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.

A slice of Indie: Morphblade

I really liked Gunpoint. My understanding, from reading the news around Gunpoint, was the next game by its developer was Heat Signature, which is this amazing sounding game about ... Actually go google it, but basically it's about being a little tiny space pod that slowly captures larger and larger ships, then battles with those ships, can lose those ships and so forth. I haven't read too much about it since it's like reading about Axiom Verge 2 or Double Dragon Neon 2: They will probably happen, but it is very far away from now in time and I don't want to think about being in my forties.

Regardless, apparently the developer of Gunpoint put out another game, on the third. I learned this when I was browsing through news of the Humble Bundle Monthly, which means not only did the game come out without me knowing but also entered a position of me owning it without knowing I was owning it beforehand. Which is pretty nice.

Play relevant month: Stardew Valley

For my final game of the year on this final day of the year, I present to you a game that sold a million copies and looks like a mix between a SNES game and something off an Amiga at best. A extremely simple and easy to play game that weirdly requires I blow the introductory paragraph on explaining what the game actually is. Simple to play, simple to learn, difficult to describe.

Stardew Valley is a bit more difficult to define because it does not generally fit into a large, well known genre. It gets compared to Harvest Moon, but what if you're like me and you've never played Harvest Moon? Ostensibly the game is classified as a low-key, low-seriousness farming simulator but addressing it as such is pretty disingenuous. Rather, Stardew Valley is a farming game that then wraps itself around a massive assortment of mini-games that interconnect. It's not a clicker game, though there is a lot of clicking, and it's not much of a simulator either. It's also not all that open-ended, and it feels like it has a lot of mechanics it actually does not.

Much like Axiom Verge last year, which was likely my favorite game of the year, Stardew Valley is a solo programmer project built from the ground up over several years of development. More so than Axiom Verge, it's also a critical and financial success, though not quite to the scale of something like Terraria I don't think? But pretty close, and pretty deserving on the most part.

It's a really weird game to review...

Play Relevant Month: Grim Dawn

I actually picked up Grim Dawn all the way back in early September, but sort of set it as my tertiary game, something to work my way through over the coming months. ARPGs are often long and take a considerable amount of time to truly review. There's actually several ARPGs out relatively recently I'm inclined to play, but Grim Dawn for whatever reason just looked like the best of the lot, though Victor Vran looks pretty good too.

Grim Dawn is the work of Crate Entertainment, which according to their wikipedia page appears to be an off-shoot or descendant of Iron Lore, whom produced Titan Quest for THQ quite a while ago. While I've owned Titan quest for ages, the game never appealed to me. I couldn't tell you why, but for a long time

Grim Dawn on the other hand was in one of the humble monthlies, and I think this is the game where I mathed it out and realized a full 12 month subscription (which gives a month free) essentially would have worked out as good enough to pick up. Since then, the monthly has actually been even better, with several excellent sidetitles to go with it. So you can sort of blame Grim Dawn from crate entertainment on convincing to me to buy into some crate-style entertainment...

Does that even count as a pun? I'm not even sure anymore.

Regardless, Grim Dawn is an isometric view style ARPG of a proper pedigree and the usual nonsense. Fantasy world overrun with nasties from other dimension, with zombies because zombies, loot because loot and "corruption". No prophecies, though, and mostly bad-ass characters who actually survived the apocalypse.

Holiday Card: Hade

At some point I stopped being able to do more card grinding games and moved onto actually playing games again. But Hade, Hade was the last of them. And Hade was a pretty good game to end on.

There isn't a great deal I can say about Hade, much of it is visually obvious. Hade is a single screen at a time puzzle game about bouncing 1 or more balls around a map to collect "hints". This might have common ground with other puzzle games, but I must admit I don't really have a lot of puzzle experience. Every couple of levels, Hade spins up the difficulty, and then settles back down as it introduces new mechanics. I got through maybe a quarter of the game and saw a good 10~ or so different mechanics in action, which would then generally build up to combining them together before adding something new and building back up once again.

The mechanics range simple directional changes, to pad that change direction depending on how you approach, to barriers, to one shot versions of all of this and extensions on the nature of several of these. There's a lot of variety. A couple of the levels do feel rather similar to earlier ones, but usually it feels like you're re-doing the earlier map with a more complex set of mechanics at your disposal.

Visually Hade is extremely simple. The audio cues are good, and the music track is a somber, gentle affair sort of going on the background. There's not a ton to say here, it's a simple puzzle game. I would recommend a 144hz VA panel for it, though. You really want those inky blacks. Yeah, buy a $300 monitor to play a $3 game.

What Hade does well, and what kept me playing far longer than any recent puzzle game I can bring to mind, is the fact Hade does not waste time. You open the game, navigate two menus to a puzzle, and then you're playing the puzzle. If you screw up, you reset with a click, you start with a click, everything is smooth and brisk. It's totally laser focused on puzzle action without any baggage dragging you down around it. I really found myself appreciating that, but ultimately, I started to dread the 'upswing' in the difficulty curve. You'd get a new mechanic and slam through three puzzles, then it started to get hard again. There's a great ah-ha moment, but it started to take me longer and longer.

Ultimately, I'm just not that big on puzzle games. Would I recommend Hade to people who like puzzle games? I want to say yes, but I might be wrong in that. I liked it, though.

Holiday Card: Pirate Pop Plus

There are various points in the nostalgia triggering spectrum that is gaming where gaming was, in a word, pretty ugly. Truly retro pixel art, that is, atari style is pretty hideous. Early 3D is pretty grim - I don't mean the sprite based faux-3d of Duke Nukem or Doom, but the shortly after those titles. But one of the true stand-outs for ugliness is the original gameboy.

I played many hours on the original Gameboy, so the four "color" LCD stylings of Pirate Pop Plus look fine to me. The faceplate, seen in the screenshots, adds to the effect and reminds me of playing Gameboy Color emulators (or whichever, the one Metroid Fusion was on) which is pretty pleasant. But I would totally understand if you took one look at these screenshots, turned three hundred sixty degrees and bubble-walked right out of the room.

Anyway, PPP is a rehash of a decade(s) old arcade game, Pang or Buster Bros or honestly who knows which? I can remember playing this game years back in the arcade, but I could never remember the name. Essentially, in this case, a pirate appears on screen and produces a bubble. When you hit the bubble with your harpoon, it pops in two or three smaller bubbles. Repeated down one size and once you've obliterated the bubble or take too long he's back again with another bubble. And repeat til you lose. PPP distinguishes itself with a world-flipping mechanic, in which the pirate appears at random and picks up, down, left or right to be the new down. Often he'll pick the direction you're already facing, but then you can shoot him in the ass.

PPP also has a currency system, in which gold coins drop and can be traded into a vendor for new characters, new music and then a lot of silly stuff that doesn't do overly much but is sort of fun. The cosmetic side is cute, but requires a lot of grinding that likely goes beyond how much fun you'll get out of the game. I had a good two hours with it, and I'd probably play it more, but I have so many games to work my way through you know how it is.

The gameplay on the most part is quite enjoyable. When the gravity gets flipped, you have a weird bonus round where you can 'land' on bubbles to pop them very quickly. If this happens at the right time, you can rack up quite a few bonus points, but it's also the most dangerous point. When you first touch the ground, you bounce, and you can't fire while you're in the air. The end result is a period of extreme vulnerability, which isn't much fun and is basically the main point I die at. The other thing is your spear can ONLY ever pop one bubble, which frankly isn't well thought out on the developer's part. You can end up in the later levels with piles of bubbles all clumped together and chain spearing just won't get through them all. Not sure why it doesn't linger for a split-second to pop multiple.

You can also run into an issue where you fire a spear as the pirate appears, and drive it into his rump while expecting to hit something else. End result is much the same.

In conclusion, I'd say PPP is good if the graphical style tickles your fancy. It's a fun little game with a little grind on the side to make it a bit more interesting. I do wish it had more power ups, or perhaps more interesting power ups as most of them are pretty dull. Definitely a lot better than, oh, quite a few titles I fired up while grinding cards only to find them utterly unplayable.

Play relevant month: Broforce

You can talk about the toxicity of hyper-masculinity if you want, but there's something truly epic about the 80s era of action hero. Banal, ridiculous and adorned with giant muscles alongside giant guns and often giant chins, this was the point where PC didn't quite come into the picture but film making had decided exactly how they wanted to do it. For better or worse.

Broforce is both a tribute and a homage to this lost, actually kind of tedious to watch era of film making. I don't know what Broforce originally intended to go about making, but as we'll explore, Broforce is about bros very much re-creating that action film charm. As an aside, bro in this case is both the name of all the characters - with such classics as Bronan, Brobocop and Ellen Ripbro - and a description of their bro-dentity. Bros are generally slanted toward male, but there are female bros, just as there are female action heroes.

I'm a bit disappointed there's no Brofee, but I guess she isn't distinctive enough? Ah c'mom, Pam Grier was awesome in that movie. Whatever!

Broforce succeeds because it doesn't worry about... To be frank, much of anything. It's a side-scrolling run and gun shooter, or a jumpnshootman as I like to refer to other games of this nature. But the elements that make Broforce different lies in the name. The bro. The bros. And the attitude of mayhem that may, in a way, fit the bro moniker just as well.

Bro-hem.

Belated hootemer: Starward Rogue

You ever get an idea of what a game is, and wanting that game, in your head? And then when you get said game, you realize you either had it wrong or were thinking of an entirely different title? And you're left in the possession of a game you're now trying to figure out if you even wanted? Well, here's Starward Rogue, and here's me.

Starward Rogue is an "Arcen title". If you've never heard of Arcen, they make a lot of weird games. That's sort of their thing. They're probably one of the most prolific indie developers. On a basic level I admit I feel affection toward Arcen, they try to do something different and keep trying. Some of their games are successes and some aren't, but that just makes them more endearing.

Which kinda makes Starward Rogue a little weird to review. Starward isn't an especially creative or unusual venture, and how I mixed it up with something else is very strange to me. In fact this game is almost a little ironic to review now, but it's just coincidentally a title that appeared in a humble monthly - albeit a humble monthly I didn't pay for, and instead got from a friend - which it has in bundle common with some other games I've been playing.

Anyway, the game is a completely top down roguelite or maybe even roguelike twin stick shooter. I'd say it is "simple" but the game manages to be extremely complex in spite of the fact it's a simple premise and it all kinda rolls from there. I'm putting it under shootember because bullets and shooting, man, bullets covering the screen.

Arcen style yo

A convergence of everything I hate: Crypt of the Necrodancer

No, not really. But we'll get into that.

Crypt of the Necrodancer is one of those titles that gives you the "why didn't anyone think of that sooner" sort of feel to it. One of those weird mashes of two genres that feels entirely obvious, yet somehow, isn't all that common. The weirdest thing is how visually evident the combination is, how just looking at an eight second video of this game almost entirely explains what you're seeing in action. Even the title feels completely obvious. They changed one letter from what is so well tread it is a trope at this point.

Essentially, it combines a mediocre roguelike - that's not a complaint, there's limitations because - with a rhythm game. The rhythm component follows the beat of the soundtrack. I'm not exactly certain how the story works, but it sounds like you're just as enthralled to the magic of the dungeon as everything else inside.

The game procedurally generates relatively simplistic dungeons, has a huge variety of spells and items and floods the screen with monsters who just like you are enslaved to the beat. Everything moves with the beat, or in my case, mostly doesn't since I am completely terrible at either exclusively this game or rhythm games. I'm not certain which.

But either way, this game is something of an experience for me.

From the forge of Donut Steel: Freedom Planet

While Sonic After the Sequel, made by one LakeFeperd, remains firmly in the camp of fan game not all Sonic fan games remain as such. To my understanding, Freedom Planet is the effort of a team that started out making a fan game and then realized they'd, you know, actually like to own their work. This is of course something of a double edged sword, as a Sonic fan game gives you a built in audience - LakeFeperd went on to begin working on Spark the Electric Jester, with a kickstarter and all though - but also you can't monetize in any real way.

Well, sort of. I mean Team Four Star does "fan parody" work on youtube and they've monetized the crud out of that. There's often ways around. But regardless, Freedom Planet's team wanted to actual make money off the game, maybe not some alternate channel, so it ended up as whatever you want to call it now.

I find it kinda jarring when people describe a game as a "fangame of X" and then go on to then admit well ok it's actually a fangame of X, Y and Z and then also a weeb fantasy and a lot of weird stuff that kinda makes me think furries got worked into the game past the Sonic threshold to boot. And don't get me wrong, Sonic is on a threshold and he crosses it in some games as well. Don't make out with teenage human girls Sonic. That's wrong.

Freedom Planet is, ultimately, more or less it's own thing. Whatever people claim is a big part of the game honestly comes off as utterly diluted into the larger whole of the game's influences until while you might recognize an individual part, the gameplay of the gestalt is not really recognizable. I think that's sort of a plus or minus; if you're looking at this review as a review of a "Sonic fan game" no, not really.

But if you're looking for a game that doesn't play a lot like other games in the genre and feels like something unique - for better or worse - I actually think Freedom Planet does manage a lot of that. How well, though, eh...

As an aside, I played about an hour of Freedom Planet several months back (actually maybe in 2015, I'm not quite sure) and then shelved it. The game just didn't grab me, but, given this was just the Summer of Sonic I felt like if there was a time to play it, this was it. 

Relevant to Sonic: Fotonica

Most of my gaming news comes through a pretty narrow selection of youtube channels and the occasional hit off my otherwise trump-riddled facebook news feed, which tends to overlap with google news feed and complaining media isn't what I was going to get into. Anyway, I mostly watch superbunnyhop, wish I could enjoy his podcast but one of the trip is a donger, and then I get the rest from Super Best Friends and a bit of Total Biscuit, who is also a bit of a donger but at least a focused one.

I mean I get you want to talk about protecting the consumer and all the menu options and FOV sliders, but sometimes I kinda wish you could just click on a video and here a review. And sometimes you can so... Anyway, Fotonica got played on the 2BF's youtube channel. The game didn't look super amazing, but it looked like a 3d running game, so I picked it up as a method of contrasting with the Sonic games.

At its core Fotonica is one of the simplest titles you'll ever play or look at. It has one button, and that button is Goes Fast. Upon clicking the goes fast, you go Goes fast. When you release, you jump, and if you click again while jumping you attempt to force toward the ground to try to Goes fast once more. The game's visuals are complex wireframes, but not much beyond that, and the gameplay is...

Something alright.

The game relates back to Sonic because it creates longevity through levels which must be learned through muscle memory and rote memorization. Player skill is largely irrelevant; the game under-explains its mechanics and you're often left wondering what you were supposed to do. It also goes fast, beautifully fast, but then abruptly it doesn't, You don't so much die as fall off, and unlike Sonic, the game instantly restarts when you hit another button, although for whatever reason it's the Back button on the xbox one controller which feels a little awkward as that hand's side of the controller isn't otherwise in use.

One plus is the game has an excellent, minimalist score that frames the weird atmosphere beautiful. It's not beepy boop chip tunes, but gentle and enticing techno. It lends an airy sense of tranquility the game's design does not carry with it. Fotanica, you see, is not about player skill in the least - you are incapable of seeing the things you're going to respond to, so once you have the basics down you see little improvement - it is entirely about rote memorization. You can only get better at this game through replaying levels, though there's a period of learning how to master the jumps.

The game touts exploration as a feature, but I don't think that has any real meaning. The terrain is intentionally flat and devoid of substance; which is beneficial to the design, but offers nothing to the brain. The levels are all around the same difficulty, eventually you memorize them, or more likely, eventually you join me in getting bored. That being said, if you can get it in a bundle or the price tag doesn't bother you, I think there's a unique - if short lived - experience here.

Shootember: Nuclear Throne

Shootember was traditionally a month for shooters, but this game involves more shooting than most shooters, so I think it's fair to classify this one under Shootember.

Nuclear Throne was $10, or rather, at the peak of the humble bundle a couple weeks back, though I mostly picked up said bundle for it. I've being eyeing Enter the Gungeon for a while, and it is often mentioned that NT here is either a spiritual predecessor, a game you should just buy instead, or a game a lot like it. You can pick whichever harsh or positive statement you like, I've heard them all. NT has an overwhelmingly positive rating on Steam, and I've heard lots of good things about it.

I was a little reluctant, which we'll get into, but bundles with multiple quality games are just hard to resist. That's the rub of Humble bundle, isn't it? Buying a bundle of seven or eight games for $10, when you want maybe three of them, but $3.33 doesn't sound so bad for them individually...

It's especially enticing when rumor has it the developers of this game stated they would never put the game on sale, or something to that effect. I haven't touched the rest of the bundle as of writing this, but that's generally how most humble bundle experiences work for me. I play two of the games and forget about the rest.

Summer of Sonic (6.5): Sonic After the Sequel

I'd be happy to know that most people don't know the internet like I do. I've been browsing online a pretty long time - over twenty years now, in fact  - and I've seen some shit. Unfortunately, a couple years back Steam started Early Access, and that was a rare portal into what Indie gaming kinda actually is.

A lot, and I do mean a lot, of unfinished work. Not as bad as Patreon but... Yeah... So digging through Sonic fangames is a bit of a sad affair. It is a lot like digging through Fallout New Vegas mods, mostly abandoned, patched together ruins of games that never will be. A lot of them have blog posts like "We're not canceled guys, just getting things back on track" with dates like April 2009 and so forth.

But you're not wondering about that. You're wondering, why is there a Sonic fangame in the middle of this Summer of Sonic? Because fangames are, unfinished or not, a part of the Sonic gaming genome. When Sonic CD took a fan-gamer's work at porting it and put it up for sale, it legitimized fan-gaming and Sonic Mania continues that. I feel like if Mania does well, and it sounds like it should, we may see Sonic opened up to 2d fangaming slash indie development. But if you're wondering, why this one and not just why, it's because most fangames either aren't done or turned into Freedom Planet or something of the sort. This was one recommended, that works and is done.

I knew very little about this game before installing. I believe the developer went on to make a kickstarter something that people in the SA "Thousands dead, injured as Sonic Mania sweeps the nation" thread described in less glowing terms, but I might be conflating mod makers, and really that's neither here nor there. Apparently the game connects with Sonic 2 in some capacity, but I'm not certain exactly how that works either. And I don't care. To me, canonically, Sonic CD is before Sonic 2, and then Sonic 2 goes right into Sonic 3. There's not a lot of room, but it doesn't matter. Sonic's world is the childhood world, where there's sprawling cities and insane abomination carnivals in the middle of uncivilized islands, but also vast sweeping ruins 'just over there'. He can have as many adventures as people want to put him in.

The point of reviewing a fangame, I guess, is to briefly talk about what Sonic 4 is not, and to look at someone's attempt at doing that without being an official Sega whatever. That being said, I'm mostly doing this to play the game, not to delve into what honestly should be meaningful research in re-creating physics and the mod scene.

Little spaceship adventures: Mysterious Space

There's this weird feeling I get sometimes when I wonder about how children growing up nowadays interact with video games and imagining what they'd want. Not in the sense of them imagining the games they want to play, since the hype pumping media handles that, but what they imagine when and if they imagine some hypothetical game. What spills from their imaginations, now that gaming is pretty unrestricted in what it can do.

As a child, I imagined a lot of the things that are now common place. Open world, overworld maps, exploration and procedurally generated, these concepts all seemed "the future" and they slowly came to pass. Now that we're here, well...

They're pretty great. Anyway, Mysterious Space is, I think sort of the game I imagined as a child. Admittedly this is a very budget little indie title, nothing exotic or exciting about it, but it does have that sense of wonder to it. It is basically a game about a little spaceship, adventuring across the stars, or more in particular flying down to planets and exploring them for precious fuel.

Oh, and yeah, Mysterious Space is essentially a roguelike or roguelite or whatever I'm supposed to call this basic set of mechanics. They are grafted onto a simple space shooter, but the combination actually works really well, as opposed to my general feeling toward rogueLs.

This game doesn't have the brutal fatigue that sets in, nor the unexplained mechanics you just try to figure out desperately that the game maker assumed you'd read a wiki on. It's very easy to figure out what you're doing in this game, which is a plus and a minus at once.

Indie Gradius: Counterattack

I end up in this situation, pretty often, where I pick up an indie game and I want to write my review like... 15 minutes into playing it. I'm not saying AAA games have more depth, but they tend to ease you into things, whereas games like this you just don't feel like finishing because bam you feel like you already know everything about it.

Counterattack is, before I mention anything else, an early access title. I have no idea what is missing from the game, although the news does mention they plan to revamp the UI. Which is good, because the UI is simply awful, but if they admit they need to work on it I'm not holding it against them.

As for the game itself; it's a side-scrolling space shooter. The storyline is simple: mankind something something, many robots, blah blah, super science space fighter shoot planes, pew pew, off we go to the lasers. The game is a bit lacking in some categories and robust in others.

Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas

There are a fair number of mascot, high profile games that define or defined a genre that you see surprisingly few clones or at least attempts at. For all the complaining about Darksiders being a 'zelda clone' (whatever) you really don't see many others in spite of it being a pillar franchise for an entire console. There's not really many Megaman clones - not precisely, not really - and very few Sonic clones. There are lots of platformers, of course, but of those very few really live up to Sonic or Mario. They're all brownity torture platformers that don't really have the same crisp, refreshing feel of those games.

(I've always been, as a total aside, completely baffled by the treatment of a lot of mascots and their games. Sonic is obviously the most confusing one, where they seemingly just toss out random garbage to weaken the brand, but it feels like the recent efforts in Starfox and Metroid are just baffling. Metroid especially. Metroidvanias have a market, Metroid has a market, Nintendo has ... Never mind)

Oceanhorn is ostensibly a zelda clone, or something, although I haven't played enough recent Zelda games to pretend I'm much of an expert on the matter. It is a Zeldalike more toward the charm and simple puzzle solving, also it has boats and I feel like there's some major Zelda games that had boats. It is otherwise a charming, colorful game about a boy with a sword and a shield and he has bombs and hearts.

Yay.

Two pack review: Puzzles Galaxies and Save Halloween: City of Witches

So much like the last time I did a two pack, this is two smaller indie games I didn't get that much play out of. On the plus side, they're both puzzle games, so at least it feels like we have a theme this week.

You can actually get the gist of Puzzle Galaxies basically from looking at the screenshots - which look nice - in that it is a "match four on a platform" game. You highlight two platforms at a time and transfer crystals until a platform is homogeneous, and then it locks off. After you get all the platforms done, the little space station launches and that's the entire game. This is pretty good for being a relaxing, simple brain puzzle you can play at a little to mellow out. It certainly looks fine, and as bundle fare goes, it's fine.

Except it has enemies who pick up and steal crystals to swap them around. This is such an odd decision, since you often end up in the last 25% of a board waiting for the enemies to drop their crystals. There is nothing lamer in a game than sitting there waiting on a timed board for the game to move on, but here you go and there it is. I wouldn't really recommend puzzle galaxies, as it is very simple and yet doesn't really do well with being a simple relaxation game for that. Also, it only has four music tracks, which get repetitive quite quickly.

I would, oddly enough, recommend Save Halloween. I know for a fact I got this game from a groupees greenlight bundle, where I honestly remember seeing it and expecting like a trash HOG or VN or something. But those basically always have cards, so like, why wouldn't you pick it up in a $1.50 bundle you're going to make fat stacks of card bux on?

Instead, Save Halloween is actually a very campy themed match 3 game with a ridiculous amount of variety. The board shapes change with pieces flopping on on the dialogue, the piece icons change, you get lots of power ups and upgrades you gradually unlock by adding things "to your house" which is of course a spooky Halloween looking mansion. It also has various roadblocks to slow your progress, like parts of the board being blocked off til you break barriers or spiders that spread til you destroy them. Oh, also you get activated abilities, though I didn't get far enough to unlock all of them. The game at its core is very simple, but with timed mode off it is extremely relaxing and plays quite smoothly. Most boards are completed by meeting certain criteria, and the game even has vaguely boss battles. I say vaguely because they're not especially vicious, but they do add to the variety.

The art assets especially are just so ridiculous, and the early steps of the game are voiced - and then replaced with text only and suddenly all the grammar in the game breaks. It's not a "good" game, but it is weirdly delightful and I think I'll buy a copy for my mom on sale day just to see her laugh at it since she's a big halloween fan. I wouldn't recommend it if you want something really stunning out of your five bucks, but it's certainly a solid enough match-3 if you're looking for one to goof around with.

I can't really explain the deal with the voice acting dropping off five levels in and being replaced by euro-broken english. It's just very strange. You only paid the woman to voice like, all of four or five lines? And only paid for the translation on like 17 clips?

Still, it honestly just adds to the silly camp humor.

Top down days: Hammerwatch

There is a terrible feeling when I look over my Steam collection.

It isn't the biggest backlog in history or something, but I'm at something like 200 games tried out of 1200 games. That's nice. What isn't nice is realizing I had bought a game I wanted to play, and then forgot to play it for a long time due to it falling into that giant pit of unplayed games. It's an unpleasant abyss.

Hammerwatch is one of those games. I got back in ... It looks like 2014? Yeesh, is that seriously right, that's brutal. Back logs are the most first world problem not involving purse dogs or speculating on ebay sales, but it's still kinda dismal when you flip through the Badge page and realize you've been playing games you're not exactly too impressed with instead of games with Very Positive scores and pretty consistent reviews.

It's also really bad when you go over how many games you've played from six months of the Humble Monthly - which ain't cheap, after six months - and that is seriously at a whooping 1/30 or something. Ok that's worse.

But I did finally manage to play Hammerwatch

Two pack review: an Imp? A Fiend! & Astaral Breakers

I run into this issue from time to time where a game just doesn't have enough meaningful content to discuss in a broad, long review. Having hit on two of these games in a row, and having posted nothing in months, I guess I'll lump these two together.

 An Imp? A Fiend is about the easiest game type in the universe to review. It is a torture platformer, more in line with Super Meat Boy than something like There Was a Caveman, which I enjoyed a heck of a lot more than either of the former. This is a platformer with rotating saw blades, double jump, wall jump and a lot of the usual suspects. Pixel artwork, boilerplate soundtrack, etc.

The game is... Bad sort of in relative terms. There's nothing really distinguishing here, except that your imp is pretty good in a fight, but the game is just a bit of a chore without much pay off. Screens are filled with enemies, which is lame, but the real bummer is when you get to the first town and basically no one says anything. Just screen after screen to waddle through, with NPCs that shouldn't be in the game and extra busywork. For the one town you acquire the key, but you have to thaw the key out, only nothing really implies this... So you just wander around til you find that exact spot and yeah it's pretty not great.

I got about thirty minutes of amusement here. The controls are good, and I like how your little imp doesn't exactly feel like a slouch, but eventually you start smashing your face into screens filled with spikes and saws, and it's just not that exciting. That's all there is to the game, but it's not really quite as quick or nuanced as better versions of the genre. It feels like it could use a bit more polish and a lot more consideration of game flow.

Astral Breakers is a tetris vein puzzle game of ... Oddly limited means. I was fiddling around with the new Genesis Hub thing where I have a copy of Columns, and the game is very reminiscent more of Columns somehow than pure Tetris ... But even then not all that much.

Basically you drop 1 singular colored block at a time, which is unusual. The blocks are completely nonreactive and won't disappear by themselves. At seemingly random points, the game gives you the breaker power up, which you can enable with a keystroke. The power up is added to whatever color you currently have, and it 'breaks' all connected blocks of that color. You can aim the powered up blocks at blocks of another color, they won't break, and this - in theory - sets up the combo system.


As far as I can tell, the game is about that. You can set up combos by having 'breaker' blocks set up to fall on their matching color, but I honestly found this just about never happened, because you're always competing against an opponent and whenever they do a break random crap spews on your screen.

Oh, and the game has an adoreable little intro video with a little star. D'awww.

Frankly, this game is probably a good introduction to puzzle games since it feels very under your control, but it's not a Tetris, not a columns and definitely not a Bejeweled. Maybe if you wanna give a kid a non-violent but simple game, it would work there, but for me there's just not enough to recommend it.


Anyway, I generally wouldn't recommend either of these games. An Imp? is a decent torture platformer, but I'm a poor judge of the genre since I hate these kinds of games. Astral Breakers is just too simple for its own good. It just doesn't grab you, even though it is a quality presentation.