Fun for what it is, and hard to complain about a surprise free release like this, but it does start to show its problems on Furier mode. Some bullet patterns are very annoying to dodge because of the invisible walls, the contextual shoot/melee button really does not work well, and parry being back+attack rather than a dedicated input is annoying. Lot of things are just unclear generally, unsurprisingly not as good as the full game. Worth a quick playthrough on the base difficulty then put it down imo.

[ Day 1 - September 7th, 2023 ]
Time Bandit stands out as one of the more unique experiences I've had with a game. The central mechanic of the game is interactions taking real world time to complete. You work in a warehouse in a desolate, company-owned town, and are tasked with moving boxes around to collect time crystals. This is represented by sokoban-type puzzles. The equipment you need to use to complete your work will take at least 30 minutes to complete an action, sometimes longer, but you can leave it to work even with the game closed. This might sound like a gimmick, and it did seem that way to me at first, but the game does a great job of fully exploring this concept.

Early on, there was an event that started to make me think this game was something special. You meet a character who is part of a resistance against the company you work for, and he wants to schedule a meeting with you tomorrow. You have to pick a real world time, and show up in a specific location at that time. So fucking cool. As the game goes on there's a lot of really neat interactions with time. You can get put in jail and have to wait out the sentence before you can continue playing. You can get injured and have to go to the hospital and wait out your stay there. Your job shift changes to random times each day. It really feels like the idea was fully explored.

[ Day 2 - September 8th, 2023 ]
As far as the moment-to-moment gameplay, I mentioned the sokoban puzzles previously. These aren't anything especially complex, but they do require a good bit of thought as you have to plan out your moves in advance. These also introduce other elements with different types of equipment and obstacles. I never found the puzzles too difficult, but they were interesting enough to be satisfying. There are other elements to the game as well, and it's quite an interesting mix of genres. There's a management element, you earn money through your work but you're required to provide your own equipment beyond what you get at the start. You can buy more stuff at the town's general store, but you also have to balance this with saving money for trips to the hospital and buying gas to power the equipment you already have. Early on you also learn of a secret entrance to the warehouse and can sneak in while you're not on the clock, introducing a stealth element. You can get some extra work done, or more importantly steal from the company, but if you get caught you'll be sent to jail for trespassing.

That leads into my main complaint I have with the game, which is the late game tedium of the stealth sections. Unless you keep track of your ever-changing schedule and only play the game during those times, then more often than not you'll be playing when you're off-shift. This requires you to sneak into work, which is exciting enough at first, but by the end of the game I got very tired of. You can follow basically the same path every time, and there's only a handful of layouts of the cameras and patrolling robots that can catch you, which you'll quickly learn to recognize. This is compounded by the fact that the later game content is further into the area, which requires you to walk and crawl through an even longer path over and over. The dull repetition of work ties into the story and themes of the game, so I can almost forgive this as intentional, but I still feel there could have been some more variety to what you actually have to do with the stealth and still accomplish this goal.

[ Day 3 - September 9th, 2023 ]
I haven't really talked much about the story up to this point, and while you've probably realized that the company in the game sounds pretty evil, you might expect it to not address that on a deeper level. Time Bandit gets into some very political themes, and while it's a bit heavy-handed in some of the ways it talks about them, it addresses stuff I haven't seen any other games really talk about sincerely and tries to educate the player on real political ideas. The story is told through interacting with just a handful of characters. There's your boss at work, a coworker, a member of the resistance movement, and the local store owner. While you do sometimes talk to them in person, most conversations are done over radio. Sometimes they'll reach out to you with something to talk about, but you can also contact any of them at any point in the game and they'll have different things to say depending on the context of what you're doing. I won't spoil more of the details than I already have, but it does stand out as very different among the medium of games and uses it pretty effectively.

One thing I wanted to address that didn't fit neatly elsewhere in the review is the time commitment of this game. It might sound like a lot, but I really don't think this is too much for anyone to handle. It took me a bit over a month to complete the game, but in that time Steam says I only spent a bit under 8 hours in game. Most of my sessions were just logging in for the day, playing 5-10 minutes, and closing it. You could definitely complete it faster in real time by managing the timers more efficiently, but I enjoyed just starting it up whenever I felt like it, rarely more than once or twice a day, with occasional skipped days. Through the various limitations, this also seems to be the way the game wants you to approach it. A very cool side effect of this is that at least for the first while, I felt like I was spending more time with the game while I wasn't playing it than while I was. It gives you a lot to think about between play sessions and planning ahead for what you're going to do next time is a really cool experience. I was admittedly not feeling this way so much towards the end and was pretty ready for it to be over, but it's such a unique overall package and I had such a good time with it for the most part that I'd still easily recommend this to anyone.

Pseudoregalia is one of the best executed 3D metroidvanias I've seen. It's a game almost entirely focused on movement, and it really nails that. Your abilities are fun and interesting, and many of them aren't the generic upgrades you'd expect from many games in the genre. You can find them very out of order and it feels like the game almost encourages sequence breaking with the amount of opportunities it gives for that. The combat for the most part is just there, it's not great but it's not in the way to the point of being annoying either, with the exception being the final boss fight which I found surprisingly fun. The vibes of this are great, you're exploring a huge castle with very N64-inspired visuals, and it gets those right in a way that feels very authentic and nostalgic as someone who grew up with that system. The music is also really good and adds a lot to the tone of the game.

My biggest complaint that while the castle has a variety of areas, navigating between them can be a little confusing. The game doesn't have any sort of map, and I mostly respect that decision. I feel like if it had one I probably would have been over-reliant on checking it constantly, and the challenge of mapping everything out in my head in a complex 3D space was pretty fun. That's a pretty fine line to walk though of balancing that complexity without frustrating the player, and where it failed at that was near the end of the game when I had to backtrack to specific areas. Within a single area I was usually fine with navigating off of memory, and didn't get stuck often at all, but in the later parts of the game I would know a specific location I needed to get to, and remembering where the zone transitions were and figuring out how the areas all connected together was more frustrating than fun.

Overall it's a very neat game that's good at what it does, and it's very short and underpriced for what it is, so it's an easy recommendation. I could see myself replaying it just to see how doing things in a different order went, or trying to speedrun it as it seems like a really good game for that.