Lurker > Kenri

OPUS: The Day We Found Earth (Steam)

Only really played this because I've heard Echo of Starsong is really really good and that's game #3 in the series. This was cute though, if short. I was expecting more of an RPG but it's really just a... I dunno, a point-and-click telescope sim? With VN elements?

There's an achievement for scanning 1000 stars. I scanned more than was necessary and only barely got the achievement for scanning 100 stars. wtf. ain't nobody got time for that shit.

Paradise Killer (Steam)

You can fuck the hunky doctor and the goat lady. 10/10

Fire Emblem Fates: Revelation (3DS)

This garbage fucking sucks. I dropped it after Scarlet ate it but decided to finally come back and finish it. Honestly not even worth it.

The Fates mechanics are just bad. They're just really, really bad and it would make the three routes all bad even if all the other stuff about them was good. But instead almost everything else is bad too. The map design in Revelation is especially unforgivable. Just constant slogs through overly large maps with clunky gimmicks that only exist to slow things down. Shovel this snow. Burn this thicket. Wait for this platform. It's awful. It all sucks.

The writing is infamously garbage but Revelation is garbage in a completely different way from the other two. But also it's garbage in many of the same ways.

Don't play this bad game.

The Sexy Brutale (Steam)

I loved this game actually. The puzzles were pretty easy (every time I was stuck for a bit it turned out I was just overthinking it) but I just loved the game's setting and concept and... vibes. The ending twist leaves a little to be desired but it's essentially where I thought things were heading.

I was terrified they were going to make me save everyone in a single loop at the end. Thankfully not!

Simoun posted...

This was frustrating for me as well, but even more sad was this is how I found out Runic Games had filed for bankruptcy----they literally could not patch the game because they no longer existed.

Oh wow, that's a shame. Despite my complaining I would have liked to see what else they could make in the future.

Hob (Steam)

I wish I could give this one a wholehearted endorsement. I really love this game's animations, and I know that sounds like an odd compliment to lead off with, but it's just incredibly satisfying the way everything in this game spins and shifts and clicks together and interlocks. That ties into the exploration aspect too: yes, there are a couple upgrades that open new areas for you, but most of the progression is done by shifting new landmasses into place, literally building and modifying the world around you as you play. With lots of secrets too, it's just a really great metroidvania experience, if an unusual one.

Unfortunately the game's technical aspects are dogshit. I probably had around 10-15 full on "would you like to submit an error report?" level crashes, and that's not including all the times I fell through the world or whatever. Sometimes the map just doesn't load, too! But don't worry, you have bigger issues because that means the game will be crashing soon. Sometimes the game will crash during cutscenes. Sometimes it will decide to absolutely chug because too much stuff is on screen, until it decides to just crash anyway. It crashed during the final cutscene for me, which was after I beat the final boss at about 3 frames per second. This isn't even touching on the smaller bugs like invisible walls, graphical glitches, enemies attacking you during cutscenes, or the time an enemy's death cry just never stopped. Or the stiff controls. I'm willing to give a little benefit of the doubt and say maybe this was running poorly because I was playing it on Steam Deck, but it really doesn't feel like a good excuse!

Valdis Story: Abyssal City (Steam)

What a weird game. This is a metroidvania that definitely takes some pointers from the Souls games, but instead of bonfires and corpse runs, it's just bad at explaining anything and loaded down with missables and mutually exclusive upgrades and stuff. Very hard to tell if you're even playing it right. My build was probably pretty bad because a lot of the bosses ended up being incredible HP sponges in a way that didn't feel intentional, but I'm inclined to say I'm not at fault for this given the game provides zero guidance.

Also like. Is this a series?? The game keeps mentioning events and characters from, seemingly, a prior game, but does it actually exist or is it just kinda in medias res? Who knows! I do appreciate the incredible late 90s anime energy it has, though. The main character is a half-demon sword boy with a superpowered rage mode. His allies have names like Shadoboxxer and Ben McSteely. One of his allies is a panda with a laser cannon. Incredible that this was released in 2013 yet so perfectly channels the aesthetics of Toonami in the early 2000s.

There are 3 alternate characters to play as so I might come back to this one later.

Vision Soft Reset (itch.io)

This game fucks. It's basically a 4D metroidvania, so while you're exploring the standard Super Metroid-style cavernous alien planet, you're also exploring different timelines that you create "nodes" in each time you save, which also function as fast travel points. Minor upgrades like extra health can't travel with you between timelines, but major upgrades do, so you can quickly hop between timelines to solve puzzles. But also, like a game like Outer Wilds, you'll sometimes have to start completely new timelines or use some outside-the-box thinking to solve certain puzzles.

I will say that while the game is a normal length for the genre (about the length of Super Metroid, I'd say) I kinda wish it was longer and really went deeper with the time travel mechanic! I also beat the game on accident -- I was doing something that I thought was a major sidequest, and it ended up leading me to the final boss. Whoops!

This game can be kind of punishing at the beginning while you're still getting the hang of the mechanics - and especially in combat, thanks to low health and an inability to shoot diagonally - but stick with it and it's totally worth the effort.

LiEat (Steam)

So this is actually three short JRPGs but they're all one package on Steam. Weirdly, the game that they most remind me of is Ace Attorney -- the majority of LiEat is just about going around and talking to people to eventually solve a mystery (though most of the actual deductions are done for you). The setting is interesting and I like the characters; the main duo especially has big '90s anime energy, with the hot knife-wielding con man main character and his superpowered adoptive child as a moral tether. It just works! Recommended.

Disc Creatures (Steam)

It's like Pokemon, but not Pokemon. I enjoyed it but I could also go on for a while about its flaws. For one thing, it had frequent slowdown for no apparent reason and probably crashed on me completely ~10 times -- maybe that was just due to playing it on Steam Deck, but it's rated playable so presumably not. I think everything it did differently from Pokemon was almost universally for the worse, which is a pretty sad position for a game to be in. The creature designs aren't great either, though some of them just need official art to fix a bad sprite. I still found a good number I liked enough to use, including Bladequin, Tungpedal, Posheon, Vipeworm, and Aubergee. It's kind of a shame you can only field 3 at a time.

I did basically everything except the post-game battle coliseum that just seemed tedious. Of the Pokemon -- sorry, creatures -- that aren't locked behind coliseum rewards or gacha, I think I only missed about 5 tedious to obtain ones.

That's two big recommendations for Chicory I've seen now. Gonna have to play it at some point!

I can relate to... a lot in your write-up. The staring at a blank paper, the maybe-ADHD-maybe-not, the procrastination, the feeling that first drafts were somehow beneath me as a kid (and unfortunately, even in grad school where I was definitely no longer good enough to kinda justify it). Also the not being good at art and feeling like it's too late. Wish I could say that I figured out solutions for any of them, but not really! NaNoWriMo helped with the "just write something instead of staring at an empty doc" problem at least. I used an app called Write or Die where the background would slowly turn red if you stop writing for too long, which turned out to be all the motivation I needed. For everything else I'll just say that I can sympathize.

Thanks for doing this list. The whole thing was a great read and put a bunch of games I hadn't heard of on my radar.

Environmental Station Alpha (Steam)

Insanely frustrating game. I really wanted to like it, but it does what I've decided is my absolute least favorite thing for a Metroidvania to do: have a bunch of one-way paths making exploring and backtracking an incredible chore. This game absolutely punishes you for wanting to explore, not even by killing you, just by wasting your goddamn time because there's usually nothing to find and no easy way back to where you came from. I ended up just reloading my save a lot rather than doing an incredibly circuitous loop when exploration didn't pay off. Between that and the tough bosses, my Steam time was almost 19 hours but my in-game time was less than 10. Crazy.

The game is also very, very dense and confusing, and not in a fun way, and every guide online is out of date or incomplete so good luck! Especially with the labyrinthine post-game quests. I did most of them and killed the double-secret final boss (very, very cool boss fight -- probably the best in the whole game) but didn't do everything because it's just too much. Incidentally, one of the post-game bosses has absolutely broken hitboxes and damn, it's a good thing I don't have anger issues because if I did I absolutely would have thrown my Steam deck against a wall. I swear, I was stuck on the thing for about 2 hours.

Safety bump

Lost Ruins (Steam)

What a weird game. It's kind of a Metroidvania, but there are no real movement abilities. It's kind of a Souls-like, but there aren't corpse runs or bonfires. It IS fun, though, if you can get past all the jank. There are certain quirks (like how attacking in the air cancels all your momentum immediately) that you'll just have to get used to, but if you can, the combat ends up being pretty satisfying. There's also an incredible amount of tension to the whole game because save points don't restore your HP or MP -- in fact, there's no way to do so without spending resources or time. It makes the whole game feel like one big endurance run, which is probably not for everyone but is very unique and interesting. It also really highlights the different standards I have for 2D and 3D games, because if a 3D game had these mechanics I'd call it a piece of shit and drop it immediately. But in a 2D game I'm just like, "okay, challenge accepted."

Unfortunately, I don't think it really makes good on its promise to be an extremely difficult survival game. It starts that way: in the beginning, each enemy is a threat, there are a lot of traps, and you'll really have to pay attention and find in-game notes to gather info about situations before just jumping in. But sometime between the first and second boss it just becomes a fairly standard 2D action game. Once you get a strong weapon and equipment that passively heals you, it's pretty much GG. Almost every enemy in the game can be easily dispatched by the same one or two strategies. And by the end I was so overpowered that I could kill the last couple bosses in a few hits each.

The story is pretty whatever. I will give it credit for not being as poorly written as I initially thought, but then the ending kinda makes no sense, so... I dunno, it's just not great. There are also a couple really skeevy little details. The character designs are one thing and generally forgivable, but the permanent upgrades you collect are mostly children's underwear. It's easy enough to ignore but yuck.

Dusk Child (PC)

More itch.io backlog. This is a Pico-8 puzzle platformer. It doesn't overstay its welcome at about 30 minutes long but the controls are frustrating so I can't really recommend it.

MindSeize (Steam)

Good sci-fi Metroidvania that, unusually, does not copy Metroid in basically any way. It isn't a true Metroidvania because the whole game world isn't connected, but each planet is pretty large on its own and composed of multiple areas that are interconnected. The weapons are varied and I actually used almost all of them at different points in the game, rather than just sticking to one I liked. The upgrades are pretty well hidden so exploration is very incentivized, and - probably my favorite thing this game does - most of the hidden upgrades are not just more max health or whatever but full on new abilities or improvements to older ones.

This game also kicked my ass, the boss fights especially. You'll start a fight and go "oh, this pattern is tricky but I can deal with it, and my attack chunked off a tenth of the boss' health, everything's peaches and cream" but as the fight goes on, the boss pattern gets subtly faster and more chaotic until there's practically zero room to actually attack between dodges. Your heal takes a full second to activate and even then it only restores health over time, so it's hard to win battles of attrition too. I'm not trying to brag but usually I'm not particularly challenged by 2D games these days. MindSeize definitely brought me back to the days of, like, struggling with the Watcher Knights in Hollow Knight. Unfortunately the final boss is a bit of an anti-climax.

The Witch & The 66 Mushrooms (Steam)

Fun little Metroidvania with unique bosses and lots of uses for new powers in previous areas. It worked almost perfectly on my Steam Deck, but two rooms in the last area don't load correctly so I either had to stumble through 99% blind or play on my laptop like a peasant anytime I went through that area. I also had a few glitches where my character got stuck in the wall, which is apparently pretty common. Overall it's a solid game for being made in a simple game-maker though. I got 100% including the final challenge where you have to circumnavigate the game world as a cat, which was frustrating but satisfying to complete.

All that practice protecting idiotic green units in FE6 has finally paid off!

Holyn moment

Or whatever they're calling him now I guess

You might not care wrt pairings but he's Ayra's cousin, I know that bothers some people

UshiromiyaEva posted...

Friend of mine told me to potentially start considering pairings now that her and Adean are in board. Adean/Midayl seem like a cannon thing so probably that, but Arya...might wait until I see more characters, unless that's gonna make things difficult.

None of the pairings are really canon (though some are essentially canonized by Thracia 776) but there are pairings like Adean/Midayl where it's clear the characters are into each other, and usually that corresponds to faster love growth and/or unique conversations. Midayl's not the only one who likes Adean though so even if you stick to those, you have options!

The reason to start thinking about it now is because love between characters grows even when you don't want it to, and there's nothing like in later games where you have to accept the S-rank support in a menu to finalize it, it'll just happen without even telling you.

And IIRC the last castle auto ends the chapter

I always roll my eyes a little when people talk about a hypthetical remake letting you freely trade items, because that would completely change the game, but I do feel like choosing how much money thieves/lovers give would be a nice QoL improvement.

That said Dew accrues money insanely fast and barely needs it for himself, so it's not really a problem that he gives it all away.

Beasts of Maravilla Island (Steam)

I really liked this game! It is honestly just a Pokemon game, right down to having dueling legendaries -- specifically it's a free-roam (still highly linear, just not literally on rails) Pokemon Snap without scoring. Most of the creature designs are good and the environments are beautiful. My biggest issue with this game is that I just want more of it. I knew the game was short and it still surprised me with how short it was (100% in just over 2 hours, including all achievements). Only three areas feels very inadequate as well, especially when the last is kind of half-baked compared to the first two.

Dad Quest (Steam)

What a weird, weird game. You play as a Dad (male or female) who goes on the Dad Quest to collect the all the Dadges and become a Good Dad. You fight by throwing your indestructible Child. I'm not sure if the world-building here is neat or just bizarre but it's certainly something.

It's kind of a Metroidvania but much more of a quest-y one than is typical, so it doesn't really have MV vibes even if it has the gameplay. (No map either. We really need to start bullying devs more for this.) I 100%'d it including all the achievements because I'm an insane person. It's solid and truly, truly strange.

Para's already said that Lenna's Inception and Unpacking didn't make it, and I think Tunic is a 2022 game?

Has Paradise Killer been mentioned yet?

Each chapter has 7 set rounds that are always the same.

Each character can attempt to beat all 7.

I'm stumped on what #1 could be, but I assume it'll be an "oh, duh" moment when I see it. My random guess is Chicory, for no particular reason.

I've gotta play Echoes of the Eye sometime. I'm not as big on Outer Wilds as most of its fans seem to be, but it was still an insanely cool experience.

I wouldn't call him a Mary Sue personally but they fumbled writing him hard. It's funny because they start off pretty well, his 5x appearance shows that he's capable and a fun character but NOT invincible. And then they forget all that and make him invincible for the rest of the game, while also being much wiser than Eirika so she really has nothing on him at all. Really the Alm vs. Celica problem all over again. FE gonna FE, I guess.

Yeah Summoners are kinda broken once you understand that they're utility with niche combat uses and not combat with niche utility uses.

You play Eirika's route for the hilarity of Ephraim going off to singlehandedly conquer Grado and succeeding with enough time to spare to also double back and finish Eirika's route split for her. also an enemy general is now his subordinate.

Ghost ship on normal mode is cake.

Ghost ship on hard mode is FE8 suddenly deciding it's out for fucking blood.

That said, shout-out to my randomizer run when Kyle and Forde were both dancers. Between that and mage Ephraim and bishop Orson (with no healing staff) it made for a real unique Ch5x.

Forde is kinda infamous for being dogshit in general. I think it's a little exaggerated but he's worse than Kyle and way, way worse than Franz.

GRIS (Switch)

This is an exceedingly pretty game. You could grab any random frame of gameplay here and 99% of the time it'll be something gorgeous, surreal, dramatic, and unique. The music is hauntingly beautiful too.

The game itself is... okay. It's a 2D puzzle platformer that wants to be a walking sim, or maybe the other way around? There are puzzles and there is platforming, but a lot of the game is spent just holding a direction while stuff happens. And those are the good parts! There are also parts where you just hold a direction and stuff doesn't happen, but you have no choice because you need to get to the next area and it's waaaay over there and your walking speed is really slow.

The ending was quite good.

Zero to valkyrie

tbh I've never had an issue leveling staffbots in FE. If someone's gonna join underleveled I'd much rather it be L'Arachel than Sophia or Zeiss or Nino or whoever.

The bigger issue is that she doesn't get Slayer.

UshiromiyaEva posted...

Celica vs Eirika in a dumbass competition who ya got?

Celica but if Judah looked like a normal human instead of a literal ghoul then it would be Eirika

either way, winner fights Xander in the finals

Inexistence Rebirth (Steam)

This... is not a very good Metroidvania! Its biggest sin is chugging along at like an inconsistent 10-20 FPS, but it's just messy in general. Lots of typos. The best way I can describe the controls is "starchy". The text isn't sized correctly, so the menus glitch out and frequently select two options at once (great when you buy an antidote from the shop and get a free super potion, not so good when you're trying to heal during a tough fight and end up warping to the store instead). Obviously I 100%'d the map and got all upgrades and items, though I didn't do hard mode or the bonus "sister mode".

Despite the flaws it's a decently fun - if small - MV that feels sorta like a SotN hack, even sharing a lot of the same enemies. I did enjoy how powerful and useful magic is here. Normally I go through MVs with an almost exclusively melee build, but here magic is so outrageously OP that there's no reason not to use it as much as you can. It melts the final boss in a few seconds. Just absurd.

The game is frequently on sale for <$2 so at least the price is right. Fair warning that there's a slightly upsetting twist in the ending.

Nanis23 posted...

I am not even sure if that game has a desert section lol

It does, but it looks very different

FE8 is the easiest to just play and zone out (which makes it great for randomizers... well that and the monster classes) but I think it definitely has the weakest maps of the GBA trio.

She skipped leg day

1-2 sentence writeups have their own appeal but mostly when they're for something I already know well. For games I've never played/maybe never heard of, definitely prefer longer ones like this!

https://imgur.com/a/MHvOxLi

i was on a couple flights and some things happened:

Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light (Switch, originally NES)

Okay, this ended up being a lot more playable than I expected, despite the complete lack of any kind of quality of life feature. Hey, did you know you can't trade items in FE1, only give them? If two units both have full inventories, too bad! No battle prep either. Really I was surprised there was even a convoy. I honestly just eyeballed my way through this without really doing the math on if my attacks would work or not, luckily enemy quality is VERY low (at least until the last few chapters). I rolled with Cain, Abel, Caeda, Catria, Palla, Minerva, Navarre, Merric, Linde, Castor, Wendell, Boah, Ogma, and Barst because movement and staff use are king. Also magic. Also flight. And uh Barst was moral support. I don't think I'd play this again but I had a weird sort of fun!

Titan Souls (Steam)

What if Shadow of the Colossus was made for the SNES? Titan Souls is a pretty interesting boss rush type game where all you have is a single arrow. You die in one hit. The bosses die in one hit (sorta). They really don't have particularly difficult patterns or gimmicks, but there is very little room for error. Given that this game is all about bosses I do wish the bosses were somewhat more interesting (they're mostly bog standard), and given the high difficulty I wish the hit-boxes felt more exact (they look much smaller than they actually are, so give anything threatening a very wide berth). I killed all the titans and the secret final boss.

Escape from Tethys (Steam)

This game feels a lot like if Metroid 1 had gotten the Mario 3 treatment -- a late NES game that really iterates on the original and pushes the hardware more. It isn't like a top 5 Metroidvania, but it has solid retro sci-fi vibes if that's what you're craving, and it plays well too. There are lots of secrets so it's worthwhile to really explore the entire game world. Achievements don't pop in offline mode so I have the achievement for killing the final boss but not the one for the first boss.

Blooming Nightshade (Steam)

i'm gay

There are six routes in this VN and each corresponds to one potential girlfriend (there's also a prologue and some bad - more like neutral/platonic - endings). The first two I did - Nanami and Shiori - had me feeling kind of down on the game, because for those two routes the main character has a bad case of Extremely Malleable VN Main Character syndrome. They just sort of float along, with no initiative or strong opinions or, seemingly, even any likes or dislikes. However, the other four character routes are much, much stronger, and the ending of the Kiku route deserves particular praise.

I can see the writing style being very hit or miss for some people. Each route is made up of a bunch of very, very short scenes, which can usually be summarized as:
I found [girlfriend] at [place] and decided to say hello.
*girlfriend suggests doing [thing]*
*they do [thing]*
I don't know if I'd ever do [thing] myself, but it was fun to do it with [girlfriend].
I went back to my room thinking I understood [girlfriend] a little better.

It's this, over and over for about 4 hours. But while the scenes never have as much time to breathe as I'd like and while the internal monologue is stilted, the dialogue is pretty breezy and the characters genuinely are cute together. Don't expect much action or even much drama. It's slice of life (which I like) at an all-girls boarding high school (barf, but you can pretend they're in college pretty easily -- it certainly reminded me of my college days more than anything).

Catmaze (Steam)

Kind of like a less depressing Momodora + Slavic folklore + a little sprinkling of Cave Story, specifically leveling up from killing enemies but losing your levels as you get hit. Very solid Metroidvania and I obsessively played it to 100% completion, as is my wont. The ending is a little saccharine for my tastes and I wish there were more unique upgrades to go with the unique setting, but it's still great even if it doesn't break the mould. Character art is amateurish at best, which is weird because the sprite-work is very good.

Westerado: Double-Barreled (Steam)

I marathoned this open-world retro Western revenge story on my flight today. It's pretty interesting! You're trying to hunt down the person who killed your family, by doing tasks for people so they'll trust you with information. The game keeps track of your clues and you can accuse anyone in the game when you think you have them pinned down. You can also just... murder everyone, or help the local Native Americans take their land back, or whatever. It's very freeing, but in a way where it's easy to fuck things up by not considering the consequences of your actions. The combat is pretty nerve-racking too, though the lack of real consequences for death peel away the veneer of high stakes as soon as you realize. I feel like I'll probably come back to this one to try the other characters.

You should definitely do Eirika normal mode and then Ephraim hard mode. For reasons.

Lilina is so good. The glassiest of cannons.

UshiromiyaEva posted...

Awww dammit I missed the Delphi shieeeeeild.

Mewtwo59 posted...

That's a shame, since archers are the only thing that can kill Melady once she gets going.

UshiromiyaEva posted...

....accidentally put Melady in range of an Excalibur game over.

perfection

UshiromiyaEva posted...

Words cannot express the amount of suffering it took to get here.

I trained Sophia up to speed with the rest of my units on this chapter. Do not recommend.

UshiromiyaEva posted...

Just spent like 2 hours on chapter 11 to find a way to save all the villages. THIS GAME.

I didn't get the whip but I got the bolt and the Hero Crest.

What a NIGHTMARE. I mean if you don't want the stuff it's an easy map, but if you do, OOOOF.

This is legit one of my favorite maps in the series haha

Shin is better but mostly on hard mode where he gets hard mode bonuses.

You could also use them both a lot for the real FE6 experience

My group's favorite Jackbox game is Trivia Murder Party 2 but Job Job has definitely made a running for #2. The wheel on the other hand was a complete whiff, I don't think any of us liked the non-trivia parts and just personally I prefer Murder Party's style of trivia too.

Job Job definitely not an ally though after trying to out me as trans to my whole friend group by hitting me with a "if you went back in time, what's the one thing you'd tell your younger self?" prompt

Zealot (Jerrot?) can also help out in a pinch for at least a few chapters before he falls off.