So... the story in Sheepy is an absolute trainwreck. At times it almost feels like it was written by AI; all the tropes of a classic 'cute character in a scary world' Metroidvania are here, but nothing seems to really fit together. The game puts you in one of the traditional locations for this genre (abandoned factory, ancient ruins, etc) and scatters tapes all around for you to listen to to get you interested in the lore and the world, but then just moves on to the next set piece location before anything is resolved or explained. Aside from the most basic of elemental story beats, I pretty much had no clue what was going on in the story here and I'm fairly sure no coherent story exists.

In every other way though... Sheepy is nearly perfect. The atmosphere is great throughout, the visuals and sound design are absolutely fantastic and the gameplay, while simplistic, strikes a near perfect balance between challenge and frustration. I did find the first two bosses a little bit lacklustre, but the game more than paid off for these with its final boss which was just epic in terms of scope and spectacle.

But in general yes, this game has everything you'd want from something like this. It's got a good variety of Metroidvania-style powers, hidden collectables, timed challenges, speed challenges... all within a game with a run time of ~1 hour at most. I think if the game had been longer there would have been more time to flesh out the plot and setting in a more sensical way, but aside from that it's remarkable how the game manages to cram in all its content into such a short time without feeling overcrowded. That short runtime has led to a game where everything has clearly been meticulously hand-crafted down to the pixel, and it's all just fantastic.

So yes, hearty recommend from me on this one; this is almost certainly the best free game I've ever played, and frankly I'm baffled that it is free in the first place. It is a shame about the underdeveloped setting, because in my opinion that is all that stands between this and a bite-sized Hollow Knight. But worldbuilding and lore is a big part of why I play games like this so I do have to dock some marks on that front. Still, otherwise an all-round excellent and well-polished little game, and would probably score up in my top 10 or so games in its genre.

This game is... very pretentious, but it's absolutely my kinda thing. The closest thing I could compare it to would be Scorn; you spend your time exploring this vast, uncaring and alien landscape and, while there are occasional puzzles or platforming sections, the main reason you are here is just to drink it all in. Again like Scorn there is no real story to grasp on to, it's more about vibes and a nonspecific sense of dread, and the experience comes off more as an art exhibit than a video game (see also Yume Nikki and, for a bad example, Agony). In my experience games like this can feel a little aimless or content-poor in terms of actual gameplay challenge, and I get why many would find this boring... but it turns out these kinda of game are absolutely my kind of shit.

Naissance is absolutely beautiful and, despite basically nothing happening in the whole game, utterly terrifying. The use of massive scale, harsh lighting and pitch blackness make you feel like an insignificant mote of dust drifting through a world that wasn't made for you, doesn't care about you and mostly doesn't even realise you exist. The use of darkness in particular is very bold... parts of this game are so dark that it's extremely difficult to see anything, which sounds like terrible design on paper, but it really hammers home the feeling that this is not a world that was built for you to explore. Later on in the game it feels like the world 'notices' you somehow and begins to fuck with the player character more directly and... well, it lost me a bit there, and I much preferred the feeling of loneliness and lostness that came in the earlier part of the game.

Overall, though, I did find this game weaker than Scorn. The art direction in NaissanceE is, don't get me wrong, austerely beautiful... breathtaking, in fact. But it just can't compete with the overwhelming detail of the world in Scorn. There are also a few parts of NaissanceE where it opens up into a quasi-open world, and honestly these feel pretty aimless (and not the good 'aimlessness' of the explorative parts of the game). The area I'm going to refer to as 'the Desert' is the worst example of this; just a huge area with a few random points of interest in it. Each of those landmarks is interesting in its own way, but they all come across as just randomly placed set pieces that were dumped here because the devs couldn't figure out where to put them. Also... yeah, won't lie, that ending made me roll my eyes pretty hard.

Still, the overall experience I had with NaissanceE was a strong one. I particularly liked the more maze-like areas where it felt like there were dozens of different paths you could take; I'm sure that video game magic ensures you get to where you need to go anyway, but the illusion of choice really helped sell this game as an exploration of an unfathomably large place in a way that few other games can. Definitely recommend trying it if it's your kind of thing (it's free!), but do be prepared to bounce off as this is definitely not everyone's cup of tea.

At the end of the day, this is a very simple game and it mostly does what it sets out to do well enough. It doesn't have the purity and streamlined design of something like Geometry Dash, and yet I found Bit.Trip to be a much more enjoyable experience than Geometry Dash because it doesn't feel the need to get unplayably difficult right off the bat. On the surface, Bit.Trip feels like a pretty mid game; nothing too bad, nothing too good, it's all just... adequate.

That's not to say I didn't have any more significant issues with this game because I definitely did, but they mostly ended up being rather specific. While I found the level design to be quite good (decent use of repetition without becoming stale, interesting mix of obstacles, etc), the overarching difficulty game is rocky to say the least. In particular, level 1-11 is an absolute nightmare. It's by no means the hardest level in the game (although it is by far the longest), but placing it at the end of an introductory world filled with pretty trivial levels for the most part is just sadistic, and led to one of the most abrupt difficulty spikes I think I've experienced in gaming.

I also don't really get on with the aesthetics in this game, or how they impact the moment-to-moment gameplay. For starters, the game is so heavily pixelated that I had to learn how to read the HUD, because none of the characters looked like the letters or numbers they were supposed to. I also don't like how similar the colour pallets for the foreground and background are in large parts of this game, as it can make it very difficult to make a snap judgement as to what is a hazard in some of the more challenging levels. In fact the use of colour in general is overall poor in this game. It feels like colour could be used to convey player information (e.g. all kickable objects could be blue, all objects that need ducking under could be black, etc); the game does do this, but only with 2 or 3 of the many types of obstacle, and most of the time working out the correct way to deal with a hazard is left to educated guesswork or trial and error.

The most heinous misuse of colour though has to be with the little squares you have to use the shield for in World 3, which are coloured the same as the gold bars you are supposed to collect. The game spends 2 whole worlds conditioning you that hitting gold objects is a good thing, only to sadistically 180 at the last moment. When I'm in a flow state in this game my lizard brain is 100% in control, and it simply cannot differentiate between two small identically coloured objects in the 1/10th of a second you have to process information in the more hectic parts of this game. Honestly this feels like a deliberate choice to fuck over the player, and it's not the only one; Bit.Trip Runner also loves to have obstacles fly at you from off-screen so unreasonably quickly that the only way to deal with them is to just learn exactly where they all are. It really goes against the sense of flow and rhythm that this game can create at it's best; I think the 'haha fuck the player' attitude present in many of the early indie titles is nearly always a mis-step, but especially in a game like this where it seems completely antithetical to its specific brand of gameplay.

I think the game also hates anyone who would be interested in 100%ing it as well. If you collect all the aforementioned gold bars in a level you get a 'perfect' score for that level and a little badge for it, which is a nice reward for opting in to a bit of extra challenge. But you also get a bonus level. These bonus levels are obtusely long, deliberately awkward and incredibly uninteresting... and you need to get all the gold bars in the bonus level too to get a true perfect score on a given level and an even nicer badge. Missed one or two gold bars in the bonus level? Well then you'd better go get a perfect score in the original level again, because that's the only way to have a second go at the bonus. In a game that so heavily relies on trial and error, having such a hurdle be in the way of retrying content is just agony, and makes any effort you put into getting regular perfect scores feel completely wasted.

All this makes it sound like I hated Bit.Trip Runner, but I really didn't. At times I did (1-11 can continue to go fuck itself), but my issues with the game were mostly surmountable roadblocks rather than persistent problems. Once I learned to give up on 100% and treat this more as a memorisation game than a reactive one, I started to get a lot more out of this. I am glad to have played it, but I do think this is still one I'm going to remember more for its failings than for its successes.