Witch cards will drop: Porradaria Upgrade

This game isn't any good, and neither was my reason for playing it.

I'm still putting time in to grind out games that have cards, that I want to play. I idle stinkers, but I can usually spare the five minutes to see if a game is worth playing. Porradaria, on the other hand, caught my eye because looking over the 'badges' page you can see black bars across some of the cards. I paused, staring at them in confusion. Was he censoring his own trading cards? What the...?

So yeah I installed and played it to figure out what kind of brazen nudity this greenlit game had managed to sneak through. For reference, there is nudity of various kinds in Steam, I think? The Witcher's cards are censored, although maybe they're not anymore, and I'm not sure how censored the Witcher 2 is. I'm pretty sure Huniepop is censored, but I don't own it, and I know from people's discussions in the SA Steam thread it has an uncensored version. But Path of Exile had some minor nudity (mostly statues, iirc) and many other games might have similar little bits hanging out. I feel like there was a horror game I played recently that had some nudity. Oh yeah, the ghost psychic in Fear 2 had her bits out.

That was chilling.

Personally, I don't think nudity is all that big of a deal. It can be effective in horror or in showing decadence, but those big black bars of censorship made me genuinely wonder what the deal with this game was. So, you know, a bad reasons to waste an hour of my life.

Inaccurately named: Gunpoint

I'm not a historian and I don't know when it happened, but at some point advertising took over the naming of things. Probably in the sixties, but probably like the 60s BC. A flashy name was worth more than actually, I don't know, describing the contents of the project. Thusly we have Gunpoint, a game in which I was shot about a hundred times but never held at Gunpoint, and only shot a singular person throughout the entire campaign. The developer straight up admits he came up with the name and built a game that got away from the name.

Your character is holding a gun on the box so... Actually I guess it's kind of a reverse spoiler or something... Well, whatever. Gunpoint is a puzzle game, a genre rarely recognized for its thrilling action-o-matic scenes. Actually it might be better described as a Noir detective ninja puzzle game, or maybe a spy thriller puzzle game. You're described as a spy, but you look more like a noir era detective. It's a spy game, basically, in that fantasy realm of spy games that I don't think we get that many of any more.

Well, there isn't a box. If there was a box, then he'd be holding a gun on the box. Or the tin, if you bought the hypothetical nonexistent collector's edition.

It's also a pixel art game. If you've been reading my reviews for a while, you probably realize I'm a little enamored with pixel art games. Good pixel art, mind you, which can be minimalist like Risk of Rain or incredibly detailed like Sonic Mania. There's lots of bad pixel art, lots and lots, people just taking the easy way out and making something "retro".

I wouldn't describe Gunpoint as retro. In fact, the juxtaposition of elements and ideas in Gunpoint are such that it really ends up defining itself by stringing together those elements into something that feels familiar but also unique.

Toward the Verge: Strider

Strider!

Strider is a word used here for ... Like literally ninja. You're a "strider" from a "strider" school which teaches you to strider people to death. It's weird. They also call you "Strider" like it's a name but you are also a strider from that strider school, and they previously sent other striders to bestride the stride-able but they failed in their striding leaving all possible stridering to you.

Or something? In Ninja Gaiden do they just call the main character 'ninja?'

I had actually played Strider on the Genesis slash Mega Drive back when I was a young'un, but I don't have any strong memories of it. Reading wikipedia on the history of the release, it sounds like it was considered very highly as games go and not a metroidvania at all. Strider, here, is a Metroidvania and thereby covered vaguely under the toward the verge sub-banner of games I've played.

I'm going to be honest in that as a genre goes or has gone for me this year, this has not been what I would call a pleasant set of games. Generally speaking what you end up with are a lot of games with dull hallways, mediocre enemy placement, boring gameplay. No sense of exploration, of 'opening up' the game world or progression.

Strider is both the best and worst of the games I played in this regard. I didn't write many reviews, since there are more than a few games I feel like I might go back to in the doldrums between the two great sales, when I'm not trying to grind out many a card. Strider is a mix of a lot of elements that really make me wonder how much better it would have been if it wasn't crippled by being lashed to metroidvania elements.

It is also apparently inspired by Shadow Complex, so man, did that ever make me not want to pick up Shadow Complex.

The coolest thing about this game is that the Strider's scarf changes color when you change plasma options. You won't notice this early on, since you don't get a plasma change for quite a while, but you can actually change it on the fly and it slowly flows out. A lot of the visuals pick up on this sort of subtle element while the rest of the game hesitantly sits down before drooling on itself.