MysticWonder
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MysticWonder
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Another Crab's Treasure
This review contains spoilers
Aaaaah okay here we go... Another Crabs Treasure is a good game - full stop. But lend me an ear and let me tell you why I also think it is an unfocused mess that's in the wrong genre and really could have used an extra month or two of development to iron out.
Okay so that's a lot, and it doesn't quite make 100% sense, but the same could be said about Another Crabs Treasure.
Okay so Another Crabs Treasure (which I'll be shortening to ACT) is a souls-like, through and through. Now I've played Dark Souls 1, Dark Souls 3, and Elden Ring and beaten every one of them three or more times. So when it came to the challenges put forth by ACT, I felt like I was well equipped to deal with them.
So why did I give up halfway through the game and gave Krill a gun for half the time?
To put it simply, ACT's common enemies suck, more than usual souls-like games. They have too much health, have weird windups that are difficult to read, and are too numerous to deal with. If you're familiar with DS1, imagine if every single common enemy was replaced with a Black Knight, and you've basically got ACT. For over half of the game I did nothing but put points into Attack, desperate to figure out why the fuck it felt like I was dealing absolutely no damage to these common enemies, while also breezing through bosses like they were nothing.
And yeah no, I'm not talking about like special dudes, I'm talking about your Goomba-level guys, your Koopas, your 'i'll just sprinkle a little bit of these guys over here', dudes. Why do they take 12 hits to kill? This very rudimentary problem fucks up the ENTIRE game for me. Instead of giving new areas one or two good old college tries before running it down I started borderline speed-running the game after the second area. Don't fight anything I'm not required to, collect all the loot, and get the fuck out of dodge.
This is a problem with all souls-likes, but if the game is more enjoyable by NOT engaging with the level as intended, then IMO you have a balancing issue.
Now you may have noticed earlier (maybe because of the sheer shock value) that around the 40% mark I said that I gave Krill a gun.
This is where ACT gets a full 5 stars from me: Accessibility settings! Yes, ACT is hard, but you can make it easier, guilt free, with a wide variety of settings to make your experience more enjoyable. Some options are as follows: Decrease the damage you take, decrease the health enemies have, increase shell hp, keep your money on death, slow down combat, and finally, the best one of all, give Krill a gun. The gun is a photorealistic model of a glock, and has a special ability that instantly kills any enemy, common or boss level. It's great! I love this! I think any game that is willing to say 'hey you know maybe this difficulty isn't for everybody, but we still want you to have fun' gets a full 5 stars from me.
BUT
You notice that I mentioned a couple of relevant settings in that list? Specifically, decrease enemy max hp? Well I'm not convinced it fucking works, because even with that setting turned up to HIGH common enemies still were taking 12 or so hits to kill. I swallowed my pride and had those settings kicked up to the highest they went for the rest of my playthrough after the 2nd area and though my enjoyment of the game went up, I still couldn't shake this feeling that maybe, possibly, ACT might be in the wrong genre.
I got far more enjoyment out of the game treating it like a collectathon with puzzles and platforming than I did treating it as a souls-like. The combat is interesting and the hallmarks of a decent souls-like are there, but since every small encounter takes forever to get through, all I really wanted to do was swim around and do platforming. Hense: Gun.
The bosses are the only point where this feeling dissipates though, and I'm right back into the souls-lover-69-git-gud mentality when it comes to them. The stagger meter is great, I love the high risk high reward play-style it encourages, though if you don't have the execution ability unlocked then you're missing out on a lot of damage. Kinda feel like that shouldn't be an unlock, since you can miss it if you decide one of the other paths are more interesting, like I did. Some of the status attacks feel... just a little bit undodgable at times, and if you get frightened you get to just watch the stagger bar deplete... but hey this section was supposed to be a positive one.
So that's it right? I got to play ACT the way I wanted to right? When I stopped having fun I turned on the Gun and went to town until I started having fun again right?
Well...
ACT has a pacing problem, and is thematically inconsistent. Okay so picture this, I'm makin my way through the starting area of the game thinking: "Hell yeah, bitchin art style, simple motive - gotta get me my shell back". Made my way to the castle, met the duchess, went on a quest to the moon snail, came back and beat the duchess to death with a spork. Took me close to two hours to do, and honestly I was feeling pretty chuffed. No issues with enemies yet, a couple of difficulty spikes, but I was really digging the shell combat at that time.
And then I made it to New Carcinia and... it turns out none of those first two hours mattered AT ALL. No joke, aside from the necessary tutorials, you can cut that entire section of the game out and absolutely nothing about ACT will change. The ACTUAL plot of the game is a treasure hunt, and you have to collect map pieces in order to get a treasure so that you can buy your shell back. This is only the first of many weird narrative and pacing issues ACT has though.
For over 66% of the game there is a very anti-capitalism, pro-union, environmental theme to the game. The Antagonist is a late-stage-capitalist who exploits their workers for monetary gain, while flooding the streets with trash that is simultaneously worth a lot of money, and toxic to sea-life. And it's a bit heavy handed, but overall I think it's done in a cheaky manner, I mean your currency is literally microplastics.
And then the game kinda loses the plot. You have this big showdown with the primary antagonist after completing the treasure map. After beating him Krill loses his shit and tries to kill the Antagonist for the treasure. Now all of your friends are trapped in the Marianas Trench, deep at the bottom of the ocean and Krill has depression.
Now instead of the anti-capitalism message, the game pivots directly into the anti-pollution message and how being depressed doesn't fix anything. Okay, slightly different from the anti-capitalism message, but it's along the same lines. So you escape the Marianas Trench but right at the end the old-man crab tells you that there's a long lost shell that grants unimaginable power to change the world.
What
We went from pro-union, anti-capitalist messages, to hard pro-environmental message, to... high fantasy long-lost-civilization with a deux-ex-machina-shell. For a good two or three hours (depending on if you use the gun or not) the game goes HEAVY into the souls-like inspiration. The Old Ocean looks gorgeous, and plays like a mix of Anor Londo and Crumbling Farum Azula combined. Honestly, ignoring the stupid high health enemies that now come back to life, this was my favorite section of the game, and I wish the rest of the game looked and played like it did here. But it did give me tonal whiplash, and honestly doesn't fit in at all with the rest of the game. The boss of this area literally speaks in ancient tongues about living forever and how we'll never stop the spread of rot -- straight out of dark souls.
At the very end of it all we get an unnecessary 'betrayal' and killing of one of the named characters and you get to fight what feels like the god-of-the-sea in this universe, or at least one of that power level. It's the only boss I used the Gun on because the fight consists of him spawning 5-7 common enemies that you have to beat over and over and -- well - see a couple paragraphs ago on why that doesn't work.
And then, after all of that, after killing two near-god-like enemies, you finally get to put on the shell and make everything bett--- nope another named character steals the shell.
And the whip cracks once more and we're back at the hard pro-union, anti-capitalism message, but NOW Krill is ANGRY. There's this weird undertone about anger, and lashing out. The game basically says, if you're going to be angry about all these horrible things then you should focus that anger on making things better.
Queue the final boss fight which was pretty good! It felt like a satisfying narrative ark, if you ignore the previous 4 hours of content that went a bit ape-shit on the dark souls inspiration.
But hey remember that weird anger undertone? Well as it turns out by beating the final boss, Krill accidentally breaks the deux-ex-machina shell, dooming the entirety of New Carinia to be flooded in toxic, but monetarily valuable, trash. So I guess the message is... don't lash out in anger? But do fight for whats right? Even though doing so dooms the city? What am I supposed to take away from this?
The ending of the game is super gloomy. Krill has basically fucked everything for all the residents of the city, but in the last 20 seconds of the game they really try and make it seem like all is not lost as best they can. Honestly, to be frank, it feels like whoever was in charge of the story of the game got super depressed right at the end of development. And honestly, yeah that's game-dev for you.
So okay that's a lot of words basically just summarizing the plot of the game, but what's the deal man? Well the first 2 hours of the game can be cut entirely. The duchess literally has nothing to do with the rest of the game. The middle 10 hours are okay, though visually uninspired (we go to TWO different poison swamps? Wow! Such innovation! I wonder if the next one I go to will be purple!). Then the game falls off a cliff into the marianas trench and it's like I'm playing an entirely different game for 4-6 hours (again, depending on if you use the gun). Then right at the end we go back to the main theme of the game - with some weird anger undertones - right into a depressing save-the-planet ending. The game is all over the place, and honestly coming away from it I don't even know the developers want me to take away from this? Form a union? Fine I guess.
Overall the game feels... unfinished. Like 95% unfinished, but still noticeably unfinished a month after release. Some of the bosses have voice lines that are unimplemented. The entirety of the Marianas Trench level is missing music (it's a multi-hour long level, you can't tell me that no-music or sfx at ALL for that length of time is a good idea. See: Subnautica). All of the open-sea areas feel completely baron - and yeah it's accurate to the actual open-sea but that doesn't necessarily mean that your game has to also be completely baron (See: Starfield).
There's an in game map that is simultaneously gorgeous and completely fucking useless. On more than one occasion a character told me to go to a place and I could not for the life of me figure out where to go because of it. It locks to your current position and cannot be panned around, so guess what: if your in New Carinia -- All you can see is New Carinia. The compass, which should be used to mark where you should be going, is also similarly useless and completely broke for me right after I got to New Carinia.
The cutscenes in the game are fully voiced, but there actually isn't that much more out-of-cutscene dialog in the game, was it really that much more to do the whole game?
As soon as I got to the god-like boss at the bottom of the Marianas Trench I was locked into the shell that I had. I couldn't leave and I couldn't get any other shell in the area. It also wasn't a very good shell and certainly not what I was used to using for the rest of the game, so that felt like a huge oversight that could have been caught with more playtests.
So really at the end of it all I'm just left weirdly off-put and confused.
The character designs and creativity in this game are great. Seeing all the environments made out of house-hold trash was always super cool and the wide variety of gunked-up enemies were always fun to see, even if they sucked to fight. The puzzles were great too, with a good mix of platforming and puzzle solving. The characters are all compelling and they're tackling real world problems that are worth talking about.
So I like Another Crabs Treasure. I think it's a good game - full stop.
But also --- well now you've got me talking in circles.
Okay so that's a lot, and it doesn't quite make 100% sense, but the same could be said about Another Crabs Treasure.
Okay so Another Crabs Treasure (which I'll be shortening to ACT) is a souls-like, through and through. Now I've played Dark Souls 1, Dark Souls 3, and Elden Ring and beaten every one of them three or more times. So when it came to the challenges put forth by ACT, I felt like I was well equipped to deal with them.
So why did I give up halfway through the game and gave Krill a gun for half the time?
To put it simply, ACT's common enemies suck, more than usual souls-like games. They have too much health, have weird windups that are difficult to read, and are too numerous to deal with. If you're familiar with DS1, imagine if every single common enemy was replaced with a Black Knight, and you've basically got ACT. For over half of the game I did nothing but put points into Attack, desperate to figure out why the fuck it felt like I was dealing absolutely no damage to these common enemies, while also breezing through bosses like they were nothing.
And yeah no, I'm not talking about like special dudes, I'm talking about your Goomba-level guys, your Koopas, your 'i'll just sprinkle a little bit of these guys over here', dudes. Why do they take 12 hits to kill? This very rudimentary problem fucks up the ENTIRE game for me. Instead of giving new areas one or two good old college tries before running it down I started borderline speed-running the game after the second area. Don't fight anything I'm not required to, collect all the loot, and get the fuck out of dodge.
This is a problem with all souls-likes, but if the game is more enjoyable by NOT engaging with the level as intended, then IMO you have a balancing issue.
Now you may have noticed earlier (maybe because of the sheer shock value) that around the 40% mark I said that I gave Krill a gun.
This is where ACT gets a full 5 stars from me: Accessibility settings! Yes, ACT is hard, but you can make it easier, guilt free, with a wide variety of settings to make your experience more enjoyable. Some options are as follows: Decrease the damage you take, decrease the health enemies have, increase shell hp, keep your money on death, slow down combat, and finally, the best one of all, give Krill a gun. The gun is a photorealistic model of a glock, and has a special ability that instantly kills any enemy, common or boss level. It's great! I love this! I think any game that is willing to say 'hey you know maybe this difficulty isn't for everybody, but we still want you to have fun' gets a full 5 stars from me.
BUT
You notice that I mentioned a couple of relevant settings in that list? Specifically, decrease enemy max hp? Well I'm not convinced it fucking works, because even with that setting turned up to HIGH common enemies still were taking 12 or so hits to kill. I swallowed my pride and had those settings kicked up to the highest they went for the rest of my playthrough after the 2nd area and though my enjoyment of the game went up, I still couldn't shake this feeling that maybe, possibly, ACT might be in the wrong genre.
I got far more enjoyment out of the game treating it like a collectathon with puzzles and platforming than I did treating it as a souls-like. The combat is interesting and the hallmarks of a decent souls-like are there, but since every small encounter takes forever to get through, all I really wanted to do was swim around and do platforming. Hense: Gun.
The bosses are the only point where this feeling dissipates though, and I'm right back into the souls-lover-69-git-gud mentality when it comes to them. The stagger meter is great, I love the high risk high reward play-style it encourages, though if you don't have the execution ability unlocked then you're missing out on a lot of damage. Kinda feel like that shouldn't be an unlock, since you can miss it if you decide one of the other paths are more interesting, like I did. Some of the status attacks feel... just a little bit undodgable at times, and if you get frightened you get to just watch the stagger bar deplete... but hey this section was supposed to be a positive one.
So that's it right? I got to play ACT the way I wanted to right? When I stopped having fun I turned on the Gun and went to town until I started having fun again right?
Well...
ACT has a pacing problem, and is thematically inconsistent. Okay so picture this, I'm makin my way through the starting area of the game thinking: "Hell yeah, bitchin art style, simple motive - gotta get me my shell back". Made my way to the castle, met the duchess, went on a quest to the moon snail, came back and beat the duchess to death with a spork. Took me close to two hours to do, and honestly I was feeling pretty chuffed. No issues with enemies yet, a couple of difficulty spikes, but I was really digging the shell combat at that time.
And then I made it to New Carcinia and... it turns out none of those first two hours mattered AT ALL. No joke, aside from the necessary tutorials, you can cut that entire section of the game out and absolutely nothing about ACT will change. The ACTUAL plot of the game is a treasure hunt, and you have to collect map pieces in order to get a treasure so that you can buy your shell back. This is only the first of many weird narrative and pacing issues ACT has though.
For over 66% of the game there is a very anti-capitalism, pro-union, environmental theme to the game. The Antagonist is a late-stage-capitalist who exploits their workers for monetary gain, while flooding the streets with trash that is simultaneously worth a lot of money, and toxic to sea-life. And it's a bit heavy handed, but overall I think it's done in a cheaky manner, I mean your currency is literally microplastics.
And then the game kinda loses the plot. You have this big showdown with the primary antagonist after completing the treasure map. After beating him Krill loses his shit and tries to kill the Antagonist for the treasure. Now all of your friends are trapped in the Marianas Trench, deep at the bottom of the ocean and Krill has depression.
Now instead of the anti-capitalism message, the game pivots directly into the anti-pollution message and how being depressed doesn't fix anything. Okay, slightly different from the anti-capitalism message, but it's along the same lines. So you escape the Marianas Trench but right at the end the old-man crab tells you that there's a long lost shell that grants unimaginable power to change the world.
What
We went from pro-union, anti-capitalist messages, to hard pro-environmental message, to... high fantasy long-lost-civilization with a deux-ex-machina-shell. For a good two or three hours (depending on if you use the gun or not) the game goes HEAVY into the souls-like inspiration. The Old Ocean looks gorgeous, and plays like a mix of Anor Londo and Crumbling Farum Azula combined. Honestly, ignoring the stupid high health enemies that now come back to life, this was my favorite section of the game, and I wish the rest of the game looked and played like it did here. But it did give me tonal whiplash, and honestly doesn't fit in at all with the rest of the game. The boss of this area literally speaks in ancient tongues about living forever and how we'll never stop the spread of rot -- straight out of dark souls.
At the very end of it all we get an unnecessary 'betrayal' and killing of one of the named characters and you get to fight what feels like the god-of-the-sea in this universe, or at least one of that power level. It's the only boss I used the Gun on because the fight consists of him spawning 5-7 common enemies that you have to beat over and over and -- well - see a couple paragraphs ago on why that doesn't work.
And then, after all of that, after killing two near-god-like enemies, you finally get to put on the shell and make everything bett--- nope another named character steals the shell.
And the whip cracks once more and we're back at the hard pro-union, anti-capitalism message, but NOW Krill is ANGRY. There's this weird undertone about anger, and lashing out. The game basically says, if you're going to be angry about all these horrible things then you should focus that anger on making things better.
Queue the final boss fight which was pretty good! It felt like a satisfying narrative ark, if you ignore the previous 4 hours of content that went a bit ape-shit on the dark souls inspiration.
But hey remember that weird anger undertone? Well as it turns out by beating the final boss, Krill accidentally breaks the deux-ex-machina shell, dooming the entirety of New Carinia to be flooded in toxic, but monetarily valuable, trash. So I guess the message is... don't lash out in anger? But do fight for whats right? Even though doing so dooms the city? What am I supposed to take away from this?
The ending of the game is super gloomy. Krill has basically fucked everything for all the residents of the city, but in the last 20 seconds of the game they really try and make it seem like all is not lost as best they can. Honestly, to be frank, it feels like whoever was in charge of the story of the game got super depressed right at the end of development. And honestly, yeah that's game-dev for you.
So okay that's a lot of words basically just summarizing the plot of the game, but what's the deal man? Well the first 2 hours of the game can be cut entirely. The duchess literally has nothing to do with the rest of the game. The middle 10 hours are okay, though visually uninspired (we go to TWO different poison swamps? Wow! Such innovation! I wonder if the next one I go to will be purple!). Then the game falls off a cliff into the marianas trench and it's like I'm playing an entirely different game for 4-6 hours (again, depending on if you use the gun). Then right at the end we go back to the main theme of the game - with some weird anger undertones - right into a depressing save-the-planet ending. The game is all over the place, and honestly coming away from it I don't even know the developers want me to take away from this? Form a union? Fine I guess.
Overall the game feels... unfinished. Like 95% unfinished, but still noticeably unfinished a month after release. Some of the bosses have voice lines that are unimplemented. The entirety of the Marianas Trench level is missing music (it's a multi-hour long level, you can't tell me that no-music or sfx at ALL for that length of time is a good idea. See: Subnautica). All of the open-sea areas feel completely baron - and yeah it's accurate to the actual open-sea but that doesn't necessarily mean that your game has to also be completely baron (See: Starfield).
There's an in game map that is simultaneously gorgeous and completely fucking useless. On more than one occasion a character told me to go to a place and I could not for the life of me figure out where to go because of it. It locks to your current position and cannot be panned around, so guess what: if your in New Carinia -- All you can see is New Carinia. The compass, which should be used to mark where you should be going, is also similarly useless and completely broke for me right after I got to New Carinia.
The cutscenes in the game are fully voiced, but there actually isn't that much more out-of-cutscene dialog in the game, was it really that much more to do the whole game?
As soon as I got to the god-like boss at the bottom of the Marianas Trench I was locked into the shell that I had. I couldn't leave and I couldn't get any other shell in the area. It also wasn't a very good shell and certainly not what I was used to using for the rest of the game, so that felt like a huge oversight that could have been caught with more playtests.
So really at the end of it all I'm just left weirdly off-put and confused.
The character designs and creativity in this game are great. Seeing all the environments made out of house-hold trash was always super cool and the wide variety of gunked-up enemies were always fun to see, even if they sucked to fight. The puzzles were great too, with a good mix of platforming and puzzle solving. The characters are all compelling and they're tackling real world problems that are worth talking about.
So I like Another Crabs Treasure. I think it's a good game - full stop.
But also --- well now you've got me talking in circles.
1 day ago
MysticWonder
completed
Armortale
Armortale is a game with a lot of charm, that unfortunately struggles a bit with its execution leaving me with a middle-of-the-road rating.
You play as a nameless character that has the ability to switch between four different sets of armor all with different abilities. You have the Golem armor, which makes you immune to spikes, and gives you an up-attack, at the cost of a little bit of movement speed. The 'Hero' armor, which lets you move a bit faster, hang from ceilings, and do a spin-attack that reflects projectiles. The Bomber armor, which lets you throw, well, bombs - blowing up specific kinds of blocks. And finally, the Wing armor, which increases your jump height and lowers your fall-speed.
Credit where credit is due, these armors are really well designed. I was constantly finding myself swapping armors, and every time I found myself struggling with a section of a level I would stop and ask "Is this really the best armor for this situation?". It's what the game set out to do, and I think it did it well. I will say that the Hero armor and the Golem armor feel like the most consistent by far, though it could be related to the fact that those are the first two you acquire.
The visuals of the game are also pretty good. There's a very clear art-style, and though some of the bosses look a bit.... off, the environment and character art are good. I love the extra touches put in as well, like the goblin animations where they run away in fear, or get angry and bash each other on the head.
What unfortunately brings the game down for me is the level design and the sheer lack of mid-points in the levels. Let me explain: The game plays through Mario-style or old-school Kirby-style. You select a level from the map, and play it through to completion, often with a boss at the end. These levels are considerably long for a game of this type, and often times there is only one mid-level checkpoint. While this isn't a problem normally, what you'll primarily be dying to in the game are not Enemies, but from pitfalls and spikes. These are insta-kills, and because of the aforementioned level-length you will be losing a lot of your time to unfortunate deaths.
There were many times I simply wanted to put the game down because I have to play through 5 minutes of an easy level with a difficult 2 minute section over and over and over again. It's very unforgiving, but not in an interesting way, just a frustrating way. Mario or Kirby games fix this by having more midpoints, shorter levels, or even just designing in mechics that give more chances to not die like mushrooms or fire flowers - but Armortale doesn't have any of those it just has armor and hp. The final level of the game has multiple checkpoints and was the only level that felt like the length between checkpoints was 'okay'. Not great, just okay.
Putting all of that aside though, there are other parts of the game that don't work so well either. You'll be collecting one of two currencies in Armortale, Witch-Tokens and Gems. Witch-Tokens are coins - collect 100 and gain another life. Gems are currency that you can use at the Witch-Tower to get slight powerups. The powerups are a bit lackluster and definitely not worth grinding levels to purchase. The biggest problem with them is that they are per-life upgrades so if you die once you lose them.
You can get a little bit of extra health, a potion you can use mid-level to heal yourself, a one-up (which I never bought, what's the point if game-overing doesn't matter?), a leaf shield that rotates around you and also can break when it does enough damage, and a bird. The bird is by far the best powerup, because it's cheap and does it's own thing without any effort on your part. But again, die once and you've basically burned that cash. On the other hand, there's nothing else for you to spend gems on, so just buy the bird over and over. Birds Bros 4 Life.
Really though when you get down to it, for a one-person passion project, it accomplished what it set out to do. I think the game is fine, an attempt at a retro 2D platforming game that maaaybe fell a little bit short of expectations from me. It's pretty cheap on Steam, and it's worth the 4 hours I spent trying to beat it. With a few tweaks I think it could really shine, and I hope I can play more from this dev in the future.
You play as a nameless character that has the ability to switch between four different sets of armor all with different abilities. You have the Golem armor, which makes you immune to spikes, and gives you an up-attack, at the cost of a little bit of movement speed. The 'Hero' armor, which lets you move a bit faster, hang from ceilings, and do a spin-attack that reflects projectiles. The Bomber armor, which lets you throw, well, bombs - blowing up specific kinds of blocks. And finally, the Wing armor, which increases your jump height and lowers your fall-speed.
Credit where credit is due, these armors are really well designed. I was constantly finding myself swapping armors, and every time I found myself struggling with a section of a level I would stop and ask "Is this really the best armor for this situation?". It's what the game set out to do, and I think it did it well. I will say that the Hero armor and the Golem armor feel like the most consistent by far, though it could be related to the fact that those are the first two you acquire.
The visuals of the game are also pretty good. There's a very clear art-style, and though some of the bosses look a bit.... off, the environment and character art are good. I love the extra touches put in as well, like the goblin animations where they run away in fear, or get angry and bash each other on the head.
What unfortunately brings the game down for me is the level design and the sheer lack of mid-points in the levels. Let me explain: The game plays through Mario-style or old-school Kirby-style. You select a level from the map, and play it through to completion, often with a boss at the end. These levels are considerably long for a game of this type, and often times there is only one mid-level checkpoint. While this isn't a problem normally, what you'll primarily be dying to in the game are not Enemies, but from pitfalls and spikes. These are insta-kills, and because of the aforementioned level-length you will be losing a lot of your time to unfortunate deaths.
There were many times I simply wanted to put the game down because I have to play through 5 minutes of an easy level with a difficult 2 minute section over and over and over again. It's very unforgiving, but not in an interesting way, just a frustrating way. Mario or Kirby games fix this by having more midpoints, shorter levels, or even just designing in mechics that give more chances to not die like mushrooms or fire flowers - but Armortale doesn't have any of those it just has armor and hp. The final level of the game has multiple checkpoints and was the only level that felt like the length between checkpoints was 'okay'. Not great, just okay.
Putting all of that aside though, there are other parts of the game that don't work so well either. You'll be collecting one of two currencies in Armortale, Witch-Tokens and Gems. Witch-Tokens are coins - collect 100 and gain another life. Gems are currency that you can use at the Witch-Tower to get slight powerups. The powerups are a bit lackluster and definitely not worth grinding levels to purchase. The biggest problem with them is that they are per-life upgrades so if you die once you lose them.
You can get a little bit of extra health, a potion you can use mid-level to heal yourself, a one-up (which I never bought, what's the point if game-overing doesn't matter?), a leaf shield that rotates around you and also can break when it does enough damage, and a bird. The bird is by far the best powerup, because it's cheap and does it's own thing without any effort on your part. But again, die once and you've basically burned that cash. On the other hand, there's nothing else for you to spend gems on, so just buy the bird over and over. Birds Bros 4 Life.
Really though when you get down to it, for a one-person passion project, it accomplished what it set out to do. I think the game is fine, an attempt at a retro 2D platforming game that maaaybe fell a little bit short of expectations from me. It's pretty cheap on Steam, and it's worth the 4 hours I spent trying to beat it. With a few tweaks I think it could really shine, and I hope I can play more from this dev in the future.
1 day ago
MysticWonder is
now playing
Armortale
2 days ago
MysticWonder
completed
Animal Well
They weren't lying, there really do be animals in this well.
Let's be real, if you're reading this then you probably already know about it, but Animal Well is a 2D puzzle metroidvania developed by Billy Basso and published by YouTube star VideoGameDunkey. And honestly, what a fucking show. First game developed by Basso, first game published by BigMode? I'm super excited and can't wait to see what both parties do next.
As for the game? It's fucking great.
It's a simple puzzle game centered around exploring and using items to solve puzzles. The items are super straight forward and yet with every passing minute, Basso manages to eek out more and more unique ways of using them. But the items would be nothing if it weren't for the secrets, and boy howdy does Animal Well have those oozing out of every corner possible.
No joke, any time I saw a black space on the map, no matter how small, I just knew there had to be a secret room or unlock that got me there, and 89% of the time I was right. Honestly, it was far less common for a room NOT to have a secret to discover than it was for it to have one. And in your pursuit of those secrets you'll find more items, more animals, more puzzles to solve, more moving parts to this strange strange world you've been dropped into. It's animals all the way down.
The atmosphere is top tier as well. There's dark and droll moments, but there are moments of warmth interspersed between, and you never quite feel lonely as, true to the name, there are animals fuckin everywhere.
I think they did a good job at ensuring that the normal game was beatable without hints, while also leaving enough questions unanswered to keep you coming back for more after the credits roll. I managed to get the normal ending of the game without hints, the true ending the of the game with one or two hints, and the super secret [REDACTED] ending by getting a lot of hints. Some of the super late game stuff was super obscure, but Billy Basso has gone on record to say that he never expects ANYONE to find them, so... go internet!
So give Animal Well a chance, it's a delightful romp through a damp and droll place with adorable animals and mysterious puzzles that you'll go crazy trying to figure out.
Let's be real, if you're reading this then you probably already know about it, but Animal Well is a 2D puzzle metroidvania developed by Billy Basso and published by YouTube star VideoGameDunkey. And honestly, what a fucking show. First game developed by Basso, first game published by BigMode? I'm super excited and can't wait to see what both parties do next.
As for the game? It's fucking great.
It's a simple puzzle game centered around exploring and using items to solve puzzles. The items are super straight forward and yet with every passing minute, Basso manages to eek out more and more unique ways of using them. But the items would be nothing if it weren't for the secrets, and boy howdy does Animal Well have those oozing out of every corner possible.
No joke, any time I saw a black space on the map, no matter how small, I just knew there had to be a secret room or unlock that got me there, and 89% of the time I was right. Honestly, it was far less common for a room NOT to have a secret to discover than it was for it to have one. And in your pursuit of those secrets you'll find more items, more animals, more puzzles to solve, more moving parts to this strange strange world you've been dropped into. It's animals all the way down.
The atmosphere is top tier as well. There's dark and droll moments, but there are moments of warmth interspersed between, and you never quite feel lonely as, true to the name, there are animals fuckin everywhere.
I think they did a good job at ensuring that the normal game was beatable without hints, while also leaving enough questions unanswered to keep you coming back for more after the credits roll. I managed to get the normal ending of the game without hints, the true ending the of the game with one or two hints, and the super secret [REDACTED] ending by getting a lot of hints. Some of the super late game stuff was super obscure, but Billy Basso has gone on record to say that he never expects ANYONE to find them, so... go internet!
So give Animal Well a chance, it's a delightful romp through a damp and droll place with adorable animals and mysterious puzzles that you'll go crazy trying to figure out.
3 days ago
MysticWonder is
now playing
Animal Well
3 days ago