🤛🏻🎀❌🍛👊🏻🏐🎸🌊🤜🏻

maaan, i was looking forward to this one! time to unpack a bit after deciding to stop pursuing the post game.

there’s a lot to love in the presentation here. rem is this expressive illustrator who’s designed some real good knuckleheads. reading through her comic, devil’s candy, is a blast every time, and i love getting to see another angle of her work through this synthwave rude girl lens. go check out devil’s candy!

the setting of two delinquent girls headbutting their way through a city of violence is also too good to pass up. you’ve got shops full of jaded kiosk workers & inspiringly buff women giving you brief periods of calm between tidal waves of punches on vibrantly beat up streets. each variant of an enemy has a unique name & can be recruited as a single move unit, including secret boss versions that hit harder & reveal the undercurrent of a subplot through their descriptions. going around the city & finding these characters becomes it’s own type of minigame.

these are all cool ideas! there’s a lot of cool ideas in this game. but it feels like a collection of cool ideas & sweet art put next to each other on a shelf, rather than something that works together as a cohesive whole. none of it quite rings through to me as well as i can imagine how cool it sounded in the planning stages of development. there’s this spiritual successor fusion of scott pilgrim & river city ransom going on, but it gets in the way of delivering a good time.

i wish they either kept things rougher around the edges or actually playtested the game a bit. things end up in this kinda in-between space where you can feel them phoning it in after a while. for me it was around the 20th time an enemy said ‘does anyone actually read this?’ as their defeat line.

Reviewed on Oct 20, 2022


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