Aquaria has a 'casting' system whereby the protagonist sings tones at the player's command, and certain tone / note combinations cast certain spells. I spent more time than I'm willing to admit (over an hour) just listening to her sing, no 'spell' or ability in mind, ad libbing acapella primal beats. The same level of attention and beauty has been payed to the backgrounds, the enemy sprites / behavior, the subtle environmental story telling..... At it's heart, ripping away the beautiful and captivating environments and artistry, you've got a perfectly serviceable 'metroid-vania' game. Highly recommended.
Pros : Every game has a different castle layout The weapon balance is superb, with only one arguably becoming obsolete The enemies are varied, with differing speeds, tactics, and weaknesses/immunities There is a ticking-clock mechanic Rarely did I feel like I "didn't know what to do" since there's always someone to rescue Rooms reacquire enemies after a time - there's never a feeling of safety Some enemies lie in ambush, but the ticking clock working in Real Time towards Midnight (and later Dawn) makes careful exploration dangerous in its own right. Each boss felt different (one was even a puzzle fight) You can mess up, let people die, and still complete the game with a 'victory' (albeit a harder won one) When you reload you lose the ammo left in your gun, instead of instantly adding bullets into a half-empty magazine (ala most FPSs excepting the Rainbow Six ones) Unlockable doors keep backtracking to a minimum (four or five rooms for the most part) Cons : The enemies aren't scary The graphics show their age (but aren't awful) There are a few bugs (some beneficial) There is a flaw in logic at the end that made a good deal of the struggle/stress from a particular aspect of the game irrelevant (I'm trying not to go into spoiler territory) In short, it's a fun little replayable First Person Shooter (/ Brawler) with multiple levels of interesting choices going on at any given time. If you finish a fight with just two rounds in your handgun do you reload, wasting those two, or go into the next fight having to almost immediately pause to reload? Do you 'slice the pie' and check corners on your way into a room, or do you sprint through because you want to rescue (Person X) before midnight and can't afford to be cautious? Do you breach a new room brandishing your crucifix (and blocking half your screen) to drive back vampires, or toting your pistol to gun down any hell hounds waiting in ambush? Small caliber revolver or slow, massive flintlock? Enjoyable!
If you've played a Soldak game before you've played this game before. If you haven't, I recommend the Depths of Peril and associated high-fantasy universe games first. If you *love* 2d space shooters and have already beaten Transcendence, Star Control 2 (The Ur Quan Masters), RingRunner (Flight of the Sages), and their ilk then this game is probably worth a go. For my money though the amount of time needed for one of the Soldak games isn't justified in this instance. It maintains the grind of Depths of Peril without having the storytelling / exploratory reward system. And since everything in these games is slowly falling apart when you're not saving the day, having the player take on the role of an apathetic mercenary is unrewarding. Once more - it's a decent game that doesn't do anything it's excellent predecessor didn't already do, and falls flat in a few places where that game shines.
The game has an interesting and fairly unique style. Playing detective, both in terms of 'who murdered that guy' and 'what is the nature of my possessing my host,' is fun. At least the first time around. It is short, and a lot of the time is taken up with prolonged conversation you have little input into. Opportunities for combat are few (your gun locks when you're not in a fighting set-piece) and (mostly?) avoidable. It makes reference to an A.R.G. - I guess exploring that would pad play quite a bit (I tooled with it for 45 minutes or so before setting it aside) but I'm not terribly interested in printing five hundred pages of ramblings, posting them to a wall, and tying them together with different colored threads like a madman. Which I'm fairly confident is the only way to make sense of it. The game poses a number of interesting riddles and complications but doesn't offer enough hints or resolutions to have a satisfactory ending. And it ends in a 'to be continued' cliffhanger. We all know how those work for small Indie studio games... I'd recommend it if it were on sale for five bucks, OR if they release additional chapters which grant any resolution to the plot.
This game, as other reviewers have noted, is frustrating and repetitive. Each level has a learning curve - the elements at play that can foil your attempts are hinted at, but the mechanics of how to control them are only discovered through experimentation. Which means failing. A lot. For reference, I've beaten the first level of "I Want To Be The Guy" before losing any interest in completing that game. If you have a similar level of masochistic doggedness this is worth checking out. Note that it should only take about six hours to play through the whole thing though, even if you mess up a fair amount like I did.... and since how much one should pay for the privilege of suffering in exchange for an eventual feeling of accomplishment is extremely subjective it is worth balancing the current cost against the playtime. It's more challenging than it is 'fun' but there's something going for that approach. Try to get to the third level at least - that's probably the most enjoyable one.
This game has about everything I could want from a Metroid / Castlevania style game. Novel backdrop. Plenty of optional backtracking, but with a 'warp zone' style mechanic that keeps you from being more than five minutes from any given spot you've been before. However, there's an extremely annoying mini-boss well over halfway through the game. It combines an area attack (instant stun effect, hits well beyond it's animation, no interrupt window, unblockable) with throwing the player into big holes in the area, sending them back several screens to a point full of low-damage, high juggling enemies and a time-based 'puzzle' needing to be completed to get back to the fight. It's a luck-based fight with a long-term (walk away from the computer, read the paper for a while, get a cup of coffee) reset delay while you wait for your character to die and respawn in the mini-boss's room. This is a new miniboss though, and the game is under constant development. I can not imagine they won't fix this game breaker fairly soon... but until they do I wouldn't advise it to anyone.
