One good thing I can say about this game is the animation team went hard at it. The game looks gorgeous. Too bad about everything else. I mean the concept in itself isn't too bad, it's a puzzle platformer with some metroidvania elements, but you control multiple characters (up to 3) that you can switch between to solve puzzles, or control all at once to move around easier. It's a good idea, but the execution is lacking. It seemed like whenever I was concentrating on moving one character to get them in position for whatever the puzzle called for, the other inactive character would get attacked by monsters that spawned right next to them. You don't have much HP (4) and healing is rare outside of item use (and your inventory slots are very limited). Boss fights are even worse, where you need to avoid lots of attacks, but you can either only control one character at a time, or control them all where they execute the same movements, but this has a tendency to de-synch, leaving some of your characters as sitting ducks. And if anyone dies in the fight, it's game over for the entire party. Combat also feels off. Something about the hitboxes seems off, and all your special attacks seem to be a bit delayed with a few frames of windup, and this seems to mean that the enemies just will get a free hit on you. So you end up just spaming your basic attacks, leading to repetitive and uninteresting fights. Also there's some unskippable cut scenes before some boss fights, so yeah, you'll probably see those a few times too many. And even moving around the map feels a bit sluggish and off, which is horrible in a platformer. And the last guy you unlock has a hookshot that I found near impossible to use in an effective way. Thankfully, the game is short, I finished it in under 10 hours, but it still felt like a slog. It's a shame such beautiful animation was wasted on such a mediocre game.
I grew up playing games on my Nintendo. I knew of 8 Eyes from back in the day because I saw it in Nintendo Power, but I never had a chance to play it. But it stuck in my mind because of how similar it looked to Castlevania 2, which I loved. I noticed this last week that it's on GOG, so I picked it up to try, and it's a disappointment. First, you don't get the game manual with GOG, I had to search for a scanned copy online. Managed to find it, which was good because it has key details of how to play the game in it that you'd miss if you just started to play the game without reading it. And through reading the manual I find out this game isn't as open world as I had thought, as you need to go through the worlds in a particular order as each boss is only vulnerable to one sword, and each boss you defeat will give you one new sword. And right after this I read the section on 'Lives' and alarm bells start ringing in my head. It says 'This is a one-life game. If you lose the life, the game is over. No free men are awarded. This is reality!' No my dude, this is a video game. I start playing and your guy moves like a slug and has a shorter range with his sword than just about every enemy. The combat isn't fun, you're basically trading hits with enemies and feels deliberately punishing. Like it goes beyond Nintendo Hard to blatantly unfair. I don't know if it's a problem with the port, or if this game always played this badly, but I had to give up on it. It just wasn't worth it, even though I like the concept they were going for, it's just lousy execution. Unless you know exactly what you're getting into here, like you played it back in the day and you really want that nostalgia hit, than I'd let this game stay back in the 80s. It did not age well, and I suspect it wasn't enjoyable even back in the day.
I just wanted to have some fun shooting Nazis, and this Game has Nazis, Nazi Zombies, and Nazi Supersoldiers all up for the slaughter. So why didn't I like it? After a promising first few levels, the game turns into an unfun slog. Levels are littered with gotcha snipers that you can't anticipate turning much of the game into an exercise in savescuming. Enemies are often hard to see, being brown shirts in a brown world, while you must be going into combat wearing a bright neon disco suit, because every enemy seems to be hyperaware of where you are at all times. I think the game really wears out its welcome shortly after the flamethrower dudes start showing up. They're like a microcosm of what's wrong with the game. When I first started fighting them I thought I must have been doing something wrong because they often took multiple clips of automatic fire to bring down, so I looked at a wiki, and nope, they're just bullet sponges and take no extra damage from headshots. Meanwhile, they have an absurdly long range on their attack, it does massive damage to you, and blinds you so you can't see anything while you're taking damage. AND then you've got to unload about 2 clips of bullets into them before they go down, which is about a quarter of the total ammo you're allowed to carry for your main gun. It just feels punishing for no good reason. But that wouldn't be so bad if the game had a good amount of health/armor/ammo refills laying around, but it's pretty sparse with those, and they never seem to be where you need them to be. So even if you manage to survive a tough fight, you may be so low on health that you'll die form the next shot from a sniper that pops up behind you, so you'll have to reload anyways. This isn't a game loop that I enjoy. I realized I wasn't having fun with the game, so I cannot recommend.
The Animation and the Music are just beautiful. And if you've read anything at all about the game you heard it's tough. And it is. Cuphead is essentially a series of boss fights you can select from an overworld map. With the defeat of each boss, you unlock more of the overworld, and you can find more boss fights. There are a few non-boss fight levels in the game (six if you're counting) where you run around, shoot things, and collect coins, but mostly this game is all about the boss fights. So whether you consider this game good or not will really depend on how much you enjoy the boss fights. I've heard a lot of other reviews saying that all the boss fights are 'tough, but fair'. That is a lie. Most of the fights are exercises in overcoming frustration, learning patterns, and hoping for some good RNG so you get patterns that won't hose you. That anyone thinks that the fights are in any way fair are a testament to just how charming this game is. Some of the needlessly frustrating things I've found with this game is how a lot of time objects that can hurt you are obscured by set dressing; Bullets hidden behind foreground detail means hidden surprises to sap your life bar, and losing one of your three hit points to something you literally had no idea was there sucks. On some stages you need to ascend platforms to avoid projectiles and other hazards, but where the platforms appear seems to be generated randomly. I often found myself in spots where there was nowhere for me to dodge without taking damage because of dumb luck. Also, on the overworld map there are hidden coins you must find (if you want to buy all items and get 100% completion), but save for one coin, there are no indications where they might be. You need to either hit every pixel or look at a guide to find the coins, and that just rubs me the wrong way. But these are fairly minor gripes. The game is charming, if difficult. If it's your sort of thing, then you'll like it, but know what you're getting into.
This game has built an absolutely stunning and unique world to set the game in, that is fully realized with a wonderful story, imaginative level design, and an excellent cast of characters to inhabit it. It is a terrible shame that this game undermines this game at every turn. It is a platformer that has some stunningly made levels, but has poor controls and a camera that never seems to let you see where you're going or what you're doing. It gives you fantastic powers, but most of them don't work unless the plot calls for you to use that specific one. Some examples: You have a ranged psychic blast that you can't aim at anyone unless you're at near melee range. You get invisibility, but anything you'd want to sneak by can see though it. You can lift enemies up with your telekinetic powers, but can't actually do anything to them other then let them down gently where they were already standing. You CAN light a lot of enemies on fire, but that doesn't stop them from attacking you, and now they'll light you on fire as well. There are epic boss battles, that turn out to be frustrating games of 'guess which environmental hazard or psychic power the devs want you to use at this point'. Hint: It's never the one that you'd think would be the obvious choice. There's tons of things to collect, many of which you can barely see, even if you're standing in front of them with the camera focused on them. Oh, and at some point, we'll lock you out of backtracking to collect the items you've missed. It's like the game was designed by the whims of a cursed monkey's paw.
The game looks gorgeous, and hits the right notes for the mood it's trying to portray. Felt genuinely creepy & eerie. Except for those moments where you fall into a pit even though you were sure you could make that jump. The game has a problem with perspective. It's in 3D space, but has a fixed camera like it's a 2D platformer, and very little in the way of indications of where objects are in relation to other objects, so you'll often find yourself hitting obstacles that you thought you'd clear, or missing jumps you thought you'd make. There was one section where all I had to do was walk in a straight line, and managed to die 3 times because I accidentally stepped too far to one side of the pipe I was walking across, because it's hard to know if you're centered when you only see the side of the object. This makes for poor gameplay, which is a shame, since this game is reliant entirely on gameplay and art direction for it's charm, as story is a very thin veneer. You just need to survive each room and make it to the next, until you find yourself at the end of the game. Your motivations and backstory are left to your imagination. Although, It does manage to maintain its wonderful atmosphere throughout the game, but seeing as I completed the game in under 3 hours, it shouldn't have been in any danger of wearing out its welcome regardless. I also had some problems with the scripting physics in the game. After one cut scene, a monster left the room and knocked over a cage. There was an object I needed to reach, but couldn't. I tried standing on the knocked over cage, and it was still out of reach. After exhausting all options, I restarted from my last checkpoint, and this time, the monster did not knock over the cage, and I could just drag it to the right place and stand on it to reach the object that I couldn't before. This seems like a QA fail. Overall though, I did enjoy the game, but at $25 CAD @ full price, I'd recommend waiting for a sale if you're interested.
Overall I had fun playing this game, but there were parts of the game that I found frustrating. There are some platforming challenges that are Celeste-like, but this game has some shortcomings that make these sections even more disheartening. One ability your guy has is to activate a slow-fall mechanic, which you do by pressing A. Another is a double-jump, which you also do by pressing A. In tough platforming sections I've had my guy double-jump into spikes more than once when I wanted them to float, because of how these two functions are mapped to the same button. I would have loved it if they had the float mapped to a trigger, but alas, it is not. Also most platforming is done over instant death pits, so even small errors in judgement will lead to a game over, and an annoying death message. Also, many boss fights felt cheap, and I had many, many deaths trying to learn their patterns, but the fighting in this game just isn't that interesting, so this became boring and repetitive. Another small gripe with this game is that most enemy projectiles go right through walls, while your ninja stars don't, which I think is an odd design choice. But if you can make it past the boss fights, and the frustrating platforming (the most difficult of which are optional, only for gathering collectables to unlock a secret weapon), you'll find the core of this game to be a decent action platformer, that has an interesting story to it. One thing I should say is that this game initially got my attention by being reviewed in some places as a hot new Metroidvania style game. And while this game does have some metroidvania like elements to it, I really wouldn't call this game a metroidvania. The game is of decent length, and took me around 15 hours to play through, and has a number of different themed areas where the action takes place in, and there's a good in-game map that you unlock that means you always know where you are, even if you don't know where you're going.
It's a fun little point and click adventure game, where you follow a family through a few generations of life on their estate, witnessing people get born, grow old, get murdered, and practicing dark rites. I like the hand drawn aesthetic of this game. The puzzles are fairly straightforward, some require thinking, but no moon logic or pixel hunting. There's 30 some levels, that are mostly just one screen each, each depicting vignettes of in the lives of the family. I picked this game up on sale for under $2, and it gave me a day's worth of entertainment. Would recommend if you're looking for a light point and click puzzle game, and enjoy some Edward Gorey levels of grisliness along the way.
Let me first say that I like this game. It has a wonderful atmosphere, art direction, and a unique setting. It's the 1800s, some terrible calamity has fallen upon the surface of the world, and humanity has retreated inside the Hollow Earth to survive, where they find a new world of mushrooms, darkness and a vast underground sea. You play a ship Captain, and you voyage across this dark world delivering cargo and uncovering secrets. Utterly charming so far. The problem are with the pace of the game, the rewards it gives you, and an expectation of legacy play. You begin each iteration of your character in Underground London, and there's a vast uncharted, semi-randomly generated world for you to explore. And explore it you do, at a snail's pace. Your ship is slow. Very slow. Even crossing known waters you must still pay attention as there's hazards in the sea. I timed how long one trip took, I was given a mission from the Admiral to collect important intelligence reports from an agents on an island halfway across the map. To make some side money, I looked up what trade goods that island wants. Sapphires, Not sold in London, but there's a port not too far off the path that has them, and they want Wine, which is sold in London, so off I go. That 3 port trip, with a few very slight detours, too me nearly a real life hour to complete. And the rewards? Well I could buy Wine in London at $21, and sell at the first port for $23, where I could buy Sapphires for $86, and sell them at my destination for $95. Netting a profit of $11 for every cargo space I could spare on the trip. How far does that go in the game? Well shore leave for your crew typically costs between $10 and $50, so not very. Sleeping one night at your London townhouse will set you back $100. Rewards are slim. And failure is punishing. And frequent. Dozens of hours sunk into one iteration can be lost with a single bad choice or unlucky outcome. Making the game feel overall not worth it, despite it's good aspects.
So I read a lot about this game, and I love point and click adventures, and I love horror, so I thought this game would be ideal for me. And while the story that this game tells is reasonably good, it suffers from some cheesy voice acting and being dragged down by an albatross of bad game play. Your character is afflicted by the worst movement mechanism I've ever seen used, where instead of clicking where you want to go, you instead position your cursor in front of your dude and hold down the right mouse button for them to possibly move vaguely in that direction for as long as you hold your mouse button down. This works terribly because it doesn't seem to be very accurate and you'll constantly be moving in a slightly wrong direction. This would be a slight annoyance outside of the game's mercifully few action sequences if it weren't for stairs, which you automatically move up and down on, especially when you don't want to, and that your character seems to get caught on the scenery much too often and randomly, where you'll have to question if you can go through that dark patch of grass or not. Inside the action sequences the devs seemed to be aware enough of how bad their movement system was and when you fail at them they'll just kick you back to the start of the sequence, but keeping the game progress you have managed to make. The other big gripe I have with movement is how slowly you character does move. Going across the map to try and solve a puzzle turns into a several minute long ordeal, and you'll have to do this quite often because the screen is locked to your character and you can't look around the map without moving him, and many items are small and easily missed or easily mistaken for background details you can't interact with. I kept playing the game because I held out hope that the narrative would deliver a payoff justifying finishing this game, but it never came. If I could go back in time with what I now know, I'd pass on this game. A disappointment.
