Game is fun but felt a little short. Store page makes it look like pinball, but theres never really a moment where it felt like pinball. It feels more like brickbreak with a magnetic paddle. Gameplay boils down to avoiding damage zones and tracking type enemies while you use your charge attack to gather all nearby balls. Balls must be charged or they don't do damage so you cannot just hit the balls directly. After charging you can aim where you want them to go and they'll just bounce around uselessly until you can gather them in another charge (they'll likely have expended their energy). In simple terms, its like playing a topdown shooter with a charge shot but you have to gather your ammo from the level. Its a fun concept, lasts maybe 6-10 hours but I kind of wish it played more like pinball. Theres no real reason to replay it either.
Solid Retrovania. Doesn't particularly do anything amazingly well or have any glaring faults. The controls feel responsive. The puzzles are reasonably varied. It has some neat ideas using oldschool designs. The music is amazing and the visuals are good. Levels are a bit too long and tend to outstay their welcome, but thats not necessarily a bad thing. You don't get many combat options. Checkpoints are sparser than I would like, but thats probably because I've been spoiled. The bosses aren't great but I can say that about most games too. Overall, its a simple Platformer that fans of Metroidvanias and Retro games will enjoy and I don't have much else to say about it.
I don't typically like point and clicks but this does everything right. Choices feel like they matter, thats right. This is a point and click with meaningful choices, branching paths and many diverse endings. Its also never a problem to find items in each area, each chapter is paced just right and any items you missed will be provided somewhere in the level if they are needed. The areas and puzzles in them also vary greatly depending on how you played the previous chapters and its well worth playing through again for each ending. The story is neat, maybe a bit odd at times but its fresh and definitely fits the festive mood of this time of year. Its maybe 5 hours of playtime, but seeing everything can very well take you 15+. For the current sale price this is simply a steal.
The themes involved just seem they could have done more by the end. At some point it feels like its trying to hard to be a Bad Dream game, perhaps force a tie in as a sequel to Coma.. It is still one of the better point and click games, it does suffer from the common point and click problem of identifying useful objects. Especially since objects can only be picked up after you encounter the problem that they can be used to solve. And the end effect is that the player always feels restricted. Paths being closed rather than opened. The narrative reflects that and maybe thats an intended feeling the dev was going for. Perhaps I just don't enjoy this aspect of meta-focused games, I'd much rather the meta aspects being about opening paths than blocking previously working paths. The payoff is well worth seeing I just wish the road leading up to it were a bit smoother.
Imagine FTL but instead of controlling a crew you control a fleet of ships. Thats what this wants to be. But it just.. doesn't deliver that experience. Part of it is the AI clumping ships. Part of it is poor balance. I beat chapter 1 on hard first try with no challenge whatsoever. Why? Because I got 3 separate command-ship weapons that I could wipe their entire fleet with on a whim. Any of these would have let me win easily. 1 weapon took ~40%HP (80% if they're patched) of ships in an entire line. Another killed any cluster of ships and chunked any ships that were only touching a single ship. The last let me freeze 3+ ships every ~14 sec (same as ship rebuild time). All these are just mediocre if the AI was competent and avoided clumping. But it took hardly any effort to bait the AI into a pattern, and to make it worse, the AI will almost always follow the default pathing to their destination (always along the same side). I expect later chapters to get better but the AI will likely stay predictable and easily exploitable. If the AI is improved this will be an incredible fleet tactics game. But until then you would have to intentionally handicap yourself to find it challenging. For what its worth, I did enjoy the writing and music. (Although it is annoying that they keep acting as if I had lost a run when beating ch1 or starting ch2 despite never taking a single hull damage, let alone dying).
