellow doujin work Touhou. The crunch of quasi-gunfire-on-metal and gauges narrated by artificial voices calls to mind both shmup monolith Ikaruga and Cynic's tech-death classic Focus.

Hellsinker is notorious for being offputting to newcomers, as this review humorously illustrates, but in a certain sense that's simply another piece in the whole. The many esoteric mechanics, the dreamlike storytelling, even the bizarrely in-character manual, all of it loops back into each other and contributes to the complex feelings of alienation, exhilaration, melancholy, and awe that is Hellsinker. But don't take my word for it, take the dev's:

"I don’t really consider story, setting, characters, and music as something standing apart from “game design” per se. Even if one of those elements is excellent, it’s more about the holistic, overall vision I’m trying to present, and in that sense, all those elements are just one part of the whole (on the other hand, provided it doesn’t feel like something is lacking, not everything has to be “perfect” for me). Ultimately one is creating a single cohesive experience, and I think it should be conceived that way from the outset." - Tonnor in a 2019 interview

In a certain sense, I consider this to be the highest calling of the medium: aesthetics and mechanics unified as one, without sacrificing either. This describes many of the canonical classics of course, but works that flower like this from an alien core, such as Hellsinker and Voivod's albums, are often doomed to the fringes, for that's the only place they can be born. Yet their flames burn, silently but ferociously, waiting to entrance the next unsuspecting passerby who gazes too deeply inside.

An utter masterwork.

Feel like I’m slightly ill-equipped to really talk about this, given that Shinobi non Grata owes so much to Ninja Spirit, but I’m a mark for ninja games and boss rushes, what can I say?

Think the biggest issue here is that it’s frontloaded with its most compelling ideas: Stage 2 has a cool gimmick where you’re managing enemies on three different levels, with the ground floor being especially hazardous thanks to endlessly respawning enemies. Navigating through the densely-packed environments is a lot of fun, and had me cycling between weapons to find the best balance between crowd control and single-target damage, but later stages rely a lot on “assault” sections, where you’ll need to kill a certain number of enemies to progress. These have really conservative quotas, and so actually end up being much more manageable, tepid encounters than the chaos of the early levels- and the same could be said for the trajectory of the boss fights as well.

Fights in the first half of the game tend to be more dynamic, such as a centipede that can alternate between a number of different screen-covering attacks that force you to consider your positioning, while the fights latter half have more rigid, predictable phases- the final boss in particular feels surprisingly simplistic, cycling between a few telegraphed attacks that are far less organic to weave between and compelling to plan around. My gut reaction upon completing my initial playthrough was to say it’s “too short,” but that’s maybe incorrect; more that it’s incomplete.

Part of that is the scenario design (an extra phase on that final fight would go a long way!), but more surprising is the lack of any extra difficulties or modes upon your first clear of the game. I can admire the spartan charm of it, and it’s sort of reassuring that the appeal that’s kept me coming back is mostly intrinsic, but it seems like a title that could benefit a great deal from pushing its mechanics a little farther.

Much of the distinction between weapons can go mostly unnoticed when playing through it normally, but if you were considering the ammo economy and your limited health more frequently, those unique qualities might become that much more apparent- weighing the coverage of your shurikens against the defensive utility of chain-and-sickle, while conserving enough meter for the upcoming boss. Not entirely absent as-is, as mentioned above, but surprisingly infrequent. (An arcade mode with continues and/or a hard mode that limited your health and ammo seems like the obvious additions here, and would likely add the needed pressure to make the game really shine.)

I have my reservations with this, but it’s got enough of a pulse that even some of the early bosses still throw me off- even multiple runs into the game- and it’s been seriously tempting to return to it in the hopes of getting a 1CC. Maybe not an unambiguous classic (yet), but hopefully this gets the extra support it needs to round out the experience.

Magenta Horizon is one of my favorite action games, perhaps even the most fun I’ve had in the genre. It’s a whirlwind of chaos and skill that is incredible to master.
Music that goes hard, wonderfully weird aesthetics, an expertly designed move set, a dizzying cast of delightfully devilish enemies, interesting stages + world, and a maniacal ceiling for challenge… this game is just packed with things to love.

Magenta Horizon is the full power of an action-game fiend, blasted at you without restraint. Each enemy type is cleverly designed to present you with a threat that deserves your attention… have fun dealing with an entire arena of them at the same time. There is a truly staggering number of monsters in this game, and they’re eager to gang up on you with their impressive diversity and powerful synergies.

Each arena is an incredibly crafted challenge. You aren’t only facing a purposeful onslaught of great enemies, often the arena layout itself is ready to join the fight against you. There’s a great sense of variety as you encounter various line-ups of enemies, strange environmental hazards, and interesting gimmicks. Especially amusing is the occasional flagrant disregard of occupancy limits… arenas that cram these enemies into a painfully tight space.

Gretel’s powerful moveset is what allows the game to have these mad challenges. She has a wide array of fantastic feeling moves that flow into each other as a non-stop stream of violence. Over the course of the game, you’ll unlock 8 (!) awesome magical spells that each provide a powerful ability… which also can synergize with each other to create awesome crowd devasting effects. Finally, Magenta Horizon has the greatest healing mechanic in all of video games. The glorious healing bomb promotes aggression so well that it puts things like DOOM’s glory kills to shame.

Speaking of aggression, this game has excellent bosses. None of the nonsense common to games where it feels like you and the boss are taking turns. Instead, both of you are wildly and relentlessly aggressive.

Magenta Horizon also has one of the best hard modes. Reaper difficulty is a beautiful force to be reckoned with, it cranks the wonderful challenge to a whole new level… here the enemy and arena design truly shine. It feels awesome to overcome these gauntlets which all prompt a “are you serious” reaction from me.

Finally, I must point out that Act 2 absolutely rules. This review applies to act 1, which you can check out for free… somehow Act 2 is even better. The levels are much more interesting to navigate, the musical style is even more developed, the necklace system starts to offer interesting decisions and build choices and of course the enemies are simply evil.