Superhot

SUPERHOT, SUPERHOT, SUPETHOP, etc.

The thing that made Portal so successful, you'd think, was it's wonderful excellence in terms of memetic suggestion.You can say a lot of things about Super Hot, but there's a temptation to say what the game instructs you to say instead of actually reviewing what the game actually is. You'd be surprised, once you're "in on the joke".

Me, I don't know, I don't think I really felt much for the joke.

Regardless: Superhot's description almost always starts with a lie. The line is, I believe, a shooter that moves when you move. This isn't precisely true, though it isn't precisely untrue either. Instead, Superhot is a very simple shooter with a single enemy type and a weird meta story I won't get into that moves faster as you move faster, but is always moving just a little.

The end result could actually be described as a FPS-puzzle game, though that 'just a little' thing and certain other components degrade that puzzle element as well. So you end up with a shooter that is puzzling, both in gameplay and description.

Superhot, etc

A real lack of recent games: Enter the Gungeon

There's this super weird thing about using this blog as a writing exercise in that sometimes I just, uh, forget to finish up a review and never hit that publish button. Or I go back to a game after the review is done and feel like it should be re-written but can't find the energy.

I finished ETG several months ago. Finished with, that is to say, since it is a roguelite.

I have mixed feelings when it comes to roguelite design. Some of my favorite games in recent memory were roguelites, but most of them I find rapidly tedious and get sick of very quickly. They're plagued by forcing you to repeat the first level endlessly and even worse have this sickening unwillingness to program in any amount of conveyance. They're built around the idea that fun is something you need to work for and knowledge is something you acquire through repeated, repetitive play throughs. It's pretty easy for the latter two to turn into pure tedium.

The moment I saw Enter the Gungeon, hereby shortened to Gungeon, I was certain it was a game I wanted to play. For a while I waited on the game to show up in the humble monthly bundle, as I have a sub rolling ever still and humble puts up most Devolver Digital titles sooner than later. But it went cheap on the humble store and they'd given me credit for a referral so I decided the time was now!

I'm pretty certain I'll end up with an extra key sooner than later, it's probably in this month's bundle, knowing my luck.

Regardless, Gungeon is presented as a roguelite dungeon crawler fused with a shmup and a twinstick shooter with cool boss battles; the results lean a fair bit more toward the former than the latter, though this game certainly co-habits the design space you'd put Nuclear Throne and probably several other games I haven't played in. It has a few more buttons that Nuclear Throne and leans harder on the roguelite looting side than gaining XP or gaining loot, with various results.

It also loves puns and loves guns.