Back again with only a few games.
October:
Lucah: Born of a Dream! I ended up coming right back to it after my last post, reinstalling it and playing through the postgame and getting all achievements except the two "Hard Mode"/"Challenge Mode" ones, all endings and the surreal scenes known as "sacraments" that fill out the backstory, albeit still full of vagueness and mystery. This game is quite haunting. I very much enjoyed the speed-centric second playthough, working to manage my rapidly-ticking corruption gauge by perfectly clearing fights with Soulslike precision, and enjoyed the alternate finales and hidden boss. It's been on my mind an awful lot, considering its production values and quirks.
November:
Hades! 107 hours, 94 runs, of which 43 were successful in defeating the final boss. All achievements, max affininity with everyone, saw damn near every line of dialogue and I suspect it'd still have surprises waiting for me. Maximum "Heat" (difficulty modifier combinations) I went up to was 16, and although that final run could've been an Extreme Measures 4 run and I'm confident I would've won, I feel that I've seen how that version of the final boss plays out and I have sufficient closure.
So, for context: Hades is a roguelike by Supergiant Games, creators of the beloved Bastion, Transistor and Pyre. I would consider every single game they've made a masterpiece, but Hades is their Magnum Opus - bringing together all their artistry, game design and storytelling capability in the frame of a new Greek Myth about the son of the God of Death seeking to escape his father's realm from the depths of Tartarus, ascending through Asphodel, Elysium, and beyond the Styx itself to the surface. It is truly incredible how well the genre fits the story, and how the story is told in pieces regardless of victory or defeat - victories tend to progress the core plot, while defeats tend to progress the side-stories, relationships you build with the Cthonic Gods, the Olympian Gods, and the various shades of the underworld. Progress is earned through both permanent resources that upgrade your base movement, health and odds (albeit capping out quickly) and through per-run blessings from the gods that shape your build into either a finely-honed killing machine and/or a chaotic mess that spams attacks and hopes for the best. I never once felt limited by the choices on offer, excepting when I'd taken the one difficulty restriction that literally limits the choices on offer. Supergiant's now-signature difficulty modifications have far greater appeal in the roguelike format than they ever did in their linear narratives, providing you with more and more rewards as you gradually turn up the heat. The six base weapons are all viable and suit a vast array of play styles, as well as unlockable variations that provide a staggering amount of replayability. What a bloody great game. If you haven't got it already, put it on your wishlist. It's on damn near every platform and plays great with a keyboard and mouse or with a controller. This is unquestionably my Game of the Year.
December:
Snake Pass! A wholesome little 3D collectathon platformer... where you can't jump. You can move forwards, but only very slowly... unless you wriggle by tilting the analog stick left and right. Where you might expect a jump button, you can instead raise your head. This is a game about learning to move like a snake, coiling yourself around bamboo beams and fenceposts to pick up a trail of Shiny Things, including three big ones necessary to exit the level, a whole lot of wibbly water-bubbles called wisps that are akin to coins or notes, and 5 I-can't-believe-they're-not-Dragon-Coins in out-of-the-way and challenging locations. A nice bright mayan/aztec aesthetic and music by David Wise completes the vibe. Took me about 17 hours to collect every last thingamajig as I was quite meticulous in getting them all on the first pass, only to find the reward for rolling credits was an upgrade that lets you see hidden collectables. Oh well! Definitely a fun one for fans of novelty control schemes and classic collectathons.
Timespinner! I sat down to play this on Sunday morning and finished it - for the second time - shortly before midnight. A surprisingly compelling Metroidvania, with emphasis on the vania - this game is so much a love-letter to
Symphony and
Ecclesia that I can quote my
Bloodstained review verbatim - "more of that familiar
Castlevania flavour you love and remember". The menus are practically line-for-line identical in places, right down to a relics menu with toggles that are totally unnecessary, even being used for key items you'd never reasonably toggle off. The backgrounds and music are extremely familiar in places, as are certain layout setups. The character art reminds me more of
Chrono Trigger though, another pixelated time-travel adventure. However, it tells a relatively simple story for a temporal one, two time periods 1000 years apart, with sci-fi elements in one and fantasy in the other, but both having magic and empires, and you're on a revenge quest to stop the Evil Empire from murdering your clan and stealing your time machine. Essentially, it just means there's two maps which are fundamentally the same layout but with different tilesets - not quite a direct parallel to the inverted castle of
SotN but very close. A supposedly key mechanic is the ability to stop time, but it's rarely used except to briefly turn enemies into platforms, and I had no problem barely using it against bosses or in combat generally. Even the charged-up spells with a dedicated button are largely insignificant compared to your basic elemental attacks. The game seems to have a lot of cruft left over from emulating other games. Otherwise, it's a good game - good enough I was happy to throw on NG+ immediately after finishing it and speedrun it through to see the alternate ending I was locked out of the first time around, and ended up having 100% achievements in just under 11 hours. It's definitely not my favourite Metroidvania ever, but it's worth a spin? I'd place it above
Axiom Verge and
Gato Roboto, about on par with
Bloodstained, but below
Ori and the Blind Forest and
Hollow Knight. That said, it's mostly just made me keen to pick up
The Messenger, another retro-throwback-time-travel adventure inspired by a classic franchise.
Katana Zero! Barely 30 minutes into this one. Room-clearing murder-puzzles, like a side-on
Hotline Miami as a lethal samurai with precognition. Made by Askiisoft, creators of the wonderful
Tower of Heaven and
Pause Ahead, and featuring a video-like rewind aesthetic to the latter. More on this once I've bested it.
That's all for now, besides
Fall Guys (35 crowns and counting, although I've stopped until Season 3), and I'm still intermittently playing
Warframe and
Ring Fit Adventure.