If Alone in the Dark is the first survival horror game, then Alone in the Dark 2 is the first survival horror sequel to take a more action-oriented approach. The difference is immediately evident in how each game begins. In Alone in the Dark, you’re in an attic, there are things from outside trying to get in, and you have to race to block the windows off before they break through and drag you away. In Alone in the Dark 2 you’re plonked right next to a zombie with a gun and you have to karate chop him to death before he shoots you. While the intro for Alone in the Dark eased you into exploring the mansion, Alone in the Dark 2 gives way to… what almost feels like an action setpiece, rushing down the driveway to the mansion and trying to push a statue out of the way before the guards can shoot you. If Alone in the Dark’s first major area gave you an indication of the ins and outs of combat and how the game wasn’t afraid of being cheap with traps and ambushes, the hedge maze that begins Alone in the Dark 2 tells you three key things: every space you go through is going to be rather tight. Enemies are constant. If you want to get past, and get through, you’re going to have to engage with the game’s combat.

y’know

the combat

the really good combat

…

In my review for the first Alone in the Dark, I talked about how the combat system was fairly easily the worst part of the game. You’re beholden to this system where you have to learn your weapon’s moveset and learn the timings and windups all while enemies can just walk up to you and stunlock you to death, and it becomes really clear really quick that unless you want to spend a lot of health and resources for diminishing returns you need to run from and past enemies whenever possible. For Alone in the Dark 2, it’s back, and even worse. Not because combat is now the only thing you ever really do, but because instead of enemies needing to close the gap (giving you your one opportunity to safely stunlock them), now they all have guns. All the melee weapons you get are functionally useless (except for the endgame, where they’re still useless but also you can’t use any of your guns) because trying to close the gap and use them will get you shot, which then forces you into using your own guns, which are just as bad. You need to figure out where to point so that you’re pointing at the enemy, which the cinematic fixed camera angles don’t help with. This is something the AI never has to worry about, so oftentimes you lose health trying to orient your gun so that it’s actually aimed in the correct direction. It says something that the best way to go through things is to cheese the enemies into shooting a wall between you and them, instead.

And it’s required. Not just necessarily “the door will only open once the enemy is dead” but in more subtle ways, like an item needed for progression only dropping once you kill a specific enemy. Problem is, you don’t know what enemies are the ones that drop the things you need, or, even if they do drop something, whether the thing you get will actually take you in a direction that progresses you through the game or whether it just leads to more lore or a “”””””””better””””””” weapon. This is even worse when you consider resource scarcity. More specifically, ammo scarcity: your constant need for ammo because guns are the only thing worth using far eclipses the ammo the game gives you. You’re perpetually running low, a problem that’s made even worse by how you’re always going to miss at least one or two shots because the perspective is so fucked. Oftentimes it feels like you need to savescum just to see if you can get through a fight using slightly less ammo, or losing slightly less health, or losing significantly more health because you were forced to use melee, which… even when you’re meant to use it it’s still so clunky and rough to deal with. There’s more than one segment where there are tendrils guarding things that’ll damage you if you get close, that can only be hurt by melee attacks… which usually move you forward as you do so, putting you into the damage zone with the oftentimes borked fixed camera perspective making it unclear whether you managed to land a hit on the tendrils or not. The endgame is meant to be a series of swordfights, but it’s more like a series of you using the same move over and over again to lock the opponent in place, spamming it for what feels like minutes until the enemy finally forgets to block, with absolutely no indication as to whether something was a hit or how much HP your opponent has left. Overall the combat is baaaaaaad. Bad bad bad, and the increased focus on it in this game honestly singlehandedly tanks it.

Which is a bit of a shame, because I like a good deal of what this game is attempting. I love the setting: the cloudy, early evening sky, the hedge maze, how you get to run around (and climb) a pirate ship, the fact that this game, of all games, is set during Christmas (and you spend a significant amount of it in a Santa suit)… oftentimes I feel like survival horror games tend to lean onto the same kinds of settings — primarily, those popularized by genre codifiers like Resident Evil or Silent Hill — so it’s really neat to see how even just set dressing can make what’s otherwise a fairly archetypical setting (a mansion) feel so fresh and unique compared to other takes. I like the focus on the background lore — the pirates, their curse, how that informs both the gameplay and sets the story in motion — but even regardless I’m kind of into the shift into having a bit of an active plot: characters you meet along the way, a focus on what’s happening over what happened fifty years ago. There’s also a stealth section that I liked well enough, and not necessarily just because it does away with combat for a merciful, brief moment in time and instead focuses on direct helplessness, needing to stay out of the sight of enemies, impede them when they come after you, and take them out with indirect means. It’s fun, and it does a fun job at repurposing the areas you’ve otherwise fought your way through the rest of the game, transplanting them into a different context and showcasing a little bit of versatility in how they’re designed.

None of that really makes up for how rouuuuuugh the rest of the game feels to play, though. Entirely because of how action-focused this game is: you're saddled with awful combat from the moment you start, and aside from one brief, merciful segment where the game doesn’t allow you to fight back, it never gets better. Only worse, once it becomes fully clear just how clunky the mechanics are. The original Alone in the Dark, despite suffering from the exact same issue, did well to nearly turn that into a strength, the sense of fight or flight, that question of whether entering combat is actually worth it directly inspiring the games that define survival horror today. It’s… certainly not the best game in the world, sure, but it’s still solid, and still worth taking a look at, both on its own merits and as the progenitor of the genre. Alone in the Dark 2, on the other hand, aside from some quirks, and the novelty of its setting… I feel is best left forgotten. 3/10.

The second Dread X Collection, released a little under three months after the first, brought a couple of iterations to the table. In addition to possessing twelve games instead of ten, Dread X II starts the theme of each anthology following a central theme: in this case, ‘LOVECRAFTING.’ It seems, too, that rather than each game being a playable teaser for a theoretical something more, each game was made to be a standalone experience. That’s not to say that some of the games here could become ‘full games’ — as of writing this, two of them already have — but I do believe that this approach was for the best, and might speak a little as to how this collection, as a whole, feels stronger than its predecessor. Perhaps it’s because the Dread X Collection has found its stride (though I will note that the devs coming back from the first collection, save one, seemed to… maybe put in weaker efforts here), perhaps the move to more complete experiences left the collection to feel more standalone than the first, or perhaps most people involved brought their A-game, but either way, this anthology is a step up from the first, and I easily enjoyed playing two-thirds of the games here.

Of course, another major iteration was the launcher for the individual games in the pack. While the first Dread X was simple enough — click on one of the dev logos, launch their game — Dread X II instead has a whole hub world, where you explore a house, solve puzzles, and obtain keys that then unlock each of the individual games in the pack. It’s made by Lovely Hellplace (who made Shatter one of my favourites from the first collection), and it’s generally pretty neat. I loved going through the house, from the colour palette using hues not generally used in PSX aesthetic throwbacks, to the little details: like the red eyes hidden on the statue, or how you can see rooms from outside that you can’t otherwise access. The puzzles feel fun and varied, with some being solvable from the room you find them in and others requiring you to scour the entire house. The story itself wasn’t something I particularly cared for, and there are maybe a couple stinker puzzles in there, but as a whole exploring the overworld was fun, and it’s really neat that they managed to add a wraparound, and that it doesn’t take away from the main exhibits of the anthology.

Which, speaking of:

SOLIPSIS:
A walking simulator where the value is more in the style than the substance. Gameplay-wise, while it tries to be more than ‘walk from objective to objective’ by adding little puzzles to solve along the way, they’re never more than a quick pitstop before you’re walking to the next point. The story’s… acceptable, but it’s mostly just a vehicle for the incredible vibes the game puts on offer. For something primarily painted with pixels, it’s surprising what’s been achieved here: from the way objects spin as they’re propelled in low gravity, the way blood splatters outward, and how the lighting reveals very little other than the immediate area around you, there’s a lot done here to emulate what it’d be like on the dark side of the moon, and it provides a rather desolate, kind of lonely atmosphere as you trudge across the landscape. I especially like how it transitions from pixel art to FMV as you enter a puzzle section — it does well to illustrate the steady decline of the protagonist’s mental state, and I love the use of the visual filter to make the change between artstyles feel seamless. I… probably wouldn’t rank this above, say, my favourites from the first Dread X Collection — because this game mostly is just about its vibes — but as a quick, memorable ten-minute trip into the moon, I’d definitely recommend this.

THE TOY SHOP:
Nooooooooot impressed. I’ll admit I was a little interested in the beginning, where the constant changing of visual filters (and the dissonance between the rotted, industrial interior to the brightly coloured exterior) implied that something was interfering with the main character’s perception — and through that, the reality around them. Once you're done with the tutorial, though all that gets jettisoned in favour of really drab, low saturation environments, with “puzzles” that consist of figuring out what you’re even meant to interact with and enemies that will hunt you down and kill you unless you sneak past them. 'Sneaking,' in this case, meaning the exact same walk animation, just a bit slower. I’ll admit I was entertained when the game very suddenly became a platformer… but then it becomes a shitty Unity shooter where enemies don’t make any noise until they’re right next to you and attacking (which, like, those particular enemy models come pre-built with footstep noises, why did you take them out?) and it’s even harder to see what’s even happening. It doesn’t even do the service of ending after the (very easily cheesed) boss fight — you go through another section where the game spams enemies at you and then somebody just dumps an entire fucking novel of lore telling you about the themes the game had tried to show during the first segment and also try to tie it into the theme of the anthology. Nooooooot good. It’s kinda funny to see the poor animation and the random, whiplashy directions it goes, but actually playing it? I maybe wouldn’t recommend that.

ANOTHER LATE NIGHT:
This, uh, wasn’t much of anything. It’s like a game that… pretends to be an entirely diegetic experience before slamming you full-on with meta elements, but it forgets that it needs to have something else of actual substance for the meta elements to actually effective. It also forgets that the meta elements also have to be good. And also that the story needs to be in any way coherent. I have no clue what even happened in this game. It’s meant to simulate you doing nothing on your computer at 3 AM, then you read a news article about how the game you’re playing [i]right now[/i] is making people randomly disappear, and then this red voice asks you how you feel about climate change? And then it kind of loops and does the same thing over and over until suddenly it ends? I get what it’s trying to do. I don’t think it does it well at all. Perhaps if there was an actual game the meta stuff was layered over then it…’s maybe on the right track to being effective, but as is… honestly if I’d written up this review any later than I did I’d have worried I’d forget about the entire experience. Maybe that’s the effect. Maybe the game’s reprogramming me to forget it ever existed before it comes time for the sleeper agent in me to wake up. Who knowsssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss?

TO THE END OF DAYS:
From the premise I was expecting this to be, like, a pre-apocalypse walking sim where you watch society fall apart in the wake of impending doom, and then when I started playing the game it told me to “press TAB to collect your thoughts” and I did it and I pulled a shotgun out. What followed was… a fairly fun shooter! It follows the sensibilities of something like Doom (or the many modern ‘boomer shooter’ throwbacks coming out today): there’s a certain arcadey feel as you travel down… what’s mostly a straight line and explode everything you come across with your gun. I especially like how even with only two enemy types you never quite get bored or overly used to combat, with encounters remaining fun and frenetic through the whole playthrough. I… felt like the melee was a bit useless? Other than the one part of the game where you need to break down a door to progress I always just used the gun instead, mostly because you’re encouraged to end fights as fast as possible and most enemies benefit from being fought at range. Other than that… this was a pretty fun 30-40 minute romp with some pretty fun plot beats. A pretty big improvement on the game this developer put into the last Dread X Collection.

ARCADELECTRA:
what if… we went on a date… inside the pt hallway…

SUCKER FOR LOVE:
I’m not particularly a fan of ‘ironic’ visual novels — as their attempts at ‘parody’ are almost exclusively surface level and help contribute to the mainstream Western misconception of what visual novels are actually like — but I think this one sticks the landing. If, mainly, because it actually goes beyond the premise of ‘haha, this is a dating sim where you date [x]!’ and feels that it was baked with something besides detached cynicism. While it does feel a bit too anime-inspired, and while it starts off trying to evoke the worst elements of its parody VN brethren, what follows is a fairly solid puzzle game that seems… more evocative of an Adobe Flash adventure game than anything, in terms of how you interact with the things around you. There are some sequences that are honestly effective, horror-wise, and I like how the game does discuss certain aspects of the Cthulhu Mythos and doesn’t undercut what’s happening despite the dating sim veneer. There are some issues with UI — anything that involved me dragging my mouse felt far more fiddly than intended — but aside from that I felt this was pretty decent, if not as strong as some of the others in this pack. Curious to see how the since-released full game expands on this.

SQUIRREL STAPLER:
Too long for what’s there, which is a shame, because I love this game’s general vibes. From the way things build up over the five in-game days, the charmingly scuffed pngs and models, and the random squirrel “facts” scattered across the wilderness, the game does a good job of emulating the feel of a hunting simulator while also greatly simplifying the mechanics, while also (like other games) made by this developer) possessing an immaculate ability to build this bizarre premise around the player and make it feel like the most normal thing in the world. Unfortunately, as is… I do think this should’ve been three or four days/levels, rather than five? Each day is a considerable time sink, as you scour the huge map for hints of a squirrel, then slllllllowly sneak up on them enough that you can get a clear shot, before you then through the process 4-5 more times until you’re done for that given day. Each of these days feels like it could take 20-30 minutes to complete — more, if you die and have to restart from the beginning — and while the story feels like it takes full advantage of each day to build up a climax, gameplay-wise it doesn’t feel like enough is iterated on for the length to feel justified, with days 3-5 in particular feeling like the same gameplay loop repeated three times in a row — the only difference being the number of dudes that try and chase you down. I still think this game’s fairly solid, just maybe one that wore me down a little bit, and I’m happy that the since-created full release seems to potentially address this, a glance of the steam store page indicating that the new content seems focused on deepening the existing game, rather than making it even longer. Hopefully when I play that I might actually see God.

UNDISCOVERED:
I like the way this game uses its ‘found footage’ angle in a way I haven’t seen before — how there’s both a cameraman and a reporter, and how you effectively play as both at the same time: the reporter in third person, and the cameraman in first person. It’s… done in a way that’s rather motion-sickness-inducing, admittedly, but it’s a fascinating way of controlling the game, and I like how the puzzles and the layout of the temple take advantage of it. Aside from that, I like the dynamic between the two characters, I like… the rather unexpected direction it goes, and I really love how you’re constantly moving forward as you move through the temple: both in terms of how that plays with the control scheme and how it shows you going deeper and deeper in. I really wanna play more of Torple Dook’s games. Hand of Doom was one of my unexpected favourites from the first collection, and while this pack is strong enough that Undiscovered isn’t that high, comparatively, that’s two for two. And a better record than… I think any of the other repeat devs so far.

CHARLOTTE’S EXILE:
I think the effect is a bit lost if you’re not the one playing it — I was streaming this with friends and one of these friends got bored and dropped out almost immediately — but man, if you’re the one in the driver’s seat, this is tense. The short of this is that you have to decode a cypher, and find out which symbols correspond to which letters. You have a book that’ll help you decipher each letter (and you can also use Wordle strats on unfinished words to process-of-elimination what certain letters can be), but there’s something actively converging in on you as you work on your desk, and the only way to get it to back off is take your attention off your objective and stare it down until it decides to leave, like red light green light. It’s genuinely tense: you have to be constantly on guard and can’t be distracted for too long, and it becomes a matter where you know what letter corresponds to a certain sigil, but you can’t see where that symbol even is on the list and you have to look up every couple seconds because you’re genuinely kinda scared about the thing coming in on you. It… loses quite a bit of impact when you find out that it doesn’t kill you if it reaches you, but even then that’s not the main draw: figuring out the code and solving the puzzle at the end still singlehandedly sells the game on its own. Overall really liked this. One of my favourites from the pack.

THE DIVING BELL:
At first I thought this was going to be, like, an Emily is Away-style horror game where you have to manually enter stuff into the keyboard while hiding from anything that comes into the room (almost like another Charlotte’s Exile), but then the game let me walk around the marine base and I realized it was a different — and, admittedly, less unique — beast indeed. I still liked it a good bit, though! This is mostly a mood piece: less about what’s in the base with you, more about how it feels to be all alone inside it. Sound design, the way most of the game is you figuring out how to navigate from one room to another, the short bursts of story that come through the typing segments, how you have to look at the walls to try and avoid whatever thing is looking through the windows... it really nails all the little things it wants to do, and at points genuinely manifests a little bit of fear about what you're going to find in the next room. Maybe not as ambitious in concept as some of the other games here, but it does itself with enough flair and execution that it stands out for the better, regardless.

TOUCHED BY AN OUTER GOD:
My favourite of the pack. So much here for what’s ostensibly only a twenty-minute game. It hits the old-school first-person shooter vibes perfectly: it feels arcadey in the way you chew through the waves of enemies, a bit of a power fantasy in how you can stand out, in the open, against the horde, and be able to go toe to toe against them, and yet still deliver frenetic moments where you’re being overwhelmed and have nowhere to hide. I love the EXP and upgrades system, here: the way the randomization means you’ll never have the same skillset twice — I should know, I managed to die, got sent back to the beginning, and came back with a way different build than I had initially — and how in that lens it almost seems roguelite inspired, with its focus on getting stronger along the way against increasingly more oppressive foes. Also it’s just frankly a little insane that you can just not take any upgrades and completely flip the way you play the game on its head. Also also I like how the game takes into account how many upgrades you’ve taken along the way. There’s just so much here. And even if it were just the base gameplay it’d still be super fun. Says a lot that even with a stronger cohort this is easily the highlight of the pack. Definitely wanna check out what else this dev has done.

THE THING IN THE LAKE:
…Sadly, despite four of the last five games in the pack being four of the top five games in the pack, I did not manage to end the second Dread X Collection strong. This game mostly just seems to be a victim of the short development turnaround. Which is a shame, because I like a lot of what this game’s doing. I enjoy the graphical style: even beyond how this is the same dev as World of Horror, I enjoy the way the top-down, grid exploration game looks, and how it visually harkens back to the Apple II era. I also really like how the same areas you go through as one character get repurposed when you go through them as another character, and the way it all kind of interconnects and comes together in the final chapter. Unfortunately… this is just super broken and unpolished, and not in a particularly funny way. Getting sent back to the beginning of the chapter/having to go through all the cutscenes again is way too brutal a punishment for death, especially given how cheap death generally is, with the hidden traps and unclear objectives in a game where one hit or mistake kills you. It’s glitchy, as well: there’s a point where you have to die to continue the game and I managed to softlock myself because the game told me “mash the keys” and the little movements I did while doing that were enough to move me… out of the way of the guy who was meant to come in and kill me. The monkey that provides the main threat is way too centralising: hearing his roar initially makes the process of getting out alive a total crapshoot, but once you start to get familiar with the game (or turn on easy mode) hearing his roar literally just means you have to stop what you’re doing, wait for ten seconds for him to actually appear, then leave and re-enter when he appears. It got tiring, even beyond how quickly this game kind of tested my patience. Would love to see a fixed and maybe expanded version of this game but as of now… it avoided the bottom three mostly for having promise but man, what a limp way to end off the pack.

FINAL RANKING
Touched By An Outer God > Charlotte's Exile > To The End of Days > The Diving Bell > Undiscovered > Solipsis > Sucker For Love > Squirrel Stapler > The Thing In The Lake > Another Late Night > Arcadelectra > The Toy Shop

There’s not much that can be said about Morphine that can’t be more adequately gathered by seeing it for yourself. It’s one of those bad creepypasta serial killer fan fiction sort of stories, about a high school student named Peter Bundy and how he’s constantly tor society and also Ted, who’s the leader of both the football team and the Rich Club. Again, you kinda have to play it for yourself to see what I mean, but the stilted, amateurish writing, the overwrought way it handles its content, and the… incredible way it ends lend it a really good so-bad-it’s-good quality, where you’re propelled through just to see what silly shit the next part brings (shoutout to how everybody calls Peter ‘Peter Bunny’ when it was, in fact, Peter Rabbit who had a fly up on his nose) (also shoutout to how the game completely misunderstands what morphine does despite the game being named after it). This is… both accentuated and impeded by the gameplay: while the… distinct graphical style and the cheap, ineffective jumpscares lend something to the charm (<3 the cutscene where the dev clearly didn’t want to animate all the people moving so he just turns the camera away to stare out the window), it’s quite rough to actually play, from rather unclear objectives where you have to search for something but you don’t even know what the something even looks like, this… awful lock-picking minigame, and how the game can at points crash and send you back up to twenty minutes. So long as you can stomach that (presuming you’re even the one playing it), though, you… have something special on your hands here. Great for a laugh with friends.

I’m not a loser!

So something I occasionally like to do is look over query pitches for literary agent submissions, both to prepare myself for the day I eventually yeet myself into the slush pile, but particularly because a lot of the minutiae fascinates me. There are a lot of little does and don’ts that can make the difference between getting a rejection or a full submission: a lot of it, in particular, coming down to whether you know your target market and aren’t just some wannabe who doesn’t understand the field. Nowhere is this more evident in the space where you put your comparative titles — the books your book is most like. Generally, you want to make them something in your genre of choice released during the past five years, and also something not as well known. Conversely, doing things like comparing your work to a big book, something released far outside the last couple of years, or even comparing your title to a big-budget film are huge no-nos: all they do is show that you’re not quite well-versed in the genre you’re writing in, and potentially indicate to the agent that you think your work is more groundbreaking than it is. A good first impression can sell a work all by itself, and one of the worst first impressions you can give is that you’re just a genre tourist. You want to know your market, you want to know how your work fits in that market, and you want to show the agent just how well you know all of that while still fitting within the general bounds and structure of a query. It’s a tough balancing act, and it’s loosely fascinating to see where people tend to trip up, and just how tricky it can be to get everything right.

Anyway sorry about that preamble, I know sometimes I tend to go overboard with them, it’s something I’m trying to work on, let’s just get on with talking about the game and-

oh

oh

...

Twelve Minutes is a game where you play as a loving and devoted husband, who one day returns from work to have dinner with his equally loving and devoted wife. The evening goes off without a hitch, before a man claiming to be a police officer knocks on the door and demands you open up. Regardless of whether you let him in or he kicks the door down, he swiftly overpowers the both of you, demands of your wife to tell him where she hid ‘the pocket watch,’ then proceeds to shoot you in the head… sending you back to the beginning of the evening. It soon becomes clear that the husband is trapped in a time loop, and that not even staying alive can break you out. With no other options, you decide your only recourse is to find out why this is happening: using your foreknowledge of events to come to try and manipulate what occurs, all to find out why this cop is after the both of you, what the significance is of the pocket watch he’s asking for, and just what can happen within the space of twelve ten minutes.

I have to admit, it’s a fairly decent hook, and the first act of the game does a decent job of following it up. The apartment the game takes place in is small enough that everything you can interact with is well within reach, and it’s all a matter of experimentation: doing something, seeing the results, figuring out what you can glean from it, and how this information will help you resolve the overall mystery of the loop. I like the voice acting (even if the presence of Hollywood B-listers as opposed to professional voice actors makes me roll my eyes a little bit), and I’m also into how the game handles the consequences of your actions, and showing the disconnect between player and player character. Throughout the game, there’s a knife in the kitchen you are more than capable of using on your wife. Whether you do it for the funsies, or because you want to figure out what you learn by doing that, you stab your wife to death… all while the husband is freaking out, apologizing, and is absolutely horrified by doing this even beyond that loop. It immediately kind of brings in the reality of what you’re making your character do: taking something the player likely did out of curiosity and using it to make the atmosphere entirely, intentionally uncomfortable. As a whole, the game starts out well, with the premise immediately hooking you in and the initial stages providing a decent amount of options and things to do…

…only, as the game goes on, for you to find out that most of this game’s interactivity ends with what you already have. At the start of the game, the three things you can do in the apartment are to drug your wife’s drink with sleeping pills, hide in the closet so that the cop doesn’t know you’re there, and, if you do both together, you automatically indispose the cop when he tries to use a lightswitch. By the end of the game, these are still the only things you can do in the apartment. Most of what you actually do is navigate dialogue trees with your wife. And show your wife items to unlock more dialogue trees with her. And then do dialogue trees with your wife so you can then do dialogue trees with the cop. And this is all dialogue you’ve likely seen before and you are then going to see again all because maybe at the end of one diatribe there’ll be a new option you can pick, or that you didn’t pick before, which might mean something going forward. You might think ‘oh, can’t you just skip dialogue? that’s a feature that’s in basically every story-based game to sift through the tedium of seeing the same dialogue over and over again,’ but that’s not the case here. In Twelve Minutes you can skip through some dialogue… one line at a time, as if you’re going through a Dark Souls vendor’s dialogue to try and access their wares. And if you’re not actively in a cutscene with them — if you’re allowed to walk around the apartment while they have their dialogue — you can’t skip through it. You have to wait there, minute by minute, line by line, until you have the opportunity to step in and have something new happen. If you’re looking at your phone, or if you accidentally select the wrong option… whoops, loop ruined, go back to start, go through everything, manually, again.

Which, frankly, if the comp titles being intro-level Film Studies picks (which, like, no shade, I like two of those movies a lot, but also wow those are some basic bitch answers) wasn’t indication enough, the lack of polish and how… dated it feels, mechanically, really go to show how little it knows the genre it’s in. Even beyond the oodles of dialogue you oftentimes can’t skip through, the game’s so finicky and overcomplicated even when, on paper, it’s straightforward. At the beginning of the game, when I was meant to just mill around the house and have a romantic moment with my wife, I accidentally put my plate of food in my inventory when I tried to eat it, singlehandedly pissing my wife off enough to call the whole evening off. At one point, you’re directed to show the cop a picture on the fridge, but it’s not good enough to show the cop the picture on the fridge, you must engage him in dialogue trees that will tell him about the picture on the fridge, he’ll go and check it… only for the loop to be ruined because the picture on the fridge isn’t there. Because the picture of the fridge is currently in your inventory. Because you needed to show him the picture on the fridge so you then tried to show him the picture on the fridge. This then forces you to do the whole process again because, for a game partially about messing about in a time loop, and a genre/medium all about cause-and-effect and the consequences of your actions, this game is so rigid. There’s only one way you’re ever allowed to do things, and it’s usually the way where you find the item you need… then do nothing with it, instead just bringing it up in a dialogue tree down the line. For an adventure game, one that places a lot of emphasis on walking around and finding things in your apartment, it feels like the adventure gameplay runs contrary to what the game actually wants to be. Like it wants to be a visual novel but the dev is too busy looking up /r/movies ‘what’s your favourite psychological thriller?’ to realize that interactive media is more than just anime dating sims.

Because, like, if all the game wants me to do is go through the same dialogue trees over and over, then… why is this an adventure game? What’s the point of having to interface with your inventory and have to go through the whole twelve-step, two-minute process of drugging my wife over and over again at the start of near-every loop? What’s the point of being able to walk around my apartment during dialogue if I have to wait right where I am to do the next thing I need to do? It’d certainly be more streamlined if the game was only about navigating the dialogue trees it so wants me to navigate at the cost of anything else. And the game would certainly feel more playable if it had… any of the quality-of-life features that virtually every visual novel has by default. Why sit around, waiting for the game to run through dialogue it ran through before to maybe reach something new when I could just… skip to the next branching point, or the next bit of dialogue I haven’t already seen? When the last part of the game essentially boils down to “do this complicated and finicky setup to have a heart-to-heart with the cop, have an entire five minutes worth of conversation, then go back to step one, do the entire setup again, do the entire conversation again just to use something you learned during the first conversation to learn something new the next conversation just to go back and do that entire, unskippable process two more times…” why do that when you could just quicksave, or use a flowchart to go right to the point where things actually diverge? It’d certainly be much smoother to go through. And it’d definitely feel more of a match in terms of genre than the adventure game it currently is, where every convention it uses (inventory puzzles, the need for the game to be running in real-time) directly works against the experience and makes it feel much worse to play.

…I’m aware that this game’s ending is… rather disliked, and a big sticking point for most people I’ve seen talk about this game, but on my end… it was mostly just kind of whatever — its attempts to feel fucked-up and disturbing feel rather vanilla, honestly. And any chance for it to have an impact vanished when, instead of focusing on the immediate reactions of the characters, it just zooms into incomprehensible mind-palace shit and also you can fuck the whole segment up and you have to go out of your way to get back in and try again. Quite frankly, it feels like more of a smokescreen for what I felt were the game’s actual problems: how rigid, tedious, and finicky the game was on its way up to that point. There’s certainly initial promise — the setup works well as a narrative hook, and the initial stages are at least fun to experiment with until the game starts to show its warts — but when you can find ren;py VNs on itch.io and Steam with more polish and quality of life than this publisher-backed project… it becomes loosely clear this game thinks it’s more groundbreaking than it is. Comparative titles aren’t just buzzwords that your work might vaguely be like, they’re works you drew from, that were important in the process of constructing your own, and show to those with a more discerning eye that you’re not just a faker looking for prestige. And perhaps, if more time was spent researching the field rather than just throwing random psychological thrillers into your elevator pitch, this game could’ve been one of the many entries of the canon of time loop interactive narrative, rather than some brazen attempt at feeling like an innovation that it isn’t. 3/10.

This is much buggier and less polished than… a good portion of the Nitrome games I’ve played up to this point. Sometimes jumping on enemies damages you instead of them. Sometimes enemies will remove all your health instead of just one-third. Sometimes things will clip through the walls and die instantly. Sometimes there’ll be a wall or a floor when there shouldn’t be. It’s still playable — I didn’t have to finagle much to be able to beat the game — but it’s less functional than it should be, which is a shame, because otherwise I generally like this! I love the dual world of the black and white, both in terms of how it looks and how it functions: how what could be a moving platform for one character can be a moving tunnel for another, and how it provides a really simple reference point for what one character can interact with and what that same character can’t. The game does a really good job at dispersing mechanics throughout the game, providing a steady flow of new enemies and puzzle elements as you progress, never making you get sick of them, but also never letting you forget about them. This also extends to level types, too: levels where interacting with both of the worlds is integral to get both characters through, juxtaposed to levels where each character must simply get themselves to the end. It’s decently cerebral, too: there were levels I looked at and didn’t quite know what to do, but then as I began to work out the solution it felt so satisfying to put it all together. Ultimately… it’s neat both visually and mechanically, it doesn’t take too long to play, and so long as you’re willing to deal with a bit of bugginess then there’s a really solid puzzle platformer to be found here.

Nitrome’s second endless game! And the first endless game to not go missing for three years! You play as a wizard, defending his castle by drawing sigils to pop the balloons your invaders are dropping in with. It starts simple, but like most endless games it quickly ramps up in difficulty, with invaders falling faster, and requiring more balloons to be popped before you can finally be rid of them. It’s simple, but it works, and while there are certainly some functionality issues — sometimes it thinks you drew a circle when you actually drew a V, enemies will drop in covering up other enemies which makes it much harder to see what their balloons are, one particular sigil takes longer to draw than the game will otherwise let you so you have to draw it shitty or otherwise it won’t count — it’s still fairly decent. Not something I’ll likely go back to afterwards, but I have to admit, it kept me replaying it, actively attempting to top my high score a little bit past the point where I’d otherwise gotten enough of an impression to stop, which probably means this game succeeded in what it was designed to do. I know there’s a sequel/remake/whatever the term is to this one in the far, far future of 2015, once they’d moved on to making phone games. I might check that out at some point. I’m curious to see how exactly they iterated on this, especially given the eight-year gap.

Cute! A bit confusing at first — I reset the game several times because one of the computer parts seemed to not work even if replaced but that might’ve been me not quite understanding the differences between the parts — but once I figured out how everything worked I got really into this. There’s a lot it wants to say, about the interconnectivity between the physical and online worlds, about all the weirdos in the online communities you join, and the ouroborus of online gaming — the consumption of content for consumption’s sake, and the question of when exactly something stops being fulfilling — and it talks about it well and it talks about it in an understated way: maybe pushing you in a certain direction, but letting the player come to their own conclusions about what exactly they want to take from it. I liked the way the game navigates its two worlds, and how it manages to do two separate things with the exact same engine and gameplay conceits between them. Specifically I kind of liked the scavengey explorer gameplay of the raccoon world, and I like how the game-within-a-game really nails that… empty, yet still addicting feel that’s clearly maybe not actually fun, yet it hits the right spots in your brain hard enough to make you want to keep playing despite the uneven returns. Overall this was neat! It’s short, and once you clue into how the gameplay in the raccoon world works there’s some really neat stuff it has to say. Would recommend this!

Right before I played this again, I was right ready to bask in my fond memories of playing and replaying the game to destroy as much of the level around me as possible. Having now refreshed myself… I think most of said memories are actually of Toxic II, but that’s not to say this isn’t fairly solid. It plays mostly like a 2D platformer, where your goal is to reach the exit portal, but the core mechanic is that by pressing the space bar you can drop a bomb at your feet, which will explode, after a time, destroying the walls and floor in a small radius around it, creating a way through otherwise unpassable barriers and fighting back against enemies. There are different types of bombs, which all have different side effects, but the game gives all of them to you immediately, robbing the player of things to learn and new mechanics to play with as they all go along. This mechanic also makes the game feel… rather slow: not only does the game give you way more time than you’re ever going to need for the bomb to detonate, it'll oftentimes take several bombs to actually get through an area, causing a rather tedious loop of walking to an area, laying a bomb, walking out of its radius, then repeating the process once the explosion happens and you’re sure the hitbox is no longer active.

On the other hand, though, there’s… surprisingly little rigidity in terms of how the player is allowed to approach the level. While there’s usually a given path to the end, you’re usually given the option to stray off that path however you like, provided the tools you require are in the level. You could take the path to the left, and deal with the clump of enemies that'll get in your way over there, or you could instead use your Throw Bomb on the ceiling above you, bypassing the tricky bit and reaching the end early. It’s freeform in how fast it lets the player do the level, rewarding both outside-the-box thinking and platformer know-how — an approach, I believe, is expounded and further iterated on in the followup released a year later. And while this game… certainly has the basics down, I have a feeling once I reach the sequel it’ll be clear how much this is mostly… a proof of concept. Not bad, on its own, but definitely a bit obsolete when put side to side with what it later would allow Nitrome to do.

What I tend to like about puzzle games like this is how they can often be a glimpse into the thought process of their developers, where you have to get to know them and think on their wavelength if you want to get through, and IMO this game excels at that. Its particular focus is on code-cracking — finding keywords in a sea of gibberish and using that to decrypt and access further puzzles — and all the different little languages that have historically been used to hide secret messages. I really like how the game always manages to iterate in how it applies codes to crack: for how… surprisingly large the game is it almost never repeats itself, each puzzle feeling new and at some points incredibly creative (to the point where I absolutely don’t wanna give examples since I’d be actively spoiling the game if I did so). I’m also really into how the game manages to wrap around itself in terms of progression: sometimes it takes a Metroidvania-ish approach and requires you to reach a later puzzle before you can solve an earlier puzzle. Sometimes an earlier puzzle becomes a tool in itself to solve a later puzzle. Sometimes you think you’re solving something else entirely and then when you uncover part of a picture you’ll see the symbol that signifies you have to translate something into binary and you’ll sit there, for a second, as what you have to actually do all begins to click together in your head. Most of all, it’s surprisingly variant: various different skills are tested, you’re not going to eat shit the whole game just because you’re bad at one particular thing. Not to mention how low-key great the graphic design is (I love how when you start up the game the circle behind the puzzle select screen piecharts your completion percentage) and how neat it is to see the story slowly uncover through all the emails you read and files you decrypt.

I will say, though, I’m nooooot a big fan of the in-built hint system, mostly because of its at-a-lot-of-points questionable worth compared to how much time you have to sink into it. The hint system works on a timer: if you want a hint for a puzzle, you have to wait a minute to get it. A second hint, two minutes. Your last hint, three. It’s an interesting approach, and I like how it theoretically encourages you to give something else a try while you wait for the game to drop you a hint, but the quality of the hints you get varies wildly. Sometimes they were the mental kick I needed to solve the puzzle, but a lot of the time I had to wait up to five minutes to be told about the part of the puzzle I’d already figured out. This… bottlenecks you hard, especially when there’s a puzzle where you’re immediately like ???: you spend a lot of time staring at the game, trying to see if you can brute force your brain into figuring it out, while the timer ticks down endlessly for a hint you don’t even know will actually help. This is compounded by how the game also thinks, sometimes, that what it tells you is more comprehensive than it actually is. There’s one puzzle in the first quadrant where you have to translate every o and i in an email to part of a code, and, like… does that include capital letters? Does it include letters in the subject/date of the email? I put so many different variations in and not once got the actually correct answer, and honestly I still don’t know what exactly counted, or whether there was an o or i I didn’t see. There were a lot of puzzles like that, and, consequently, a lot of puzzles where I needed outside help to solve because what the game gave me didn’t feel like enough.

But aside from that, I liked this! It was fun, cerebral, surprisingly meaty, and it was honestly really cool to learn all about cyphers, and, consequently, how to solve some of the more common kinds. I recommend it! Juuuuust don’t play it all in one day. It’ll make your head spin. Literally. I marathoned it on and off for like eight hours and now wherever I look my vision spirals in on itself. It kinda hurts

LIMBO starts with you playing as a small child wandering through a forest, braving the many horrors within in pursuit of a mysterious something. After playing the dev’s later effort, INSIDE, going through this game was… interesting, mostly in terms of what seems similar and what the dev team seemed to learn in the years succeeding. For a horror platformer, I wouldn’t really say there’s much of an atmosphere: as opposed to less tangible things sound or music design, most of what you encounter here is rather concrete, from the simple yet evocative enemy designs and the rather brutal death animations that manage to shine even if the monochrome, silhouetted artstyle does a bit more harm than good. Most interesting is how the game seems to draw a bit from masocore performers. You’re expected to die a lot, and generally not for fair reasons. From random traps in the ground, puzzles and mechanics you can only intuit in the heat of the moment, to points where you don’t know what exactly is going to happen, one thing is made clear: this world is cruel, and it’s mostly cruel for cruelty’s sake. It’s certainly… bleak — and there’s never any point of relative respite in the middle of it — but it does provide a… relatively unique thematic throughline, one that characterizes the game even in lack of a more abstract atmosphere. I wouldn’t necessarily say that I liked this as much as INSIDE, but as one of the first post-Braid-artsy-indie-puzzle-platformers, it’s fairly solid, and an interesting look at what the landscape of the early indie game boom was li- wait what do you mean there’s still two thirds of the game left to go?

…

…

LIMBO is a game that outstays its welcome. Before I played it, most of what I’d seen of it — most of the gameplay footage in YouTube videos mentioning the game, however brief — was content that was mostly in the first hour. I was under the impression that it mostly took place in the forest, that the giant spider you ran from was a threat that followed you throughout the game, and that finally managing to turn the tables on it represented the climax, the end of the game soon to follow. In one way, I was right: the game as I knew it did end, and the remaining two hours felt like something else entirely.

The ‘horror’ aspect of the game disappears almost completely — perhaps a consequence of how it was only held up by the more concrete aspects mentioned above: when those are gone, there’s nothing really there to keep the mood up, or really make the game feel like anything. While there’s the occasional bit of grotesque design, or a slightly gnarly death animation, it feels like the game drops a lot of whatever thematic material it had to become a more generic puzzle platformer where you push boxes onto switches to open the door forward. New mechanics are introduced, but it feels like none of them really interact with each other or the general setting: you just suddenly come across machines that change the direction gravity operates and oops that’s the core game mechanic now. The masocore elements still exist within the platforming and some of the puzzles — this is a game where you’re expected to die a lot — but it never feels particularly charming or meaningful. While other 'impossible' platformers of the time, such as I Wanna Be The Guy or Cat Mario, were often defined by having a sense of humour in how they chose to pull the rug under the player, intending to bait a reaction or at least let the player laugh with the game, LIMBO doesn't particularly treat your deaths with any gravitas: you fail, you wait through the wayyy long death animation, then you reload at the checkpoint. No real surprise, no real reaction other than 'okay, well, I'm dead now.' I guess ‘things are dark and bleak and also fuck you you die’ is at least a loose theme, but on its own, it doesn’t feel like enough. And without anything to really back it up beyond the direct game elements, it doesn’t feel like it coalesces into anything, just a loosely unpleasant undertone that forgot to leave with everything else the game had going for it.

Which is not to the game’s benefit, because rather than just becoming a rather standard puzzle platformer, it instead becomes a rather standard puzzle platformer which is really, really frustrating to play. This mostly comes down to what feels like a disconnect between these two separate things, where progress is determined by you figuring out all the moving pieces and solving the puzzle to find a way forward, while the masocore elements try to make that as obtuse and annoying as possible. It’s like having a jigsaw in front of you except your cat or your baby brother keeps taking pieces from you and hiding them around the house: you’re often missing something that’s the key to actually making progress, and the game makes a point at actively hiding that element from you. Say, a puzzle where it turns out you need a second box, when that second box is in a completely different area, past an enemy, in a place that does not seem like there’s anything there and in a game where you’ve never before this point had to go left instead of right.

Not to mention how tight and uncompromising a lot of the timings and solutions are. There’s a puzzle where you have to use a minecart to get onto a rail track, which you have to run across before the minecart presses a button that electrifies the ground below you. There is no wiggle room: you have to find the exact place on the slope to jump onto the minecart, both high enough on the slope so that you have enough time to run across the rail, but low enough that it doesn’t pick up speed and hit the button prematurely. The track is long enough that anything other than the exact sweet-spot means you don’t get there in time and you die. There’s no rubric to really tell where the exact place to put it is, whether a failure was because you put it too high or too low, you just have to brute force the puzzle, dying over and over again, until you somehow intuit or guess what you actually have to do. And after four or five puzzles beforehand that are exactly like that, it’s hard not to get sick of it.

Which, like, maybe that’s what the game intends. Maybe it’s meant to feel bleak and empty in a rather charmless way. Which, like, okay, sure, but that doesn’t then make it all that fun or interesting to interface with. Nor does it make what’s there… feel particularly deep or meaningful. Which is a shame, because the first hour still holds up. Even if it didn’t quite compare to INSIDE, it was a decently effective little platformer that worked well to blend horror with masocore elements to create something rather evocative. What follows feels much less interesting, much less purposeful, and something that I frankly got tired of playing long before I reached the end. 4/10.

At last, a Nitrome game that more or less runs exactly as it used to. It’s a bit slower than what it used to be (and you’re going to have to exit to the menu at the end of every level if you don’t want it to run even slower) but… other than that, this was a mostly smooth experience. You play as a Venus fly trap trying to escape a greenhouse, and with your mouse you can extend your head to wherever you click, moving you if you bite the ground, and eating whatever critters your mouth manages to connect with. It’s a unique mechanic, and it was fun trying to crawl up along surfaces by biting into them. It’s simple, and remains mostly as such: with later levels, if not challenging your mastery, at least test your proficiency with the mechanics. I… wish the hitboxes in this game were a little better — so many times where I was hit by something not even touching me, or whiffed on something when I clearly hit it — and I wish there was more use for the “your maximum neck length increases with everything you eat” mechanic (as most levels are either clearable with the minimum neck length, or immediately throw a bunch of bugs at you for the sake of progression), but, those problems aside, this was solid! I don’t think it’ll necessarily reach the heights of some of the games (and, particularly, the subsequent platformers like this one) yet to come, but of what I've gone through, I’d feel comfortable saying this is the best so far.

Ooooookay so this is two-for-two where the HTML5 port has just been… straight-up inferior to just emulating it on Flash. In this case, what forced me to switch was… just straight-up horrendous framerate. I kept up at it for… the first quarter of the game? until I hit a point where the framerate impacted my ability to see what I was doing. I then switched to the Flash version, which also had some issues, though at least they… in a way kind of added to the gameplay experience? The speed (and ground traction) of my character seemed to vary wildly depending on what my graphics settings were — if they were set to high, the hedgehog would slide at mach speed off of platforms to the point where at points I straight up clipped into the walls; if they were set to low, he’d slow his roll, which sometimes helped to ease myself down an obstacle, but sometimes cause me to really need to tilt the level if I wanted him to move. It was honestly a bit of fun figuring out which graphics setting worked best for which level, even if the process of doing so once caused me to misclick and reset all my progress. It’s unintentional, but it's a degree of customizability that… honestly added a bit of an extra dimension to gameplay: figuring out what sort of control scheme I wanted for the given challenge ahead. Sadly this doesn’t… entirely preserve the game — some platforms/obstacles don’t function as intended, some later levels are just kind of awful when you’re not dealing with the intended physics/framerate, and those levels… do tank the game a bit, enough to maybe make me question whether this is one of the games I’d recommend.

Which is a shame, because for something I had no impression of going in… this is pretty solid! It plays… like a table maze except not top-down. You play by tilting the level in a circular motion, causing the little hedgehog guy within to move along, as flat surfaces become slopes, things that are vertical become horizontal, and at some points you have to flick/move very fast to fling the guy through the air. There’s a difficulty curve that does a good job of building up and testing the player’s skills, and the game drops particular obstacles in and out so that while you never forget them when they turn up again you never quite get sick of them, either. It’s also fascinating to see where elements of level design seem reminiscent of other Nitrome games, either reused from games before (there are one or two levels here that seem ported from Hot Air), or design concepts that I know get revisited in future games. There are some stinker levels, some parts of the game where you get killed before you even know what the obstacle of the level is, and… my recommendation for this one is definitely more conditional given how much the emulation fucks with some of the later levels, but aside from that… yeah, I liked this! It’s a cute little platformer with a neat mechanic which might not stick in my memory forever but was pretty nice for the time I played it. Would recommend.

The first Nitrome game so far to be a mostly smooth experience! Or, well, as smooth as this game can be. Chick Flick is a game where little birds fall from the sky, and it’s up to you to move a trampoline across the ground to bounce them back up into the nest. Taking too long to help one bird will create more birds you have to deal with, and there are a bunch of random variables, such as different types of birds falling from the sky, and different stage hazards which you have to play around. This game is… finicky, and often feels more based on luck than precision. You never quite have the fine control to really bounce anything in a specific direction, and a lot of the stage hazards in later stages make figuring out what the prime position to be in is even harder. Most of the different birds or said stage hazards are explicitly handicaps you have to power through (like egg birds, who you literally cannot get into the nest before another bird spawns in) as opposed to conundrums you can work around, and you never know when or where another bird will drop in. And if you’re on one side of the screen, and a bird drops in on another, there’s literally nothing you can do: the bird hits the ground and you lose a life before you can race across and catch it. There are positives: the music’s nice, the final stage’s gimmick is clever in how it can both hinder and help you depending on application, and it does feel good when you’re able to line everything up and get a shot into the hoop, but as a whole… with how finicky everything feels and with how winning is more you getting lucky more than you being able to strategize around the random elements this game… honestly felt more annoying to play than anything.

According to an interview, Hot Air — Nitrome’s first game — was allegedly inspired by Lemmings, with one of the developers getting the inspiration by using the fan tool in Lemmings 2. Sandman, their second game, takes its inspiration more directly. Your goal is to guide a bunch of sleepwalkers through fifteen levels by sprinkling sand on the ground, either to force them to change direction and stop them from killing themselves, or to change the terrain to allow them to scale walls. It’s simple, and… unlike Hot Air, mostly remains that way. While new obstacles, like instant death water, or evil sleepwalkers who will kill your sleepwalkers on touch, are added in as the game progresses, there’s no real spike in difficulty, and remains fairly basic from beginning to end. This is… more to its detriment, than anything. While there are moments of tension where you spend the entire level thinking on your feet, and levels where you have to figure out where exactly you’re meant to place your sand, the game, otherwise, is overtly willing to take it slow, trapping your sleepwalkers in one area while the player can do everything they need to beat the level. It’s fun, certainly, and there’s a decent cerebral loop in terms of figuring out what you’re meant to do, but as a whole… this is a game that really wears its particular influences on its sleeves, and while decent, doesn’t particularly stand out on its own because of it.

As a side note, as one of the (few) games so far ported out of Flash, I thought “okay, so I won’t run into anything that stops me from beating the game like in Hot Air,” I started it in HTML5 and for the most part that was true… but then I reached the end of level eight and the Sleepwalkers weren’t inclined to go through the gate, no matter what I did. I tried restarting to see if it was a one-off, and (after fighting through another glitch where your additions to the terrain stick around even after a restart) found that I couldn't actually beat the level. I was ready to call it a day and a DNF, but… then I returned to the Flash version and found that neither of those glitches were in effect there. While there did seem to be lag in how much sand you could put down, and while there seemed to be a different glitch where sometimes the Sleepwalkers would just ignore you when you did the thing that’s meant to change the direction they go in… the emulated version on flash runs better than the HTML 5 port? Maybe there are bugs only present in this particular port, but… I wouldn’t lie in that this might not bode well for the future…

Hot Air is a game where you use your mouse cursor as a fan to guide a hot air balloon to the end of a level. There are optional stars to collect which unlock bonus levels, but the player has to be both careful and precise, for any wall, floor, or obstacle pops the balloon in one hit, forcing the player to restart the whole level. It seems simple enough, but it’s… deceptively difficult, without much of a curve to ease the player in. While the first level mostly functions as a tutorial — only having to make sure you don’t ram yourself into the walls trying to collect the star — the second level is absolutely brutal, requiring incredibly precise timing and understanding of how the game handles momentum should the player want to beat it, let alone collect all the stars. The third level, pictured here, eases up considerably, but getting the bonus star then requires you to effectively go through the level three times without making a single mistake. With levels four and five, I was… pretty quickly humbled, and I realized that what I thought might be a quick pitstop and a gentle easing into this whole “beat every Nitrome game” project was actually going to require serious effort and time on my part if I wanted to go through with it.

…Or not. Because when I reached level six, and got immediately walled without even escaping the beginning area, I was like “okay this is ridiculous how am I meant to do this?” I looked up a video walkthrough, and then found out… I was dealing with pretty severe lag. There seems to be an issue with the emulated version I'm using where you can't fly smoothly nor can you reach your intended full speed… while obstacles, such as the rising lava in level five, or the opening and closing mouth of level six, are not bound by these same issues. This requires the player to be reflexive and precise in their movements, yet robs them of the tools to make that possible. I tried to see whether level six was still beatable despite those constraints (like level five, in particular, was) but to no avail: I just was not able to pass the first of the levels' many obstacles, let alone collect any of the stars. It's a shame, because I was genuinely enjoying the challenge up to a point, not to mention how frustrating it felt to have to give up on the very first game of the project, but I guess there's not much of an option. I actually came back to this a few months later and played it directly on Flash Player to see whether I could do it there, only to find... the exact same problem: your character for some reason moves way slower than they should, they can't build up the speed to get past obstacles. Maybe if the promised HTML5 port for this fixes that problem, I could pull the pin out of this, but, uh, given the general quality of the HTML5 ports I played I'm not especially holding out hope. I think the balloon has burst, by this point.