I missed the boat on Hades when it came out last September. I picked it up when it went on sale during the Game Awards yet didn't start playing until a week ago. I had heard from the underground indie scene that "bro Hades is the best game ever" and had already had high expectations with it being a Supergiant game (of which I had never played their games before) then some of my favorite YouTubers and friends started talking it up and so I finally booted it up and holy shit guys it's so good. It's SO. GOOD. I mean no exaggeration when I say Hades is one of the best games I've played since Celeste and Spider-Man PS4 and is in my top ten favorite games of all time.

I'm begging y'all do not let the "roguelike" part scare you away. I know we're drowning in indie roguelikes like waterboarded POWs but what sets Hades apart is the level of dedication it has to its charm, polish and story. The gameplay is literal hard drugs. They give you little rewards for each run (better ones the further you get) and these can be spent on permanently making yourself or your weapons stronger so you aren't just at the mercy of RNG like Gungeon or Binding of Isaac. The combat is like a nonstop shot of dopamine. Every weapon (sans bow but that's a preference thing) feels great to use and all play differently. The sword is for quick close strikes, the spear (my favorite) is for slower, but longer reaching damage, the shield eats projectiles and Captain America's across foes, the bow is for losers, the gauntlets turn the combat into somewhat of a fighting game juggle combo system, and the gun, while lacking in stun locking and must be reloaded, is kino by sole virtue of being a GUN in a GREEK MYTHOLOGY game.

After every combat encounter you get a reward and often a choice of rewards by seeing what to go for next with limited options. Do you want darkness to use on your mirror to permanently empower you, a key to unlock mirror upgrades, a heart to increase your max health, money for items this run, gems to buy helpful levels with, a shop to buy shit, a hammer to upgrade your weapon, pomegranates that upgrade your buffs, or god boons that give you unique buffs and lets you talk to the gods 80% of which are all hot? It's this choosing that makes each run feel fresh and engaging. And I mean ENGAGING. As in, "I have stayed up until 5:00AM several times playing this game" engaging.

But it's not the just the gameplay that kept me engaged. I have freaked myself silly on roguelikes before, like Enter the Gungeon and Rogue Legacy, but never before has one gripped me like Hades has. Because unlike those games, Hades... has a story. Not just a story, but a good one. It's a little hard to give Supergiant props for originality because all the characters and plot lines have been fished out of the Greek mythos hat (which is what devs often pull from when they're not combing the Norse mythos desert) but full marks go to making the story immersive and enriching. It's not incredibly emotional or reaches marvelous peaks like Undertale or Celeste, but it's absolutely held up by its immersion in Greek mythos and characterization.

I think this might be one of the first video games I've ever played where there isn't a single unlikable character. There are some not so cool characters like Hypnos or the Fury sisters that aren't Megaera but those are the outliers and even then they're not intolerable. All the gods have echoing filters that highlight their commanding presence and godhood, everyone provides enjoyable banter, ALL OF THE VOICE ACTING IS GOOD. There are some characters that come off as they're "acting," but so much of it is in this strange middle ground between "acting" and "normal speech" and it helps makes every conversation so palatable. And the glue that holds it all together is the son of the titular Hades.

Zagreus is low-key one of my favorite game protagonists ever now. He's like this seemingly impossible blend of edgelord, shonen hero, and sarcastic ass that sounds like he'd be the worst aspects of characters like Batman, Naruto and Ichigo combined, but it's impossible to hate Zagreus. He's clever, he's sassy, he's goal-oriented, he makes small talk with the bosses and talks to himself when he's bored. Aside from talking about his father Hades, he never whines or broods. His voice is constant ASMR honey in my ears. He likes to fight and while he would love nothing more than to work things out peacefully with his father and the bosses, he never backs down or gets intimidated by a foe. And in a great motion of combining gameplay with story, his struggle is the same for you the player. In Gungeon, your chosen character has a kind of ending but you are given zero context for it and no one gives a shit about it, and it doesn't make sense why you come back to life when you die, because it's all about the gameplay. In Hades, being a god, Zagreus can never truly die, thus every time you lose a run, he is merely brought back to the game's hub, the House of Hades, and you can go and talk with the House's residents and upgrade yourself. Even when you finish your first run and also when you beat the game proper the reasons given as to why you continue to reach the surface is thought-out and authenticated through the story. Also Zagreus is based as fuck because HE WILL NOT FIGHT HIS DOG. And his dog is Cerberus, mind you. Imagine having a game about Greek mythology and having the cajones to NOT use him for a boss. And yes, you can pet him and give him treats and call him a good boy and it's very Reddit wholesome 100 and I'd be lying if I said it didn't put a big ass smile on my face every time.

The DIALOGUE on this game, bro. Only a handful of times have I encountered moments of repeated dialogue. I stagger to think about how much voice recording went into this game. I know it's been in early access since late 2018 but there's like 30 characters and all of them not only have a LOT to say, but they never have anything to say that's not interesting or fun. I would call Aphrodite best girl for being quite possibly one of the hottest depictions of her in any media ever, but I had to settle for Meg because you CAN'T BANG APHRODITE in this game so it's sad that I must give Hades the 0/10 it truly deserves because of this. Not to say Meg doesn't have a voice I want to have whisper sweet nothings into my ear while I go to sleep in her firm yet supple arms wrapped in her one wing... because she does... and I do. BTW, by favorite character in the whole game is unironically the supportive shade in the Thesius fight. He never talks to you, you can't trigger dialogue manually with him, and you can only say one thing to him per run, but the idea of all these shades in the arena cheering for the champions while this one guy hangs your pennant on the wall and wears red among the ocean of teal makes me feel warm and fuzzy and he's easily the best character. Also Cerberus.

Fuck man, there's so much good about this game it's nuts. The music is bass-heavy with sick licks and occasional vocal tracks that stop me dead every run because I HAVE to listen to Eurydice sing "Good Riddance" every time I see her. The art is that signature hand-painted Supergiant goodness with more Greek theming naturally. It runs PHENOMENALLY on Switch like holy shit no slowdown, no frame drops, nothing. It makes it the optimal platform for the game for portable play with no compromising. The story theming of "eternity doesn't have to be so bad" and family abuse and connections upholds the linear somewhat predictable story (like the ending is good and all but if you didn't see it coming a mile away you are either not well-versed in Greek mythology, Disney movies, and/or are stupid). I'd say the worst aspects of this game are boss variety and the side quests. There are really only four bosses in the whole game with the occasional mini boss or optional/random boss. But the main bosses you fight start to feel samey after a while. They make alterations rarely, such as Meg tagging in her other Fury sisters or the Bone Hydra changing color/design to mark a different attack, but it's so little a change that it's easily negligible. A few more unique bosses to end a floor with would've done wonders for spicing up the variety. The side quests are harmless additions in and of themselves, but trying to complete ones like "get all boons from a god once" or "get all hammer weapon upgrades for a weapon" made me wanna blow my brains out because it's random what god you'll even get and you only get two hammers per run and I SPENT ALL NIGHT TRYING TO FIND THE DUMBASS FLURRY SLASH IT TOOK LIKE FIVE HOURS FUCK YOU POSEIDON GIVE ME YOUR AIDS. Any ideas of 100%-ing this game should be thrown right into the garbage. I'd sooner recommend alphabetizing the contents of a box of Kraft Mac & Cheese because at least then the box won't randomly NOT give you the noodles. I'm charmed enough by the game that I actually do want to get the epilogue (as grindy as that'll be) which is more than I can say for games like Hollow Knight and Forager, but without story beats to carry me through and the game becoming a checklist, it's definitely gonna become a podcast or non-thinking stream kind of game.

But uh... yeah. Hades is good. It's really good. It's amazing. Quite possibly 2020's GOTY. I haven't played many 2020 releases but until something dethrones it it's taking that spot. (lol bye New Horizons I hope you enjoyed the nine days at the top). I cannot recommend this game enough, especially if you're one of those weirdos that plays every roguelike ever for some reason. I have sunk tens of hours into it so far and I'm probably gonna look like 100 by the time I get the epilogue. And for $25? A fucking STEAL.

We’ve come a long way since 2015, but in that four years, Bloodstained took the Metroidvania genre and... did it about as well as the standards of a modern Metroidvania. It’s not really revolutionary but fans of the genre will get a kick and a half out of it. The highlight of Bloodstained is the metric dick-load of weapons and special abilities. A variety of weapon types that (mostly) play differently from each other and magic shards that grant unique powers, be them summons, elemental magic, weapon conjures, buffs, familiars, etc.

While the amount of shards on their own don’t entice me enough to play the game again, the variety will keep future playthroughs fresh. You’re likely to find a favorite set, and with the quick select menu later in the game, the ball is in your court.

Visually the game looks alright. I wouldn’t say it’s downright ugly (unless you’re on Switch) but there’s an intense amount of visual filters and glossiness on damn near everything from the character models to environments. But hey, at least it’s not pixel graphics.

The soundtrack is pretty good. A couple bangers but mostly moody tracks that I wouldn’t go out of my way to listen to.

The bosses are quite a spread. They range from piss-easy to “Hey, that took a couple tries” to “If you don’t mass stock up on items, you won’t win.” Some boss fights are so unique in their patterns and variety of attacks that it often felt like I was playing a 2D Dark Souls.

The difficulty curve is pretty wack. I struggled at the beginning with how underpowered I was, breezed through the middle, and hit bumps at the end.

The biggest problems with the game are story and backtracking. The story is meaningless. I felt no attachment to any character and found myself speeding past longer dialogue exchanges. This isn’t an egregious mark against the game, since the story mainly exists to move Miriam along from one part of the castle to the next, but for as much emphasis it seemed like the game was putting on the story, I cared not one bit. Second, the backtracking. This is a problem with the Metroidvania genre as a whole, and Bloodstained suffers from it. There are plenty of save points and fast travel warp rooms around the castle, but I often found my destinations far from the nearest warp rooms. The backtracking is the worst part of Bloodstained because it just feels like filler time until the game flow continues again. There really should’ve been a shard later in the game that let’s you fast travel to area entrances/exits and save rooms.

There’s a handful of challenging bosses in the post-game, including the secret last boss which grants you the ultimate power.

The last thing I wanna note is how polished the game is. Not visually or aesthetically, but how the two are intertwined with the game’s mechanics. There’s almost a Nintendo level of polish with so many little details and moments that go a long way.

Bloodstained didn’t turn the Metroidvania genre on its head, and SteamWorld Dig 2 remains my easy favorite in the genre, but Metroidvania fans can give a cheer with Iga back in business and with free DLC on the way.

I went into Exit the Gungeon thinking it would be a roguelike of just enough length to occupy the rest of my week-long vacation.

...It took me only five tries to beat it.

I knew it’d be shorter than Enter the Gungeon but damn. Either playing Enter so much turned me into a Gungeon god or it’s the shorter length and decreased difficulty. But it’s fun. If you liked Enter and want to try more vertical platforming, it’s a fun couple hours. Recommend it on sale; $10 is too much for two hours.

I was really into Murder by Numbers at first. It's got picross; I like picross. It's got Hato Moa character designs, it's got Masakazu Sugimori music, and the writing was above decent.

If you're looking for stimulating gameplay (picross is stimulating but not on a moment-to-moment basis) then this is not your game. When you're not solving picross puzzles, you're reading dialogue in visual novel form or point-and-clicking to find the next puzzle.

The soundtrack is the best part of the game. It sounds like something from an Ace Attorney game yet has a unique tone and identity to have it stand on its own. The character designs are great; some are over-designed nightmares but the good outweigh the bad. Honor is a drink.

The game fell apart in two ways for me: the story and the quantity of puzzles. The story starts to stagnate right where it should climax. Even though the pieces are all set up, it kept unceremoniously dropping subplots and character relationships.

Of the five main characters that are highlighted in the intro animation, one disappears halfway through the game and the other follows suit in the final quarter. The dialogue, while capable of being brilliant and humorous at times, has a nasty habit of destroying the tension.

Poorly-placed jokes, painfully unfunny jokes, cringe-worthy dialogue in both inconsequential AND crucial plot moments. The mysteries aren't as clever as the game thinks they are. Two suspects is hardly a mystery; it's a coin flip. Layton games have fucking mysteries.

The final case in particular felt incredibly bloated. Too many puzzles with little juicy story moments in between to encourage me to push through was exhausting. Ending is kinda lame, too. The bad guy's reasoning is solid enough but he didn't have much time to develop a presence.

If you're a picross fan, Murder by Numbers will give you a decent cast of characters and a bopping soundtrack, but as a cohesive game, it didn't do much besides provide a mentally stimulating distraction from Animal Crossing.

First things first, DO NOT play River City Girls single-player. The game is absolutely a co-op game, and like the main man Dunkey said, we gotta take every co-op game we can get today, because there just aren't that many.

The first thing you'll notice about River City Girls is its god-tier aesthetic. If you miss the tragedy-stricken Scott Pilgrim game, this is the next best thing. WayForward went all-out on the sprite work to the point where it made me love the look of a pixel indie game in 2019. Every animation is smooth as butter and backed up by the toasted bread that is the music: banger after banger after banger. On top of its bass-y chiptune beats, there's even a few lyrical songs, which are one of the three things that makes any game better.

Finally the presentation is wrapped up in some great manga-style artwork done by the artist of the Devil's Candy webcomic and animated (short) cutscenes by Studio Yotta. They're brief but go a long way in amping up the feel of the game.

The combat is surprisingly deep. While you won't be pulling off any high-flying double-digit combos, you will be smacking bitches across the screen and powerbombing their spines onto the concrete. You unlock more moves as you play, but some are very much better than others. I'd say Kyoko is slightly better than Misako, (Misako the honey, btw) but both are skilled in various little situations. Misako early on can clear out a line of enemies and back them off while Kyoko gains more shorter-range but harder enemy-sweeping moves as the game progresses.

Where River City Girls drops the ball is in its little things. The game doesn't hold your hand after you leave the tutorial, but it holds back some really helpful information. My friend and I didn't know we could hold on to food items for use in the pause menu until we hit the fourth boss.

We also figured out that buying an item from a shop the first time gives you one permanent stat boost, but the items exact uses are locked until you buy them. So you could've been buying something expensive and weak instead of something cheaper and more useful.

Boss fights are tough, some of the consistently toughest I've played in a game recently. A good spread of challenge, although the last two were surprisingly easy. Bosses occasionally will have some cheap move that is either way too punishing or unpredictable.

River City Girls was a fun time. While the repetition started to set in by the final third of the game, the aesthetic, presentation and soundtrack hard carried me through the endgame monotony. It's got some cool replay value, but not worth it for me playing all over again.

After weeks of playing I’ve finally beaten Hollow Knight. If I may pull a games journalism, I’d say something like “Well it certainly made me feel hollow” but Hollow Knight is a good game. I was expecting that god-tier metroidvania everyone claimed it was, but between this and Bloodstained ROTN, I have now come to the conclusion that I much prefer the Vania half of metroidvanias.

The Vania half typically involves combat with RPG elements and a multitude of options to increase variety and gameplay style, while Metroid is about exploration through long winding maps with intersecting pathways and rooms sealed behind powers you get later. Hollow Knight is very much on the Metroid end of the spectrum which started out fine as the map starts small and you are taken on the critical path, but then some warning flags start to crop up. Maps are one thing; you can only get a map of an area once you buy it off a humming map guy hiding in the area. The problem is the areas can be so big and winding that you can easily miss the map guy at times because you have no sense of direction and all the corridors look the same with rarely a strategically placed identifiable landmark. This is more an early game problem that railroads you into finding a map first and foremost, but if it’s better for me to get a map of an area as soon as I get to a new one, and not go exploring until I get one, and when I do get it I have to fill most of it out myself, why can’t I just get the map right as I’m entering the area? Super Metroid does this way better; you get a map at the start that tracks where you’ve been and once you find a map room you find all the places you haven’t been yet in that area. I shudder to think what playing the vanilla version of the game without the DLC would’ve been like before they gave us map markers to mark things we couldn’t get to before. Good luck memorizing every point of interest without them, bitch.
The next red flag of the venereal metroidvania disease is the dreaded backtracking. Backtracking is par for the course of metroidvanias which one just has to accept like the grogginess of getting up after an afternoon nap or the inevitably of death. But Hollow Knight takes it too far when it doesn’t have to. Benches are the Dark Souls equivalent of bonfires where you get all your health back, respawn on them when you die, and all the enemies respawn when you sit on them. There’s also two-three methods of fast travel depending on how much you explore. The main method are stag beetle stations as fast travel points. There’s a tram that takes you to several specific locations, and an unlockable single fast travel point you can plunk down anywhere on the main map and travel to from wherever. In the early game when the maps are smaller they’re helpful to get you to your destination fast, but as the game progresses and thus the map opens up, the points of interest and fast travel points get further away from each other. It’s still helpful for getting closer to them, but you’ll still half to cross anywhere from 33%-50% of an entire area map just to get to where you need to go. I clocked 30 hours into Hollow Knight and a few of them were owed to backtracking frequently. An ability to fast travel between benches (which are more plentiful than stag stations and are closer to points of interest on the map) would’ve made the game more streamlined and cuts down on tedious unnecessary downtime.
The combat of Hollow Knight is the selling point. What it lacks in variety of ways to approach a fight it makes up for by taking what it has and refines it to near perfection. You have a nail and unlock spells that hit things far away, up and down, but more often than not, you’re gonna be swinging at things with your nail. Charms can be equipped on benches that allow you to spec into different play styles like long-range nail swings, magic DPS, heal focus, etc. You can buy and find upgrades on the map that increases your health, magic reserves and charm equip slots, but after you buy everything you can, the economy of Hollow Knight becomes fucked. I consistently spent all my money in the first half of the game with plenty of expensive things left to buy, but in the second half I had 20,000 money and nothing to spend it on. Enemies and bosses have recognizable attack patterns and cues that make most of them a joy to fight. Occasionally you’ll run into a shitter or two that demands near-impossible feats like “hey here’s a brand new boss at the end of a ten minute enemy rush” or “hey here’s a perfectly functional boss you could’ve fought solo but here’s multiple ones so you have to juggle all their cues and if one covers the ground and the other jumps in the air forcing you to take a hit then you can just eat shit on a sundae” but those are few and far between… until you get to the endgame and they become more frequent, but a lot of them are optional and I suppose it’s just the ol’ Dark Souls ram your head against a brick wall until it breaks mentality.
The best boss I encountered were the Mantis Lords. They’re fast and have recognizable patterns that demand split-second reactions, but they never felt unfair. Even when it becomes a two on one, they never cover all options and you can still read their moves and get some good slashes in. It took several attempts but after beating them I felt like I couldn’t turn around lest I accidentally smack someone across the face with my three-foot stiffie. The cherry on top was the reward. Sure I got access to a new area, but after backtracking through the Mantis Lord area, all the mantis enemies that before tried to dice me up into bug sashimi on sight, all bowed in my presence and I could walk right by them with no harm done. Hollow Knight is packed with a bunch of little moments that really stuck with me despite their briefness. The singing ghost girl that you can listen to and choose to put to rest, following another Knight that you find out is actually a nightmarish monstrosity that wears your kin like a trophy, the banker being a little bitch you can enact vengeance upon, the [SPOILER REDACTED] stabbing himself, etc. All it was missing was a Dark Souls limping dog boss moment and I would’ve needed to sit in the tub in the dark and stare blankly into the void for a while. All of these moments are well and good and help hold up what is otherwise a decent story.

Hollow Knight takes my least favorite approach to storytelling: storyless storytelling. Well that’s hardly fair. Hollow Knight does have a story, in the same way I have a USB cable in my desk drawer that I could find given some digging equipment and a couple days. The game starts and you go right and you find a little barren town. You then find a well that leads into the first area of the map and you explore because it is a video game. You proceed to fuck around for a few hours before Team Cherry snaps awake from their drunken slumber and remembers that games need stories, so they pull you into a dream world and tell you to find three sleeping souls and put them to rest (not to rest like they already are but to rest rest) so you can unlock a temple holding the final boss. But that’s just what the game tells you in a nutshell. In reality, the broader story is about a fallen kingdom ravaged by an infection that turned most of its denizens into mindless drones or resurrected dead folk that can’t be put to rest until you do all the dirty work. It’s a game not about the character but the world the character resides in. Until you get the Inception nail that lets you invade dream land, you have no goal or objective aside from the blanket “it is a video game; play” which kinda smothers my drive to explore and fight when I don’t know the context for why I’m doing it or why I should continue to do it. I was able to piece together the infection thing from context clues alone but the story behind all that is tucked behind a wall of lore that’s optional to find which leads to Hollow Knight’s greatest downfall: its insistence that the story be carried by lore that you have to go out of your way to find instead of just… telling a story. I’m sure all the lore behind the kingdom of Hallownest is quite interesting and deep but if I have to watch an hour long YouTube video to appreciate your game’s story, then methinks the writers didn’t exactly pull their weight, mate. Doom 2016 takes a similar approach by having the Doom Slayer in-canon blatantly disregard the story, but Id compensated for that by actually having a good story with an ideological conflict that I was thoroughly invested in. It also has a lot of lore in its codex files for all the nutters who want to learn, but the base story of Doom 2016 is present in the main game and doesn’t require an hour of homework to understand and appreciate.

While I’m kicking the story and lore in the balls, I might as well take a gonad shot at something I’m surprised I haven’t seen anyone levy against the game: the aesthetic and theming. Now, the aesthetic and visual art of Hollow Knight is wonderful to look at, even if some environments can get a bit samey. The animations aren’t particularly impressive but hey, it’s not pixel art so it’s already standing out in the indie crowd. The atmosphere is also great; an oppressive, depressing world that has been dying/dead for a long time but there are still glimmers of life and hope within the darkness, like the grubs and the NPCs you can save and interact with that will populate the starting town and the map throughout. But what clips my clitoris is the theming. The world of Hollow Knight is a world of insects in an underground kingdom. But about two-thirds into the game, I started thinking… “why are they insects? In what way does them being insects service the story or the world?” And the answer is: it doesn’t. Very rarely does Hollow Knight justify its insect theming. Sure, the kingdom is underground, there are tunnels that burrowing insects crawl through, and they use tiny sharp things like nails and thread needles as weapons, but the world doesn’t mesh cohesively with the characters thematically. The City of Tears is a Gothic architectural city on a body of water with elevators and buildings made from metal… that if it were scaled up could be built and inhabited by humans. There’s the aforementioned tram stations… that if it were scaled up could be built and used by humans. The infection, the shades (essentially souls of people) the coliseum, the dream worlds, none of these are relevant to insects. You might call that nitpicking, but there are plenty of games that blend its world with its theming to create a more cohesive experience. Cuphead has a cup for a head which explains his fragility (there’s a shattering sound when he gets hit) and he lives in a 1930s cartoon world with a subtle tinge of darkness which explains why a lot of the bosses are so evil and aggressive. The SteamWorld Dig games center on a world of steam-powered robots that need to absorb water to stay functional, recharge their lamps on solar power, and can upgrade themselves with modular pieces and tech because they are robots. Shovel Knight is about a knight with a shovel, so digging is a core mechanic, be it digging up treasure (commonly buried in the dirt) or digging through dirt to progress through the level. Hollow Knight is like Cars (not directly in quality, that’d be insulting to Hollow Knight) where the game could be done with humans and not insects and you wouldn’t have to tweak the story that much to make it feasible, like how Cars didn’t benefit from being about living cars and could’ve been done with humans driving cars. Compare that to Toy Story, where the characters have to be toys and you can’t change them to being humans otherwise the story wouldn’t work. Hell, A Bug’s Life is more in-line with its insect theming than Hollow Knight. A Bug’s Life has cities built from human trash, the light posts are fireflies, a bar inside a soup can, a circus carriage made from a box of circus animal crackers, they harvest food and build machines from insect-obtainable things like grass, wood and seeds, not metal crafted into human-originated architecture. Bug Fables seems to be thematically cohesive with its insect aesthetic than Hollow Knight.

By the 20 hour mark in Hollow Knight I began to get a sense that I was gonna end up feeling positive overall on the game, but was desperate for it to be over and done with. I never felt that way about Bloodstained and can say definitively that games like Bloodstained and SteamWorld Dig 2 are exactly the kind of metroidvania I can get behind and are overall better experiences. They may not have combat or bosses that are as tight as those found in Hollow Knight, but they do have better everything else. I can recall a bunch of songs from Bloodstained but like two from Hollow Knight because most of Hollow Knight’s music is just ambiance that got so monotonous I had to put on podcasts just to fill the sound. I plowed through the last third of the game, forgoing the good ending (but Team Cherry officially stated that there is no true canon ending to the game so by all intents and purposes I got an ending and that’s all that matters) and have no desire (at least at this moment in time) to play through the Grimm Troupe and Godmaster DLC. All of that was free, but it was also not base game so I don’t think I’m any less valid in my opinion. Hollow Knight is certainly worth its price of admission. $15 for a 30-hour game that has some stuff I didn’t even touch yet is a fuckin’ steal and I kinda feel like Team Cherry were underselling themselves here with all the work they put into it. I liked Hollow Knight and would recommend it for those into the Metroid half of metroidvanias, but I would much sooner recommend games like Bloodstained and SteamWorld Dig 2, games I gave my GOTY status in 2019 and 2017 respectively. Silksong, which is just Hollow Knight 2 with a subtitle instead of a numeral, looks to address a lot of problems I had and be a better game. More memorable music, more insect theming, an actual character and not just a blank slate, a wider cast of memorable characters, etc. I look forward to its release and to what else Team Cherry is capable of. Hollow Knight is a 7/10 that could possibly be swayed by the DLC I didn’t play, but the thought of playing any more Hollow Knight right now actually depresses me so no thanks I’m good ok bye.

What I thought was gonna be a Metroidvania with pinball exploration a la a more open Yoku's Island Express, was just a puzzle game made for babies.

It's braindead easy. The only challenge comes from the sudden difficulty spike at the end. The story acts like it's deeper and more ambiguous than it actually is. The titular Creature acts like it's an ambivalent guardian of the world, but is just actually evil and in the wrong. I beat the game in five hours, but in reality, it was four due to the sudden end spike. All the music is just synth ambiance and is 100% unmemorable. All "puzzles" boil down to just aiming the ball at the pegs and the game plays itself. For $15, Creature in the Well is wack. If you want Metroidvania pinball, just play Yoku.

When I opened Ape Out for the first time, I was hoping for the next game to surge onto my "actually good games of the year" list rather than my "ten games I finished this year" list. Unfortunately, we have yet another case of a middling indie game where the style has drowned out the substance like PETA drowning a potato sack full of unadopted puppies.

In Ape Out, you are an ape and you get out. You run around and murder anything that moves. In a world apparently taken over by extreme pro-2nd amendment supporters, an army of men carrying pistols, rifles, machine guns, shotguns, flamethrowers, RPGs and fucking snipers attempt to stop you from pushing them into a wall so hard they turn into Jackson Pollock art.

Ape Out's selling point and best feature is its sound design. The game is percussion-oriented jazz and every action causes a dynamic change in the music. Killing dudes and getting hurt rackets up the music. Cymbals crash and drums smash and dudes with guns get made into mash. The chaos of the gameplay is complimented by the chaos of the music and vice versa. The visuals are all minimalist and understandable. The colors flicker and are always moving in some way, keeping up the chaos. Feels like an artist wanted to show off their unique audio talent.

My issue, however, is that everything else is kinda shit. Ape Out gives off the vibe of a guy going: "Here's why you should have me an audio designer for your game."
Instead of: "Here's why I should be a game designer."

The levels are maze-like and procedurally generated. These are fancy terms for: "level design was too hard and boring so I let the game design itself so I could continue throwing drums into walls." Enemies are spawned in no meaningful areas, the push attack's hitbox is spontaneous, and the carry mechanic is woefully underutilized.

The only things you can pick up are:
-Enemies to fire off one round from their gun
-Severed limbs that stun people
-Metal doors

Not being able to interact with the environments via throwing barrels or knocking over tables for cover makes the game less dynamic and more simple. You can hurl the things you hold at 100 mph, but good luck hitting your mark. Half the time I'd hit the guy, half the time I'd miss despite my right stick being pointed at his face. Same thing with using enemies as guns. Flamethrower and RPG guys in particular can go fuck off. Flamethrowers make approaching impossible and RPGs kill you in one shot because who cares about things like "chances to win?" Since the goal of every level is get from A to B, combat is something that is best avoided. I got through several levels from running in a straight line.

Ape Out was a disappointment. Another indie game too focused on presentation causing their gameplay to lack. While the actions are satisfying when pulled off, the repetition and short length (two hours) left me bitter. At least Sayonara Wild Hearts had standard-quality gameplay. For $15, I can't recommend Ape Out. I got it on sale for $7 and while that was fair, I also got way more frustration out of the game than I did audiovisual splendor. I yearn for when most indie games can actually balance gameplay and presentation regularly.