Posted August 22, 2018
I'm thinking about shelving Mr. Shifty. It was an enjoyable ride for the most part, but the last stages are more annoying than fun. The difficulty is upped simply by making the levels longer and throwing lots of stuff at you that's tough to evade the first time around, and like in Hotline Miami, one hit means death and back to the beginning, so you need to memorize where which opponents and traps appear and then practice for the perfect run, which I find pretty boring. I was probably one level away from finishing the game yesterday and kept repeating it over and over again (this level was still somewhat entertaining because it allowed for more freedom than the linear levels, but you have to survive wave after wave of enemies and try not to get hit a single time). But the worst offender is that when you quit the game to take a break, the game doesn't save your checkpoint progress within a stage and makes you start from scratch, so in order to give that last level another try, I'd also have to repeat the levels before it that I had already beat. That's a design decision I don't care for at all and which makes me want to give up on this game shortly before the finish line.