Flash might be dead in practice but it is alive in spirit in what seems to be a tribute to a few dozen free online games you probably already played 10 years ago, down to the pitiful length of the (mostly extremely easy) base levels and especially the questionable rng fiesta of its hard mode, because whomever made this absolutely bought into the idea that a hard game is one that kills you with next to no counterplay until you just luck through by repeatedly throwing yourself at something you have no real control over. Hard mode isn't even that hard in general - you only have to survive for ten seconds on each room, and a bunch of these are still on the easy side since some of the discs are so harmless - but it is certainly stupid.

The four stars are for the X360 port, which fixes the stupid infinite lives bug. Completely bonkers, barely plays like a traditional shmup past stage 3. Giant toy robot bosses feel more like boxing matches. God tier obnoxious eurodance trash soundtrack somehow still isn't loud enough to drown out the porn moans from the playable characters when a bullet flies too close. Final boss yells BOMBA a few dozen times in a row and literally (as in, literally literally) fills the entire screen with bullets, and that's not even near the top half of hardest things in this game. Will cause a lifetime phobia of snakes with lasers, in case you didn't have one before.

Only that madman Shinobu Yagawa could have created something like this - it flopped extremely hard and along with Muchi Muchi Pork! (another weird, if slightly less demented game) it probably cost him his career, but I get the feeling that he simply saw the writing on the wall for the genre and decided to go out with a bang.

Started over a few times but never made it past the first couple hours of act 2; Larian basically doubled down on all the annoying things from the previous game (they trust their cliché-ridden writing waaaay too much, even if it isn't as incredibly dreadful this time around) while completely reworking the formerly innovative combat system into what is essentially a glorified dps race.

Still arguably worth it if your tolerance for generic overblown "chosen one" narratives is high; mine isn't, and when it's easier to find literal gods to talk to and be sent on yet another quest to save the world by than it is to find a pair of trousers for everyone in your party, you know that the developers have gone way too far up their own asses with the "divinity" theme.

This is the work of someone who understands not only why roguelikes are such a long-lasting genre but also why they've been mostly stuck in a niche for nearly forty years: by identifying what actually works and separating it from what is just tolerated by inertia, Golden Krone Hotel is all gameplay and no busywork. A bit like DCSS in how it doesn't want to bullshit the player or let the player bullshit it... if DCSS took place in a cozy little Romanian castle (read: spooky, poorly lit, broken windows, not really that little, vampires everywhere) instead of in a sprawling Australian underground dungeon.

As a vampire hunter turned vampire, or maybe a vampire turned vampire hunter, or possibly even a hunter vampire, you spend roughly half your time as a spell-casting, sword-swinging, revolver-shooting, lore-reading, human-looking, slowly regenerating BATTLEMAGE, and the other half as a slowly decaying monstrous bloodthirsty nightvision predator who probably can't sign his own name or even properly grasp a pen with those massive claws to begin with, and who also spontaneously combusts if exposed to the scorching sunlight of a gloomy Romanian afternoon; mind those broken windows and keep aware of the time of the day unless you want your vampiric self to develop instant atomic skin cancer. The Hotel has some very spacious rooms so I'd recommend just exploring the opposite side of the floor while the sun impersonates Auric Goldfinger's laser cannon.

Or, you know, just drink one of those Soul Elixirs that turn you back into a human. This is what the game is about, in the end; managing your time and abilities as both a spellcasting human and a faceshredding vampire. NPCs from the opposite faction will attack you, and different areas have different predominant populations; resources are generally limited just enough to be comfortable for a whole game as you alternate between forms, but to make it not really convenient to try to spend all the time as one of the two. All in all, an extremely solid game that knows exactly what it wants to do. It is rewarding on account of how differently the same character might play as human and vampire; not only the way you approach each fight changes, but you also need to reevaluate constantly whether you should really be in a particular room, floor or even branch of the castle around the time you transform.

While a lot of roguelikes both old and new take pride in their unstoppable feature creep and unwillingness to let players play the game, instead clobbering them with infinite menus and inventory screens and cooking recipes and fetch quests and all other kinds of bloat that just get in the way of the moment-to-moment gameplay that made the genre, it's refreshing to see a game that presents no more than a few novel core mechanics and builds a fair, balanced and distinctive experience out of it.

Incredible clarity of design and a tasty meme. When you finish each "world" gratification comes in form of both the knowledge that you have conquered yet another devious set of puzzles and a little tune that vaguely reminds me of that youtube video of some nerd playing the Titanic theme on a recorder. Will constantly surprise you not only with how many ways there are to manipulate a sausage (hur hur hur) but also with how many ways there are to fail a level. Quick, infinite undo button allows you to experiment wildly on each level, which quickly teaches you that rapid-fire trial and error will just make you get it completely wrong a lot faster and haha no you really have to use your brain, good luck, this game is 100% idiot-proof.