rylirk
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.
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.
2014
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.
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.
2010
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.
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.
I didn't get far into this before giving up, and I'm blaming that on the control scheme. The Steam port is actually unplayable on controller: the camera immediately pans hard to the top-left for no reason and Giana likes to have switching fits where she toggles about once a frame for a few seconds every now and again, even if I'm not touching the controller. Even if it had worked, the control layout is baffling (why the fuck is pause bound to R1!?), and the keyboard controls are equally horrendous and of course cannot be changed. I don't know if maybe this would work better with a different controller or if something is going wrong due to the sheer age of the game but either way, from what I've played, I really don't think I'm missing much by giving up on it.
The visuals are... let's say 'technically impressive' given when this game came out. Considering this game came out in 2012 it really doesn't look that old, and its aesthetics have aged remarkably well. Those aesthetics are, however, absolutely hideous. Like, the game definitely has a style to it, but it just looks so damned ugly... the colour pallette is all over the place, nothing really gels together ('because dream' I guess) and the general creature and object design is bloated and deliberately gross. I can appreciate a lot of effort has gone into this in terms of the visuals, but in my opinion this game looks worse than Cruelty Squad.
The level design also seems to be a big nothing-burger as well. Again, I only got to near the end of the first world, so maybe it all ramps up and becomes a gameplay masterpiece later on. But from what I played, Giana Sisters is based on a solid core concept, likes introducing new puzzle pieces and ways to interact with the environment and then applying them in the most piecemeal and phoned in way possible. You spend the entire game switching between a character with a dash and a character with a double-jump, and you could do so much with that in terms of movement, but the game would rather have you ride a moving elevator twice so that each character can pick up all the gems specified for them, or have you jump across platforms that disappear and reappear when you switch with no regard for the character's different movesets. The entire game is basically just the second mask from Crash Bandicoot 4 but implemented in an incredibly sloppy way that makes no use of its potential. No, the game is much more interested in positioning enemies perfectly off-screen so that you'll run into them before you have a chance to avoid them. Or placing a gem for character 1 behind a barrier that only opens for character 2, making me assume I had to switch and then dash through before the gate has a chance to close... it really shouldn't be this easy to softlock level 2 of a platformer for fuck's sake.
So yeah, I didn't like this. Admittedly my main issues were technical issues which I'm going to assume are specific to the version I played, but I really don't feel too sad about skipping this one based on the experience I was able to have. In any case, the final straw was entering a level and seeing 0/700 gems on the UI... yeah, no thanks, I'm good. There are so many great platformers out there, including from the same era as this... just go and pick any one of those and I'm sure you'll have a better time.
The visuals are... let's say 'technically impressive' given when this game came out. Considering this game came out in 2012 it really doesn't look that old, and its aesthetics have aged remarkably well. Those aesthetics are, however, absolutely hideous. Like, the game definitely has a style to it, but it just looks so damned ugly... the colour pallette is all over the place, nothing really gels together ('because dream' I guess) and the general creature and object design is bloated and deliberately gross. I can appreciate a lot of effort has gone into this in terms of the visuals, but in my opinion this game looks worse than Cruelty Squad.
The level design also seems to be a big nothing-burger as well. Again, I only got to near the end of the first world, so maybe it all ramps up and becomes a gameplay masterpiece later on. But from what I played, Giana Sisters is based on a solid core concept, likes introducing new puzzle pieces and ways to interact with the environment and then applying them in the most piecemeal and phoned in way possible. You spend the entire game switching between a character with a dash and a character with a double-jump, and you could do so much with that in terms of movement, but the game would rather have you ride a moving elevator twice so that each character can pick up all the gems specified for them, or have you jump across platforms that disappear and reappear when you switch with no regard for the character's different movesets. The entire game is basically just the second mask from Crash Bandicoot 4 but implemented in an incredibly sloppy way that makes no use of its potential. No, the game is much more interested in positioning enemies perfectly off-screen so that you'll run into them before you have a chance to avoid them. Or placing a gem for character 1 behind a barrier that only opens for character 2, making me assume I had to switch and then dash through before the gate has a chance to close... it really shouldn't be this easy to softlock level 2 of a platformer for fuck's sake.
So yeah, I didn't like this. Admittedly my main issues were technical issues which I'm going to assume are specific to the version I played, but I really don't feel too sad about skipping this one based on the experience I was able to have. In any case, the final straw was entering a level and seeing 0/700 gems on the UI... yeah, no thanks, I'm good. There are so many great platformers out there, including from the same era as this... just go and pick any one of those and I'm sure you'll have a better time.
I think I enjoyed this? I never played the original, so this is my first introduction to the series as a whole, and I can understand the appeal. It's weird, joyful, chaotic, cathartic... Katamari certainly isn't afraid of being different and, for the most part, it works.
But while playing this game there was always something in the back of my mind preventing me from enjoying it to the fullest, and it took a long time to figure out what it was. My initial thought was the aesthetics; I don't get on with 'cutesy for cutesy's sake' as a design choice but, while Katamari definitely is cutesy, the sheer hectic bizarreness of its premise won me over on that front. I see a lot of people giving this game credit for its soundtrack; I agree that some of the music is great (the title theme in particular, but I found the more swingy/loungy tracks to be pretty great too), but it has to be one of the least cohesive soundtracks I've ever heard, and some of the tracks are actively bad. I didn't particularly enjoy listening to a robot tell me I'm smart for 20 minutes, nor did I enjoy having to listen to children who literally couldn't hold a note at all... So the music ended up being a very mixed bag for me, but it definitely wasn't what was bugging me about this game.
So my second thought was maybe the controls were the issue: the tank controls in this game are clunky and awkward to say the least. This game is absolutely unplayable keyboard and mouse (which to be fair would obviously not have been a consideration for the original), but it can be equally painful to play with a controller. Very early I switched to the 'simple controls' layout which was honestly such a trap; the controls are indeed slightly simpler (albeit still clunky), but at the cost of a huge amount of your manoevrability. I definitely recommend sticking with the default controls and, when I went back to them and really tried to learn them, it almost felt like the shitty controls were a deliberate part of the game's difficulty. Don't get me wrong, I don't like the control scheme in this game, but by the end I didn't hate them either.
So finally I decided that what put me off this game was its level design and pacing. Some of the levels are great, with a constant stream of slightly larger items to keep absorbing; you always feel like you are making progress, and the sheer visceral nature of absorbing everything around you delivers a nice steady stream of dopamine to your lizard brain. But then in a lot of the levels, there just seem to be gaps in the object size chain. What I mean by this is I would be exploring a level and get to, say, 1.9m, only to find that every object I could see around me was either slightly too big to absorb or too small to have any notable difference on my katamari size. And then suddenly everything comes to a screeching halt. I would be left either with the option of exploring the level in depth to find some pocket of untapped mass (not a fun prospect at all given the aforementioned trash player controls and lack of any camera control), or resign myself to spending ages mopping up tiny things around me until I could creep over the critical threshold to start collecting things above the mass gap. This sounds like a minor issue, but the entertainment value in Katamari is so surface level and mindless that these gaps in play absolutely destroy the flow. Bear in mind that me calling the game surface level and mindless is not meant as an insult: I love some far more vapid games such as Cookie Clicker and Vampire Survivors, but these hold my attention so much better than Katamari because they just don't have gaps in their feedback loops.
I don't want to be too down on Katamari though. At its best it really is an incredibly cathartic experience. Especially in levels where you start and end at completely different size scales, it feels great to end up mopping up tiny objects that started out as impossibly distant background details. The change in the scale of the world is very gradual and very nicely done as you grow; there were multiple times where I had a great 'a-ha!' moment upon realising that I'd ended up back in the starting area but now everything was 1/5 the size. The Katamari itself always showing what it's made of is a masterstroke as well; it really helps with the organic changes of scale in the game, and helps give a visceral sense of achievement when you can simply look at your character and see how much garbage you've managed to roll up. Katamari deals with both this scale and this sense of progression so much better than the heavily-inspired Donut County that it's absolutely night and day, and I would 100% recommend this game over Donut County any day of the week.
So all in all, a mixed bag experience for me. I'm very glad this exists, and commend how experimental it's willing to be (especially given the era that the original version came out). I wouldn't say it lives up to the near-legendary plinth that the gaming community seems to have placed it on, but it's a decent little game and overall I am glad to have played it.
But while playing this game there was always something in the back of my mind preventing me from enjoying it to the fullest, and it took a long time to figure out what it was. My initial thought was the aesthetics; I don't get on with 'cutesy for cutesy's sake' as a design choice but, while Katamari definitely is cutesy, the sheer hectic bizarreness of its premise won me over on that front. I see a lot of people giving this game credit for its soundtrack; I agree that some of the music is great (the title theme in particular, but I found the more swingy/loungy tracks to be pretty great too), but it has to be one of the least cohesive soundtracks I've ever heard, and some of the tracks are actively bad. I didn't particularly enjoy listening to a robot tell me I'm smart for 20 minutes, nor did I enjoy having to listen to children who literally couldn't hold a note at all... So the music ended up being a very mixed bag for me, but it definitely wasn't what was bugging me about this game.
So my second thought was maybe the controls were the issue: the tank controls in this game are clunky and awkward to say the least. This game is absolutely unplayable keyboard and mouse (which to be fair would obviously not have been a consideration for the original), but it can be equally painful to play with a controller. Very early I switched to the 'simple controls' layout which was honestly such a trap; the controls are indeed slightly simpler (albeit still clunky), but at the cost of a huge amount of your manoevrability. I definitely recommend sticking with the default controls and, when I went back to them and really tried to learn them, it almost felt like the shitty controls were a deliberate part of the game's difficulty. Don't get me wrong, I don't like the control scheme in this game, but by the end I didn't hate them either.
So finally I decided that what put me off this game was its level design and pacing. Some of the levels are great, with a constant stream of slightly larger items to keep absorbing; you always feel like you are making progress, and the sheer visceral nature of absorbing everything around you delivers a nice steady stream of dopamine to your lizard brain. But then in a lot of the levels, there just seem to be gaps in the object size chain. What I mean by this is I would be exploring a level and get to, say, 1.9m, only to find that every object I could see around me was either slightly too big to absorb or too small to have any notable difference on my katamari size. And then suddenly everything comes to a screeching halt. I would be left either with the option of exploring the level in depth to find some pocket of untapped mass (not a fun prospect at all given the aforementioned trash player controls and lack of any camera control), or resign myself to spending ages mopping up tiny things around me until I could creep over the critical threshold to start collecting things above the mass gap. This sounds like a minor issue, but the entertainment value in Katamari is so surface level and mindless that these gaps in play absolutely destroy the flow. Bear in mind that me calling the game surface level and mindless is not meant as an insult: I love some far more vapid games such as Cookie Clicker and Vampire Survivors, but these hold my attention so much better than Katamari because they just don't have gaps in their feedback loops.
I don't want to be too down on Katamari though. At its best it really is an incredibly cathartic experience. Especially in levels where you start and end at completely different size scales, it feels great to end up mopping up tiny objects that started out as impossibly distant background details. The change in the scale of the world is very gradual and very nicely done as you grow; there were multiple times where I had a great 'a-ha!' moment upon realising that I'd ended up back in the starting area but now everything was 1/5 the size. The Katamari itself always showing what it's made of is a masterstroke as well; it really helps with the organic changes of scale in the game, and helps give a visceral sense of achievement when you can simply look at your character and see how much garbage you've managed to roll up. Katamari deals with both this scale and this sense of progression so much better than the heavily-inspired Donut County that it's absolutely night and day, and I would 100% recommend this game over Donut County any day of the week.
So all in all, a mixed bag experience for me. I'm very glad this exists, and commend how experimental it's willing to be (especially given the era that the original version came out). I wouldn't say it lives up to the near-legendary plinth that the gaming community seems to have placed it on, but it's a decent little game and overall I am glad to have played it.
2022
I've played a fair few Sokoban-likes since making an effort to play a wider variety of games. And I think in general... the subgenre isn't really for me? Don't get me wrong, there are some Sokobans I have really enjoyed and appreciated: the genius concept of Baba Is You and the organic simplicity and focus on player discovery in Stephen's Sausage Roll make these among some of the best made puzzle games I've played. But there always becomes a point in these games where frustration overtakes me... when the number of interacting mechanics becomes too great, or the convoluted solutions to the puzzles become too clever for their own good. When the artificial complexity begins to outpace the more organic complexity of one of these games' premises, I always find myself losing interest. Well... that didn't happen with Parabox. Patrick's Parabox starts off a little slow but before long it had grabbed onto me completely and, despite my checkered record on that front, I didn't find myself cheating on a puzzle even once. In terms of pacing, level design and player experience, I would now rate this to be the best Sokoban I've played.
The premise of Parabox is fantastic; the recursion theme is great and requires some really lateral thinking. The actual number of distinct rules the game introduces is surprisingly small, and most of the puzzles are less about applying them in an awkward way and more about exploring the way they interact and their natural corollories. It meant that every time I got stuck on a puzzle it was generally because there was an implication to one of the rules I hadn't worked out yet, and it meant each of these sticking points ended in a great 'a-ha!' moment when I finally managed to solve it. In terms of both the recursive theme and this focus on streamlined puzzles, Parabox reminds me a lot of Cocoon; but while Cocoon came off as being very handholdy and afraid of reaching it's full potential with its puzzles, Parabox is much more trusting of its player's intelligence, and really wrings out every ounce of puzzle potential from its core ruleset. In short, Parabox is pretty much exactly the game I wish Cocoon had been.
There's not much here to write home about in terms of aesthetics, though. I'm not really a huge fan of the music, the visuals are very simplistic and there is no attempt to really have any kind of theming or framework. At first this can make the game seem rather sparse, especially in the early levels where not a whole lot is going on. But once you enter the mid-game and the complexity really starts ramping up, this visual simplicity becomes much more of a blessing than a curse. In particular the use of simple shapes and bright block colours makes it remarkably clear what's going on no matter how crazy the play area gets; the game has the option for you to zoom into any box at any time to see what's happening inside, but the visual design was so clean that I almost never felt the need to.
So yes, all around, a very solid little puzzler. It's a very pure game; like I said, there's no real atmosphere or interesting visuals to speak of, but Parabox really goes all in on its puzzles and they are executed beautifully. Strong recommend from me on this one, even for people who are (like me) unsold on Sokobans in general.
The premise of Parabox is fantastic; the recursion theme is great and requires some really lateral thinking. The actual number of distinct rules the game introduces is surprisingly small, and most of the puzzles are less about applying them in an awkward way and more about exploring the way they interact and their natural corollories. It meant that every time I got stuck on a puzzle it was generally because there was an implication to one of the rules I hadn't worked out yet, and it meant each of these sticking points ended in a great 'a-ha!' moment when I finally managed to solve it. In terms of both the recursive theme and this focus on streamlined puzzles, Parabox reminds me a lot of Cocoon; but while Cocoon came off as being very handholdy and afraid of reaching it's full potential with its puzzles, Parabox is much more trusting of its player's intelligence, and really wrings out every ounce of puzzle potential from its core ruleset. In short, Parabox is pretty much exactly the game I wish Cocoon had been.
There's not much here to write home about in terms of aesthetics, though. I'm not really a huge fan of the music, the visuals are very simplistic and there is no attempt to really have any kind of theming or framework. At first this can make the game seem rather sparse, especially in the early levels where not a whole lot is going on. But once you enter the mid-game and the complexity really starts ramping up, this visual simplicity becomes much more of a blessing than a curse. In particular the use of simple shapes and bright block colours makes it remarkably clear what's going on no matter how crazy the play area gets; the game has the option for you to zoom into any box at any time to see what's happening inside, but the visual design was so clean that I almost never felt the need to.
So yes, all around, a very solid little puzzler. It's a very pure game; like I said, there's no real atmosphere or interesting visuals to speak of, but Parabox really goes all in on its puzzles and they are executed beautifully. Strong recommend from me on this one, even for people who are (like me) unsold on Sokobans in general.
2023
I mean, it's fine. On surface level there's not really a lot going on here, and I'm honestly not sure how it's gotten so popular: maybe it's a generational thing, because I'm very much a millennial and this game feels very zoomer-y, if that makes sense. I've only played maybe 10 hours or so of this with a friend, and we did have some fun, but I kinda feel I've got everything out of it I'm going to get.
That's not to say I didn't enjoy this, because Lethal Company was pretty fun... once we worked out how to play it. The onboarding in this game is terrible, and at first we assumed we were supposed to both go scavenging, which just ended up being a painful and aimless experience filled with unavoidable deaths. Once we started leaving somebody in the ship, our time got considerably better; having one person guide the other over walkie-talkie with a finite battery life leads to a pretty fun dynamic, and there was always a genuine 'oh shit' moment when the scavenger would go silent and you didn't know whether they'd died or just run out of power. Lethal Company has a pretty good vibe to it, and in general it succeeds in both its horror and its innate silly comedy.
There are a lot of different enemy types and quite a few different planets in this game, but it all ends up getting pretty samey pretty quick. Almost all of the interiors look exactly the same, the exterior layout on each planet is exactly the same every time you visit, and every enemy was functionally exactly the same for us because we never worked out a way to deal with literally any of them except 'run away'. I get the impression this game would be a lot more fun if you went diving through a wiki to learn enemy behaviour patterns and how to unlock secrets; as an example, once we went into an interior only to find a huge old-fashioned library instead of the regular steel corridors. I'm sure there must be hundreds of other secrets like this in the game, but yeah... we never had any idea what caused that area to spawn and we never saw it again. Again, I'm sure I could pore over the wiki to find these things out, but that's just not how I like to play games. And it feels like LC discourages organically discovering any of these secrets, because the cost for exploration and player death is usually so high.
I think the vibes here are generally strong enough that I'd be willing to push through the difficulties I'd had with this, if not for the quality of life in this game being pretty awful. For some reason you have to use an in-game Command Line on a terminal to do pretty much any in-game menuing, the exterior maps are overly large and easy to get lost in despite having nothing to see or do, and for some goddamn reason there's no way to reset the game! There were many times when it became clear we weren't going to meet the next quota, but in order to start again you have to land the ship however many times you have left and then sit through the cutscene of you being fired by the company. Every single time. And we fucked up a lot in this game; like I said, LC doesn't feel like it designed to be played by people who haven't read the Wiki, so we quite often would die and not even have any idea what killed us. For some reason if you both die, any scrap you had stored on the ship gets magically deleted, so yeah it can be obvious pretty early in a run that you're doomed... and yet the game forces you to go through the motions yet again. There's only so much of this I can take, and it's the single biggest issue I had with this game. I know there's mods that can fix it, but I'm not a big fan of modding, and this is a review for the base game so I'm not going to give it points for mods that happen to exist...
So yeah, there are some nice ideas in here, many of which are actually quite well implemented, but the poor quality of life and lack of player feedback really drag this one down for me. I imagine this is the kind of game that would be much more fun if one player knows what they're doing and the other doesn't, but two novices playing this together got pretty stale before I feel we'd really scratched the surface.
That's not to say I didn't enjoy this, because Lethal Company was pretty fun... once we worked out how to play it. The onboarding in this game is terrible, and at first we assumed we were supposed to both go scavenging, which just ended up being a painful and aimless experience filled with unavoidable deaths. Once we started leaving somebody in the ship, our time got considerably better; having one person guide the other over walkie-talkie with a finite battery life leads to a pretty fun dynamic, and there was always a genuine 'oh shit' moment when the scavenger would go silent and you didn't know whether they'd died or just run out of power. Lethal Company has a pretty good vibe to it, and in general it succeeds in both its horror and its innate silly comedy.
There are a lot of different enemy types and quite a few different planets in this game, but it all ends up getting pretty samey pretty quick. Almost all of the interiors look exactly the same, the exterior layout on each planet is exactly the same every time you visit, and every enemy was functionally exactly the same for us because we never worked out a way to deal with literally any of them except 'run away'. I get the impression this game would be a lot more fun if you went diving through a wiki to learn enemy behaviour patterns and how to unlock secrets; as an example, once we went into an interior only to find a huge old-fashioned library instead of the regular steel corridors. I'm sure there must be hundreds of other secrets like this in the game, but yeah... we never had any idea what caused that area to spawn and we never saw it again. Again, I'm sure I could pore over the wiki to find these things out, but that's just not how I like to play games. And it feels like LC discourages organically discovering any of these secrets, because the cost for exploration and player death is usually so high.
I think the vibes here are generally strong enough that I'd be willing to push through the difficulties I'd had with this, if not for the quality of life in this game being pretty awful. For some reason you have to use an in-game Command Line on a terminal to do pretty much any in-game menuing, the exterior maps are overly large and easy to get lost in despite having nothing to see or do, and for some goddamn reason there's no way to reset the game! There were many times when it became clear we weren't going to meet the next quota, but in order to start again you have to land the ship however many times you have left and then sit through the cutscene of you being fired by the company. Every single time. And we fucked up a lot in this game; like I said, LC doesn't feel like it designed to be played by people who haven't read the Wiki, so we quite often would die and not even have any idea what killed us. For some reason if you both die, any scrap you had stored on the ship gets magically deleted, so yeah it can be obvious pretty early in a run that you're doomed... and yet the game forces you to go through the motions yet again. There's only so much of this I can take, and it's the single biggest issue I had with this game. I know there's mods that can fix it, but I'm not a big fan of modding, and this is a review for the base game so I'm not going to give it points for mods that happen to exist...
So yeah, there are some nice ideas in here, many of which are actually quite well implemented, but the poor quality of life and lack of player feedback really drag this one down for me. I imagine this is the kind of game that would be much more fun if one player knows what they're doing and the other doesn't, but two novices playing this together got pretty stale before I feel we'd really scratched the surface.
2024
I don't think one simply stops playing Balatro, but I've beaten the game with every deck and had a win on gold difficulty, so I feel qualified to review it now. Balatro is very fun and incredibly addictive, but is it the best deckbuilder roguelike? Well... maybe. While this game is very good, I don't quite think it's the second coming of the messiah as many others seem to.
The great deckbuilder roguelikes before Balatro have all been enriched by sort of being two games in one. In something like Slay the Spire or Monster Train, you have the strategic element of building your deck and the tactical element of actually playing with the deck you've made, but I find that the tactical element of Balatro is a bit lacking. At it's best, playing a blind in Balatro consists of milling your hand until you hit the one or two hand types you've based your build around, and at worst with some joker combinations it barely even matters what you actually play.
This lack of moment-to-moment tactical depth leads to a couple of issues for me. In most great Roguelikes (specifically thinking of The Binding of Isaac and Enter the Gungeon here but it applies to deckbuilders too), you supplement shortfalls on a strategic front with player skill. That is to say, it's perfectly possible to beat Enter the Gungeon with a mediocre loadout if you just 'git gud' at using the tools at your disposal. This isn't a theme at all in Balatro; if you don't happen to get some good jokers by, say, ante 3, then that run is just dead and no level of player skill is going to fix that. This can make the game feel very frustrating at times; if you just roll badly when it comes to your first few jokers, there really isn't much you can do about it except sigh and hold the reset button.
The lack of a tactical side in Balatro also makes the game feel a bit brainless at times; while I greatly enjoy this game, it often feels like I'm enjoying it more on the level of something like Vampire Survivors or Cookie Clicker. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy both of those idle games greatly, but I don't like having to compare Balatro to them because Balatro feels like it could be so much more. I think the lack of context doesn't help with this gamefeel either; while the theming in Monster Train is kinda weird and cringey, it feels more tactile to actually be fighting against something rather than just have a raw number go up as in Balatro.
But all that said, this is absolutely not intended to be a negative review, because the strategic side of gameplay in Balatro is fantastic. There are so many different ways to break this game; I'm 50+ hours in and still finding new uses for jokers that I never would have dreamed of. Despite there being almost 200 jokers, none (or at least barely any) of them feel objectively bad or useless; some jokers are niche but powerful, some are only of value in the early game, but every card in here has its place. The game is also excellent at sprinkling little rewards throughout; most of the jokers are unlocked through side objectives rather than just for beating the game, and going for these extra goals can make you play in a completely different way, and it always feels like you are achieving something. Add on top of that the challenges, the many different deck types and the many different ways you can augment a run outside of jokers, and there really is just an obscene amount of content and replayability in here.
The game feels really good too... I'd compare it to Vampire Survivors again (this time in a good way) in terms of how great it is at using visuals and sound design to keep your lizard brain as happy as it can possibly be. And while I discussed downsides of the overall theming earlier, it really is great at both making this both stand out and be accessible. There's no big walls of text to read on your playing cards, it's just the standard pack of 52 that everybody knows, and you score using standard poker hands. Anyone familiar with poker will need no time to understand how to play this, and even if you aren't familiar it won't take long because everything in this game is very clear and presented upfront to the player. Balatro could definitely do with some more music though; the one song in the game is pretty good, but man do you get tired of it after 20+ hours of playtime, thank god for the mute button.
So in short yes, Balatro good. Balatro very good. I don't think it's the new undisputed champion of deckbuilding roguelikes as a genre and, while I don't think it would take much tweaking for it to become that champion, I don't think that's the niche that Balatro is looking to fill. It's probably better to think of Balatro as it's own thing... Balatro is to deckbuilders what Vampire Survivors is to bullet hells, a spin on the formula that completely changes the gameplay and gamefeel, opening it up to a whole new audience without alienating prior fans of the genre. And viewed through this lens, Balatro could hardly be any better.
The great deckbuilder roguelikes before Balatro have all been enriched by sort of being two games in one. In something like Slay the Spire or Monster Train, you have the strategic element of building your deck and the tactical element of actually playing with the deck you've made, but I find that the tactical element of Balatro is a bit lacking. At it's best, playing a blind in Balatro consists of milling your hand until you hit the one or two hand types you've based your build around, and at worst with some joker combinations it barely even matters what you actually play.
This lack of moment-to-moment tactical depth leads to a couple of issues for me. In most great Roguelikes (specifically thinking of The Binding of Isaac and Enter the Gungeon here but it applies to deckbuilders too), you supplement shortfalls on a strategic front with player skill. That is to say, it's perfectly possible to beat Enter the Gungeon with a mediocre loadout if you just 'git gud' at using the tools at your disposal. This isn't a theme at all in Balatro; if you don't happen to get some good jokers by, say, ante 3, then that run is just dead and no level of player skill is going to fix that. This can make the game feel very frustrating at times; if you just roll badly when it comes to your first few jokers, there really isn't much you can do about it except sigh and hold the reset button.
The lack of a tactical side in Balatro also makes the game feel a bit brainless at times; while I greatly enjoy this game, it often feels like I'm enjoying it more on the level of something like Vampire Survivors or Cookie Clicker. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy both of those idle games greatly, but I don't like having to compare Balatro to them because Balatro feels like it could be so much more. I think the lack of context doesn't help with this gamefeel either; while the theming in Monster Train is kinda weird and cringey, it feels more tactile to actually be fighting against something rather than just have a raw number go up as in Balatro.
But all that said, this is absolutely not intended to be a negative review, because the strategic side of gameplay in Balatro is fantastic. There are so many different ways to break this game; I'm 50+ hours in and still finding new uses for jokers that I never would have dreamed of. Despite there being almost 200 jokers, none (or at least barely any) of them feel objectively bad or useless; some jokers are niche but powerful, some are only of value in the early game, but every card in here has its place. The game is also excellent at sprinkling little rewards throughout; most of the jokers are unlocked through side objectives rather than just for beating the game, and going for these extra goals can make you play in a completely different way, and it always feels like you are achieving something. Add on top of that the challenges, the many different deck types and the many different ways you can augment a run outside of jokers, and there really is just an obscene amount of content and replayability in here.
The game feels really good too... I'd compare it to Vampire Survivors again (this time in a good way) in terms of how great it is at using visuals and sound design to keep your lizard brain as happy as it can possibly be. And while I discussed downsides of the overall theming earlier, it really is great at both making this both stand out and be accessible. There's no big walls of text to read on your playing cards, it's just the standard pack of 52 that everybody knows, and you score using standard poker hands. Anyone familiar with poker will need no time to understand how to play this, and even if you aren't familiar it won't take long because everything in this game is very clear and presented upfront to the player. Balatro could definitely do with some more music though; the one song in the game is pretty good, but man do you get tired of it after 20+ hours of playtime, thank god for the mute button.
So in short yes, Balatro good. Balatro very good. I don't think it's the new undisputed champion of deckbuilding roguelikes as a genre and, while I don't think it would take much tweaking for it to become that champion, I don't think that's the niche that Balatro is looking to fill. It's probably better to think of Balatro as it's own thing... Balatro is to deckbuilders what Vampire Survivors is to bullet hells, a spin on the formula that completely changes the gameplay and gamefeel, opening it up to a whole new audience without alienating prior fans of the genre. And viewed through this lens, Balatro could hardly be any better.
2014
After being pleasantly surprised by Duck Souls last year, I thought it would be worth trying some other low-budget precision platformers from small developers. But... well, I don't hate Fenix Rage, but I definitely had some problems with this game.
To get it out of the way with, at surface level this game looks a lot like a Super Meat Boy rip-off. The art style is pretty similar (albeit much more amateurish), the music is very Danny Baranowsky-eque and both games have a similar deliberately video gamey and anarchic vibe to them. But Fenix has such a drastically different moveset to Meat Boy that I definitely wouldn't call Fenix Rage a clone; despite it's structure and some of its level design being very Meat Boy adjacent, Fenix Rage plays very differently from it moment to moment.
Weirdly, the closest thing I can think of to this in terms of gameplay is Flappy Bird. It feels like you spend half the game using your unlimited, fixed-height arcing mid-air jump to somewhat awkwardly navigate through obstacle courses, and it kinda works. It's frustrating, sure, but this awkward flight is an interesting take on the Super Meat Boy formula which I do appreciate. What I don't appreciate is what felt like the other half of this game; it feels like the devs made a handful of interesting levels for each world and then padded out the back half with some of the worst level design I think I've seen. So many of the levels in this game are just filled with seemingly randomly placed enemies with no thought or care about difficulty or fun. The difficulty curve in this game is absolutely buck wild as a result; some levels take no thought whatsoever and are easily beat first try, but these can be bookended between levels which took me literally hundreds of attempts each. Add this to the fact that there is very little diversity in terms of enemies or obstacles in Fenix Rage, and the worse parts of this game end up feeling very samey indeed.
But I think the single worst thing in this game as far as I'm concerned is how it deals with cycles. In Super Meat Boy or anything else in it's genre, player death results in an instant respawn, and every item on the map goes back to the start of its loop. In Fenix Rage, the respawn after death is indeed snappy and quick... but, normally, none of the objects in the level are reset. There are a couple of instances where an object starting in the wrong place would make the level obviously impossible, and these objects do reset properly, so clearly the Fenix Rage devs knew how to implement this... but they just didn't? This issue was at its worst in bosses or levels with enemies with basic AI; while most enemies have some sort of leash to keep them near their spawn if the player gets too far away, these can be pretty generous, and I had a couple of incidents where an enemy chased me all the way to my spawn point, sat on top of it, and then killed me once per tick until by chance it wandered away. This botched cycle management makes the game feel incredibly inconsistent; in some of the best levels in Meat Boy I always felt like muscle memory was a big part of my survival, but there's none of that here. For fairness I should state that you can force a full level reset in Fenix Rage by holding R for a few moments, but having to do this is honestly the final nail in the coffin of any flow this game could have had.
In conclusion, I definitely wouldn't call Fenix Rage a rip-off or a rush job or anything like that. Effort has been put in here, and there is a hell of a lot of content (B-side levels, secret levels, different game modes, time trials etc). But my first thought on unlocking any of this bonus content was always just "Ugh, there's more?". There are a few interesting ideas in Fenix Rage, and occasionally they are executed ok, but the overall impression I get is amateurish, padded, repetetive and deliberately unfair. That being said, there are plenty of precision platformers out there that are much worse than this... but there's a whole load which are much better as well.
To get it out of the way with, at surface level this game looks a lot like a Super Meat Boy rip-off. The art style is pretty similar (albeit much more amateurish), the music is very Danny Baranowsky-eque and both games have a similar deliberately video gamey and anarchic vibe to them. But Fenix has such a drastically different moveset to Meat Boy that I definitely wouldn't call Fenix Rage a clone; despite it's structure and some of its level design being very Meat Boy adjacent, Fenix Rage plays very differently from it moment to moment.
Weirdly, the closest thing I can think of to this in terms of gameplay is Flappy Bird. It feels like you spend half the game using your unlimited, fixed-height arcing mid-air jump to somewhat awkwardly navigate through obstacle courses, and it kinda works. It's frustrating, sure, but this awkward flight is an interesting take on the Super Meat Boy formula which I do appreciate. What I don't appreciate is what felt like the other half of this game; it feels like the devs made a handful of interesting levels for each world and then padded out the back half with some of the worst level design I think I've seen. So many of the levels in this game are just filled with seemingly randomly placed enemies with no thought or care about difficulty or fun. The difficulty curve in this game is absolutely buck wild as a result; some levels take no thought whatsoever and are easily beat first try, but these can be bookended between levels which took me literally hundreds of attempts each. Add this to the fact that there is very little diversity in terms of enemies or obstacles in Fenix Rage, and the worse parts of this game end up feeling very samey indeed.
But I think the single worst thing in this game as far as I'm concerned is how it deals with cycles. In Super Meat Boy or anything else in it's genre, player death results in an instant respawn, and every item on the map goes back to the start of its loop. In Fenix Rage, the respawn after death is indeed snappy and quick... but, normally, none of the objects in the level are reset. There are a couple of instances where an object starting in the wrong place would make the level obviously impossible, and these objects do reset properly, so clearly the Fenix Rage devs knew how to implement this... but they just didn't? This issue was at its worst in bosses or levels with enemies with basic AI; while most enemies have some sort of leash to keep them near their spawn if the player gets too far away, these can be pretty generous, and I had a couple of incidents where an enemy chased me all the way to my spawn point, sat on top of it, and then killed me once per tick until by chance it wandered away. This botched cycle management makes the game feel incredibly inconsistent; in some of the best levels in Meat Boy I always felt like muscle memory was a big part of my survival, but there's none of that here. For fairness I should state that you can force a full level reset in Fenix Rage by holding R for a few moments, but having to do this is honestly the final nail in the coffin of any flow this game could have had.
In conclusion, I definitely wouldn't call Fenix Rage a rip-off or a rush job or anything like that. Effort has been put in here, and there is a hell of a lot of content (B-side levels, secret levels, different game modes, time trials etc). But my first thought on unlocking any of this bonus content was always just "Ugh, there's more?". There are a few interesting ideas in Fenix Rage, and occasionally they are executed ok, but the overall impression I get is amateurish, padded, repetetive and deliberately unfair. That being said, there are plenty of precision platformers out there that are much worse than this... but there's a whole load which are much better as well.
2019
Bit of an awkward one to review, because there's very much two things going on here at once. There's the board game version of Gloomhaven that this is based on, and from where this game lifts all of its mechanics, characters and most of its missions. The board game is good; I find it well-paced and difficult but balanced (except oozes, oozes can fuck right off). But this review isn't for Gloomhaven the board game, this is for the video game interpretation.
This game is... well, it's a mess. I'm very glad this exists, as it takes out all the tedium of setting up the game and keeping track of everything, as well as for allowing you to play remotely with friends. But it is not well implemented at all... the UI is horrible throughout, to the extent that it's often unclear what cards you even have available, what your battle goal is or whether your items are used or unused. It's incredibly poorly implemented too; it takes upwards of several seconds for each enemy to decide its next move, even if they are unable to move or attack, and this becomes actually excruciating to sit through when there are large numbers of enemies on screen. And to top it all, it's a buggy mess as well; it frequently crashes, enemies don't behave in the way they are supposed to (which is a bit of a problem in a turn-based tactical game like this) and some of the mission-specific effects just don't work properly at all. It's honestly astonishing how much of a mess this game is in places.
But, mess or no mess, it's still Gloomhaven, and the game at it's core is solid. I feel like this video game probably deserves a lower score than what I'm giving it, but I have to concede I have enjoyed my many hours in it and will continue to play it with friends for many more. But I feel like this is in spite of this game's implementation rather than because of it.
This game is... well, it's a mess. I'm very glad this exists, as it takes out all the tedium of setting up the game and keeping track of everything, as well as for allowing you to play remotely with friends. But it is not well implemented at all... the UI is horrible throughout, to the extent that it's often unclear what cards you even have available, what your battle goal is or whether your items are used or unused. It's incredibly poorly implemented too; it takes upwards of several seconds for each enemy to decide its next move, even if they are unable to move or attack, and this becomes actually excruciating to sit through when there are large numbers of enemies on screen. And to top it all, it's a buggy mess as well; it frequently crashes, enemies don't behave in the way they are supposed to (which is a bit of a problem in a turn-based tactical game like this) and some of the mission-specific effects just don't work properly at all. It's honestly astonishing how much of a mess this game is in places.
But, mess or no mess, it's still Gloomhaven, and the game at it's core is solid. I feel like this video game probably deserves a lower score than what I'm giving it, but I have to concede I have enjoyed my many hours in it and will continue to play it with friends for many more. But I feel like this is in spite of this game's implementation rather than because of it.
The story of Bang-On Balls is one of misplaced energy. There has clearly been a lot of effort put into this game; the levels are vast, intricately designed and absolutely jam packed with secrets and collectibles. The amount of character customisation is also pretty wild; in general, the scope of this game is impressive stuff.
But it feels like that scale came at the price of... well, everything else. It's kinda hard to describe what you actually do in this game, because it's just... nothing? I guess there's a spot of ultra-light platforming here, and a trivial puzzle or two there, but the majority of the loop here seems to be "bumble around until we say you can stop". The combat in particular is utterly dreadful. Despite enemies and bosses all having fully fleshed out attacks, animations and movesets, the best and only way to kill anything at this game is to spam dash at it until you or it stops moving: there's no consequence for player death, you just respawn nearby. The combat ends up being another place where it feels like the devs just put their effort into the wrong things.
It also feels like developing all the fluff in this game left basically no time for testing, because this is one hell of a buggy game. I played through this with two friends, and the friend playing on Steam Deck suffered about one full engine crash per play session; im not sure I've ever played a steam game thats crashed so hard that the engine generated a bug report. We also all had at least one incident where either an enemy or piece of terrain clipped us and sent us so high into the sky it took literal minutes to fall back down. There are plenty of lesser glitches too; multiple instances of the same object spawning and clipping into each other, music turning off for seemingly no reason, major frame rate drops in areas that seem no more complex than anywhere else. The technical issue that bothered me most of all was the atrocious responsiveness of the dash button; it would sometimes take 4 or 5 clicks for the game to register the input, and this game expects you to be dashing constantly.
So... I don't recommend this one. It's a shame, because it's clear that an awful lot of effort has gone into this, but it just hasnt resulted in a cohesive product. What with its overall fart-heavy tone and Polandball theming, this feels like something that started as a short shitpost game but then spiralled out of control. But the end product is remarkably unengaging for how zany and colourful (and sometimes a bit yikesy, especially in the Japan level) it can all get. If a game made both friends and I zone out completely more than once, and made us feel relieved when we didnt have to play it any more, then unfortunately I'd say that game has failed.
But it feels like that scale came at the price of... well, everything else. It's kinda hard to describe what you actually do in this game, because it's just... nothing? I guess there's a spot of ultra-light platforming here, and a trivial puzzle or two there, but the majority of the loop here seems to be "bumble around until we say you can stop". The combat in particular is utterly dreadful. Despite enemies and bosses all having fully fleshed out attacks, animations and movesets, the best and only way to kill anything at this game is to spam dash at it until you or it stops moving: there's no consequence for player death, you just respawn nearby. The combat ends up being another place where it feels like the devs just put their effort into the wrong things.
It also feels like developing all the fluff in this game left basically no time for testing, because this is one hell of a buggy game. I played through this with two friends, and the friend playing on Steam Deck suffered about one full engine crash per play session; im not sure I've ever played a steam game thats crashed so hard that the engine generated a bug report. We also all had at least one incident where either an enemy or piece of terrain clipped us and sent us so high into the sky it took literal minutes to fall back down. There are plenty of lesser glitches too; multiple instances of the same object spawning and clipping into each other, music turning off for seemingly no reason, major frame rate drops in areas that seem no more complex than anywhere else. The technical issue that bothered me most of all was the atrocious responsiveness of the dash button; it would sometimes take 4 or 5 clicks for the game to register the input, and this game expects you to be dashing constantly.
So... I don't recommend this one. It's a shame, because it's clear that an awful lot of effort has gone into this, but it just hasnt resulted in a cohesive product. What with its overall fart-heavy tone and Polandball theming, this feels like something that started as a short shitpost game but then spiralled out of control. But the end product is remarkably unengaging for how zany and colourful (and sometimes a bit yikesy, especially in the Japan level) it can all get. If a game made both friends and I zone out completely more than once, and made us feel relieved when we didnt have to play it any more, then unfortunately I'd say that game has failed.
2016
I'd say this is on hiatus rather than truly retired, because this is probably going to be one of those games I come back to time and time again. Enter the Gungeon is a fun and characterful twist on the twin-stick roguelike shooting gameplay of older games like The Binding of Isaac, with more emphasis on weapons than on character upgrades. But just like Isaac, EtG is packed full of diverse enemy types, dozens of unique items and character modifications and enough esoteric secrets to make it feel like there's always something else to do or find. EtG is all round pretty damn good... but Isaac (or more specifically Isaac: Rebirth) is still the much better game in my opinion.
Let's start with the gameplay. My overall opinion of Gungeon compared to Isaac is that Gungeon feels more... cluttered (yes I know that Isaac has over 700 items, bear with me). My favourite parts of a Gungeon run tend to be the early and mid game, when you only have a few weapons and flipping between them for the right tool as you work through fights feels really good. But by around floor 3 or 4 I would always end up with 6+ guns and it became awkward to keep track of what I had and what order they were in. It becomes impractical to flip between them on a whim, and more difficult to context switch between them when you essentially end up with a character that can play 6+ completely different ways. Yeah I know you can throw guns on the ground to tidy your inventory, but it feels like the sparse ammo in the lategame and the occasional presence of the Sell Creep pretty effectively dissuade me from just throwing valuable assets into the void. The lategame also gets pretty crazy with the sheer bullet hell; there are often situations where damage would be unavoidable, and the game would expect me to use one of the consumable blanks to clear a small area of projectiles. But I ended up using this system so infrequently that frankly I would forget it was there the few times I'd need it, and this ended up making some of these situations feeling more frustrating than challenging. In general I just prefer the moment to moment 'purity' of Isaac's gameplay compared to Gungeon with its blanks, dodge rolls and weapon switching.
Aesthetically Gungeon isn't really to my taste, on paper at least, but it goes so all-in on the 'bullets' theme that it honestly won me back around with its sheer absurdity. The enemies are all bullets, your health bar is bullets, the bosses are all named after puns on words like 'bullet' or 'ammo' etc... you even pause the game by bringing up your journal and shooting the lock off to open it. It's honestly pretty funny how committed Gungeon is to this bit, and pretty charming too. The feel of the game is great as well; despite there being hundreds of guns they all play and feel different enough; guns that should feel punchy feel punchy, guns that should feel powerful feel powerful, and the JK-47 feels like a piece of shit because it is one. The sound design and visual effect really help here, and on this front it's all good stuff. Just... not as good as my darling Isaac...
I do want to reiterate that I do like Gungeon, I like it a lot in fact. And it's probably only fair to acknowledge what a massive Isaac stan I am and so any differences from that game are going to feel like a negative development to me.
But Isaac comparisons aside, this game is good, and that should be the takeaway from this review.
Let's start with the gameplay. My overall opinion of Gungeon compared to Isaac is that Gungeon feels more... cluttered (yes I know that Isaac has over 700 items, bear with me). My favourite parts of a Gungeon run tend to be the early and mid game, when you only have a few weapons and flipping between them for the right tool as you work through fights feels really good. But by around floor 3 or 4 I would always end up with 6+ guns and it became awkward to keep track of what I had and what order they were in. It becomes impractical to flip between them on a whim, and more difficult to context switch between them when you essentially end up with a character that can play 6+ completely different ways. Yeah I know you can throw guns on the ground to tidy your inventory, but it feels like the sparse ammo in the lategame and the occasional presence of the Sell Creep pretty effectively dissuade me from just throwing valuable assets into the void. The lategame also gets pretty crazy with the sheer bullet hell; there are often situations where damage would be unavoidable, and the game would expect me to use one of the consumable blanks to clear a small area of projectiles. But I ended up using this system so infrequently that frankly I would forget it was there the few times I'd need it, and this ended up making some of these situations feeling more frustrating than challenging. In general I just prefer the moment to moment 'purity' of Isaac's gameplay compared to Gungeon with its blanks, dodge rolls and weapon switching.
Aesthetically Gungeon isn't really to my taste, on paper at least, but it goes so all-in on the 'bullets' theme that it honestly won me back around with its sheer absurdity. The enemies are all bullets, your health bar is bullets, the bosses are all named after puns on words like 'bullet' or 'ammo' etc... you even pause the game by bringing up your journal and shooting the lock off to open it. It's honestly pretty funny how committed Gungeon is to this bit, and pretty charming too. The feel of the game is great as well; despite there being hundreds of guns they all play and feel different enough; guns that should feel punchy feel punchy, guns that should feel powerful feel powerful, and the JK-47 feels like a piece of shit because it is one. The sound design and visual effect really help here, and on this front it's all good stuff. Just... not as good as my darling Isaac...
I do want to reiterate that I do like Gungeon, I like it a lot in fact. And it's probably only fair to acknowledge what a massive Isaac stan I am and so any differences from that game are going to feel like a negative development to me.
But Isaac comparisons aside, this game is good, and that should be the takeaway from this review.
2023
Ehhh... this feels like an example project somebody made to learn the basics of Unity (and, for all I know, that's exactly what it is). And if I had made this, you betcha I would be forcing all my friends to play it; it functions, it looks fine, there's power ups and collectibles that all works as intended, etc... as someone who has never designed a game (unless you count RPG Maker...), I would be proud of having made this.
But as something to release to the wider world, this needs one hell of a lot more polish. Simply put, the movement in this game feels really bad... which is a shame, because this is supposed to be a precision platformer. This game reminds me most of Duck Souls; but where Duck Souls had fast, flowing movement, snappy controls and fun and varied level design, Aashaa is clunky, slow and extremely samey. Aashaa loves to slide down stairs at unpredictable speeds instead of standing on them, the wall jump and dash both feel very inconsistent, and the single repeated wall texture and 10-second looping music will break even the strongest minds after a while. So yeah... this is a decent early attempt by the dev (if that's what this is), but otherwise it's really not great...
But as something to release to the wider world, this needs one hell of a lot more polish. Simply put, the movement in this game feels really bad... which is a shame, because this is supposed to be a precision platformer. This game reminds me most of Duck Souls; but where Duck Souls had fast, flowing movement, snappy controls and fun and varied level design, Aashaa is clunky, slow and extremely samey. Aashaa loves to slide down stairs at unpredictable speeds instead of standing on them, the wall jump and dash both feel very inconsistent, and the single repeated wall texture and 10-second looping music will break even the strongest minds after a while. So yeah... this is a decent early attempt by the dev (if that's what this is), but otherwise it's really not great...
2022
The theming and aesthetic here are pretty strong, much stronger than these escape room type games tend to be, and it has an undeniable character to it that I do appreciate. However the actual second-to-second gameplay isn't the best.
A co-op puzzle game that doesn't require a connection between the players is an interesting idea and great for accessibility. But I feel that this setup does rather hamstring tPW's potential a fair bit. You spend a lot of time entering passcodes to let the game know that you and the other player are still in sync, and the game ends up feeling quite back-and-forth; after every puzzle you solve, you end up having to wait for information from the other player, and there really aren't many times when you are solving puzzles simultaneously.
That all being said, I do really appreciate the game having two sets of puzzle solutions. In asymmetric games like this it seems obvious to me that many players are going to want to try both sides, but that second playthrough can often feel rather flat when you both know all the answers. Having two sets of solutions doesn't solve this entirely, you can't recapture the part of the game where you have to figure out what's even going on, but it's such an obvious step that I'm surprised I haven't seen other co-op escape room games do it before.
The Past Within ends up being a game with good vibes and good ideas on paper that don't really translate into anything that memorable or special. It's fine for what it is, but I would recommend checking out games like Operation: Tango, Unboxing the Cryptic Killer or the We Were Here series before settling for this.
A co-op puzzle game that doesn't require a connection between the players is an interesting idea and great for accessibility. But I feel that this setup does rather hamstring tPW's potential a fair bit. You spend a lot of time entering passcodes to let the game know that you and the other player are still in sync, and the game ends up feeling quite back-and-forth; after every puzzle you solve, you end up having to wait for information from the other player, and there really aren't many times when you are solving puzzles simultaneously.
That all being said, I do really appreciate the game having two sets of puzzle solutions. In asymmetric games like this it seems obvious to me that many players are going to want to try both sides, but that second playthrough can often feel rather flat when you both know all the answers. Having two sets of solutions doesn't solve this entirely, you can't recapture the part of the game where you have to figure out what's even going on, but it's such an obvious step that I'm surprised I haven't seen other co-op escape room games do it before.
The Past Within ends up being a game with good vibes and good ideas on paper that don't really translate into anything that memorable or special. It's fine for what it is, but I would recommend checking out games like Operation: Tango, Unboxing the Cryptic Killer or the We Were Here series before settling for this.
2024
It really is very creative given its simple premise with a nice diversity of themes for its mazes. Unfortunately creative doesn't necessarily equal fun; at their best the mazes in here are decent but at worst they're a bit dull and can even be frustrating (looking at you, sliding block hell). But overall this game is charming and cleverly put together... but ultimately, just not one for me really.