Maybe the best paced metroidvania? Hands out power ups at a perfect clip. And just one of the best feeling video games to control. Goes a long way in just feeling satisfying to run around and shoot. Makes Metroid 1 playable in 2023!
(more…)Category: Platformer
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Sometimes You Just Replay Mega Man 2
Perfect to blow through in 2 hours. Give me short bursts of gameplay these days, that’s what I’ve been looking for. You give me a list of short stages with a theme, I give you the heads of 8 robot masters.
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Spyro Reignited Still Owns and Some GOTY
I really enjoy doing those little letterboxd reviews because I can sit with a movie for an hour and a half and have a complete experience to mull over and jot some thoughts down about. When a game takes me 20 hours over the course of 2 months that’s a tougher ask.
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Games of the Month – February 2020
So uh, the last month has been… a lot! Between the plague and the politics, it’s not looking great out there folks. But instead of turning into absolute despair hour (for that, check my Twitter), what if we talked about some video games for a second?
Doom Eternal is mere hours away at this point (UPDATE: it’s out! I have it! I lived!). Animal Crossing’s tonight. It’s time to put February to bed.
1. Scourgebringer
Is it time to call our Game of the Year yet? Because right now, it’s Scourgebringer by a country mile.
Without Flying Oak Games’ instant , February would have been a relatively unmemorable month. There’s still good stuff to find, sure, but this one’s in a league of its own. Scourgebringer is still only in Early Access, but wow what a showing. I know now the game’s been in alpha for a year. I wish I had known! The game’s Steam release has blown me away. Action as tight as Doom 2016’s with as many variables and options but on a 2D plane? What a weird, wonderful idea.
ScourgeBringer is fast. Like, blink while you’re watching someone play and you’ll miss them clearing a room, fast. And for me? The faster the roguelike the better. You enter a room full of enemies, figure out the most efficient way to obliterate them in five seconds, and move on to do it again. It’s not the most original idea, but the execution is done so well it’s been hard to tear myself away. And when I’m not playing, I’m wondering what next week’s content update might bring. It’s real, real good.
Go play Scourgebringer for yourself it looks or sounds remotely interesting to you. It’s quite difficult to convey just how good the game feels in your hands until you’re dashing and slicing and blasting through the hordes for yourself. Combine that with the game’s combo system and skill tree, and you’ve got yourself a game to return to again and again.
For a game that seems roughly halfway content complete, a bunch of full games have a lot to compete with already. Expect to be hearing about this one for a while. That’s assuming we survive the next handful of months, of course.
2. WORLD OF HORROR
What if the world was a terrible hellscape and only your wildest imaginations could predict what awful thing would happen next? Also, did you hear about this spooky new Junji Ito inspired game? It’s good too!
WORLD OF HORROR is a solo effort from @panstasz about surviving an onslaught demons and monsters that have been unleashed. While I haven’t put as much time into this one as I plan to, early signs are good. I participated in an eldritch ritual. I fought a demon. I got my face permanently sliced open by an evil scissor lady and lived… for a while. It’s cool! The one thing I don’t have a great grasp on so far is the combat. As an adventure game it’s all menu based, and the combat is turn-based from said menu. But there’s a bit of complexity there involving what order to take certain moves, when to defend or attack or whatever. It’s all gone over my head a bit, and I’m playing mostly to see ghosts and non-euclidean monstrosities, not to learn a light combat programming language. But, like I said, the good parts are super good.
3. Mission Zigloton
A weird platformer that I found had launched on itch.io to little fanfare: Mission Zigloton by Ben Lega! Have you been looking for a pretty simple way to kill an hour or two? Ben’s got ya.
Mission Zigloton rarely pretends to be more than just a solid platforming adventure. You’ll collect doodads to open up areas which you’ll then run and jump through to collect other doodads. Towards the later half of the game, you’re introduced to a couple of boss fights and stealth sequences that feel a bit out of place but aren’t unwelcome. It’s neat!
Again, this was a super light month in terms of releases, but this was just the kind of appetizer I was looking for before the big big big stuff starts hitting and doesn’t stop. It’s also completely free!
Honorable Mentions
Escape Vauban
A very good, very quick escape room game.
Balavour
A sad short horror story about a girl, a dog, and a flower.
The Convenience Store
Decent on its own, but pales in comparison to its clear inspiration – Puppet Combo’s opus, Night Shift.
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Celeste is a Tough as Nails Platformer With a Heart of Gold
It’s a difficult 2D platformer with pixel art. None of you would have ever, ever expected it on this site, would you?
Luckily, even though I’m a sucker for any of these, this one’s better than the handful of moderate-to-good indie platformers we get tossed at us every few months or so. Bringing back memories of my first playthrough of Super Meat Boy, Celeste brings the challenge that just feels so, so good to accomplish. The campaign also does way more narrative legwork than Super Meat Boy ever attempted (i.e. any), and is a surprisingly heartfelt tale of a young girl overcoming her own anxieties with the help of friends. It’s sweet, relatable, and hit me so hard at one point that I had to take a break; not from the platforming challenge, but from the challenging subject matter.
Not satisfied with just giving you a lengthy story mode with a genuinely compelling cast and story, there’s a whole extra couple of playthroughs to break your controllers in once you think you’re done. Clocking in around 20 hours now, I’ve fully completed the game’s first and second main campaigns, barely scratched the surface of the speedrunning aspects, and walked away in awe/disgust at how wild the final challenges are.
As much as I adore Celeste it isn’t without a glaring issue or two. First off, at the very end of the second campaign, a brand new mechanic is introduced. Though, “introduced” is a strong word here, and would imply the developer bothered to mention nearly anything about it before you’re expected to be an expert at using it.
It’s like you were going to have a nice hang sesh with Celeste, but they brought their friend along without telling you and also their friend lives with you now and oops Celeste is gone and now you live with a new weird friend who you don’t really know what to do with.
Uh, yeah, it’s pretty much like that.
I’m not kidding about it being strangely brought up at the end of the campaign. After a maybe 7 hourish Hard Mode, you’re in the last 20 minutes and are told to cross an obstacle you’ve never seen before. The game says “Jump – Dash (UP ARROW)” and expects you to understand what that means. Trust me, you don’t just jump, dash, and press the up arrow. That hint is pretty much worthless.
So after you give up jumping and dashing and head to this Reddit page of other confused people, you’ll figure it out. Remember that scene in Super Metroid where the small animals start jumping up a wall and you learn “Whoa, I bet I could do that too!” and you learn a brand new mechanic naturally through the game’s good design? I remember it. I don’t think the developers did.
The puzzles are also kind of hit and miss. They seem to aim for a Fez-like vibe but feel a bit out of place and too complex for their own good, especially if you’re in the animalistic mindset of “I just wanna jump over more pits.” The first puzzle you encounter with the birds is pretty rad though. Not super difficult but requires more than ten seconds of thought to solve. More like that please!
Aside from a couple of gripes that make up less than 1% of the whole game, Celeste is a beautiful work of art. Lena Raine‘s soundtrack hits every note perfectly. The art makes every area instantly identifiable and distinct. The platforming never feels mean or unfair, and always seems surmountable, even after a hundred deaths on one obstacle.
Celeste is up in the ranks with The End is Nigh and Super Meat Boy as far as indie platformers go, and I’m glad to see Matt Thorston and Noel Berry climb into the ring with the likes of Edmund Mcmillen, Tommy Refenes, and Tyler Glaiel. I’ll take all of the excellent platforming I can get.
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10 Second Run RETURNS Is Fast, Frantic Fun
Every single level in 10 Second Run RETURNS (they write it in caps so don’t forget to scream it) has a time limit of 10 seconds. The first level, the final level, the four player multiplayer levels… all equally manic. Speed is quite literally the name of the game here, and they never let you forget it.
In less than an hour after downloading the game on Switch, I had blown through the single player campaign. It was fun as heck, and I never put my Switch down from start to finish. The thing is, though, that (if I’m being generous) the whole thing took about 45 minutes. I was a bit disappointed that it was already over after such a quick, albeit enjoyable, run. Luckily, once you’re finished racing through traps, fireballs, and other obstacles by yourself, it’s time for the better option.
While the single player mode’s draw is three stars to collect in each stage, the multiplayer mode doesn’t have that. What is does offer, however, is some of the most frantic yelling you’ll do with/at your friends outside of Overcooked. Two to four players each get a segment of the screen and are tossed into another set of 50 levels to sprint through. It’s just a very fun version of the platforming speedruns you see on AGDQ and the like, but all fit on one system without having to hook up four consoles for the same result.
10 Second Run RETURNS isn’t going to win any awards for it’s art. It doesn’t have the in-depth mechanics of something even as recent (and on the same system) as Celeste. But it’s a quick, fun game that’s better than the sum of its parts. And really, if you have anyone to do race mode with… you’ll probably get your money’s worth the first time you beat your friend to the finish line by .0001 seconds.
If you’d like to make three friends mad that you rule at platformers, check out the game on the Switch eShop.
This game was provided for review by the game’s developer/publisher.
hippochippies 