Mostly got it because it looks & sounds a lot like Darkside Detective, which I loved. While the atmosphere and humor is similar, this one takes itself a bit more serious as an adventure game... and I'm not sure I like it. A lot of the puzzles are just bizarre to me. I started reading the walkthrough as soon as I left the first tutorial level because I got stuck. Often times, the solutions don't make sense to me even after I read the walkthrough. There's a "solve a puzzle multiple ways" thing going on in every level, but this only makes the puzzles more confusing: now you have 15 useless items in your inventory that you'll never use. That makes it 10x more time consuming to brute force click every item with every other item in your inventory or the level. I'm currently sort of stuck in the very first screen of level 5, where I cannot leave the screen because I "have to talk to the client" - but I already have, multiple times, and there are no dialogue options left. The sense of humor is similar to Darkside Detective, but a bit over the top. Like another reviewer, I often have no clue what they're talking about and end up skipping a lot. That said, the graphics, music, and atmosphere are lovely. The OST has a strong Stranger Things vibe. I just wish it was a bit more accessible to people who don't want to click every pixel on the screen 1000x.
Set in the lovecraftian town of Twin Lakes, detective McQueen and his sidekick Dooley have to solve a number of supernatural cases building up to something spooky. Unlike point & click adventures of the past, Darkside Detective gives you a number of "cases" to solve in the town of Twin Lakes. This makes it easy to play it for 20-45 minutes at a time, without having to remember what happened last time. I like the modern style - characters don't walk, so I don't have to wait 10s each time I click. Dialogue is instant and very funny. The game constantly breaks the 4th wall and doesn't take itself very seriously. Some of the cases are a bit short, but they get more sophisticated toward the end - and, hint hint, there are bonus cases after you finish the regular ones. The charm really comes from the great music, pixely art, and the wit. I had fun just clicking every box in a room because of all the care and detail that went into it - almost everything in the game is a joke of some sort. Lovely gem if you feel like spending a few hours in the mysterious town of Twin Lakes and listening to the banter between two bizarro cops talk trash to each other.
Lovely sequel to Darkside Detective. The cases in this one are a bit longer and are more sophisticated, it felt like. Just as funny with more of the same crazy characters from around Twin lakes. If you liked the first game, this'll be very entertaining.
This game gets almost everything right. The controls are.. perfect. Q1 style. You run 90mph, can dodge all enemy projectiles with enough effort, have full air control, and can literally perform backflips (though I don't believe they.. do anything?) The weapons are basically the Q1 weapon set. The style is modern pixel retro. The level design ranges from "clearly stolen from Quake" to "stunning and bizarre, who came up with this?!" It's just plain fun. I kept laughing out loud at some of the weird ideas and quirks. I also screamed in surprise several times. Did I mention it's fun? The game is super over the top and doesn't take itself too serious, but it's also kind of a horror game? Except when it's just plain funny. I'll say there were 2 things that weren't quite perfect: for one, some of the levels are pretty complex and I had trouble finding the right key/door, wasting several minutes just looking for how to get to the next portion. Second thing, the enemies aren't super well balances. Some are so easy you can literally beat hundreds at a time with a shotgun (and you will), other types deal so much damage that not spotting them soon enough is instant death. I wish it was a little more linear, because (on regular difficulty) I was tearing through whole armies of some guys, only to be blasted to my last save after turning a corner. Overall 10/10, maybe even 11/10. Can't believe I never heard of this game before. This is a shooter from the good old days when first person shooters were fun, stupid, you didn't need to reload weapons, the levels didn't have to be drab office buildings, and there were no "missions" or anything - just run around shooting at anything that moves and then some. Trust your eyes.
Could've been great. But I guess similar to its NES roots, every screen needs to be replayed dozens of times until you've memorized every single enemy movement and platform pattern. 30 years later, that's just boring. There are a ton of cheap insta-deaths that are entirely avoidable, and the further in the game you get, the longer you have to walk between save points. Eventually you get so bored traveling to the actual game (aka the farthest point you made it) that you die before reaching the real game. Just boring. I listened to a bunch of podcasts while grinding to memorize the levels, but there's a limit. There are also some nasty what I'd consider bad gameplay decisions. The hitbox is wrong. Getting damage often pushes you in the wrong direction, sucking you into an enemy to take even more damage. Lots of enemies have projectile attacks where you don't know where they'll shoot, so you have to take an educated guess and then you die because you guessed wrong. When you take damage and fly, you briefly lose control of your character, often turning a regular hit into insta-death because you were pushed into spikes or a void. Often times, the timing of animations seems misleading, meaning you get hit when you shouldn't, or you can't jump and get caught by a trap. Projectiles usually travel so fast you can't avoid them unless you already memorized where they'll go. Practically every enemy type is insta-death until you've rote memorized his attacks. It just gets old real quick. I'd love if someone made a game like this with modern gameplay mechanics, as I love the graphic and music style and the precise controls.
The idea is great, and it's quite well executed. The graphics and soundtrack are amazing. You really get that weird "Alien"-like feeling of wobbling through air vents and surprising unsuspecting humans. It is executed about as well as it could be. But the game is pretty short, I went through in one Saturday afternoon. And toward the end, the idea really starts losing steam. After you get used to the gameplay there really isn't much more. Late-game fights are a bit frustrating because it's very difficult to control your screen-filling blob precisely. I ended up constantly running down the wrong corridors, getting sucked into the wrong pipes, and being shot dead by enemies off screen. Luckily there are usually save points nearby, so you don't have to replay a lot. Still, combat turned into a crapshoot of "try it ten times until you randomly make it." For reference, your blob can insta-kill almost every enemy in the game, but many of the late-game enemies can also shred you from full health to dead in less than 5 seconds, some from off screen. And there are insta-kill enemies as well. Combined with the chaotic controls and overloaded graphics, that means either a ton of hit and run or just roll of the dice. I thought the puzzles were a bit lame, forcing you to change shape to get access to different abilities and progress for no reason at all. Almost all abilities were completely useless except to access certain Metroidvania-style gates, too. It just felt a little forced toward the end. The graphics are a bit overloaded, too. I had to look up solutions to puzzles several times where it turned out a switch or something else was blocked by a piece of blood or debris that I just couldn't see on the busy screen. But still, the overall gameplay was hilarious and unique, and I think it's definitely worth the price of admission. Just be prepared that it gets a bit old a few hours in, and then to be glad when you've beaten the game and it's over ;)
I should've loved this game. I love the genre, I like tactical rogue-lites. I loved the graphics from the beginning. But the gameplay is quite frustrating. Fights are really boring because your character freezes for a split second after every attack. That means you can almost never get really good at fighting the enemies, instead you just have to hit them once and then wait out their attack cycle. You can dash, but only backward, and it is very prone to being hit by an enemy if you get the range slightly wrong. So the game feels very slow, and it punishes you a lot for trying anything but wait longer. The platforming is quite bad. The controls just aren't good enough for some of the platform puzzles, resulting in frustrating falls into lava, take damage, try again, fall again, 3-5 times just to get up to a save room. Healing is very difficult, save rooms are sparse, and enemies respawn upon re-entering a level - a deadly combination of frustration. Because almost every fight is a trading of hit points, eventually you just die by a thousand cuts on your way to get some healing or a save room. It's most frustrating how good this game could've been. If the combat was just a dash more dynamic like Dead Cells, and if the platform designs were a little better, it would be an awesome game. But I just re-played the same boring section 4-5 times just because it's impossible to get through without some control input failing, sending you back to the beginning, take some damage, start over, try it too much and reload from save.. As others mentioned the backtracking is annoying. No map markers, confusing rooms that all look the same, it's not as fun as in other metroidvania games, it's a chore. Oh what could've been.
Mana Spark has got to be my favorite rogue lite, including Dead Cells and Enter the Gungeon. In fact it's so light on the RNG that I'd call it a rogue lite lite. There's almost no grinding. There are a few things you can unlock in the game, but you really mostly advance by getting better as a player. I don't remember exactly, but I think if you play 3-5 runs you'd have unlocked all or almost all of the items, and from then on it's all on your skill. Every enemy type and boss has very specific attack and defense patterns. Eventually you feel like Neo in the Matrix, you just know what everybody is going to do and can easily dodge. I can now play through the game hardly getting hit a single time. If I'd play more carefully, I'm sure I could make it to the final boss without getting hit. Bosses that seemed impossible the first few times I can now dodge expertly and kill them in record time with the right combination of items. Very cool killing The Knowledge or the Dragon in their very first attack phase. For example, many enemies have a shield: your projectiles cannot penetrate them at all. But if you aim for their heads or sometimes feet, there are 1-2 pixels where you can snipe a shielded enemy. There's nothing like headshotting a shield guy who's running toward you from across the room. You get about 15-20 items in one full play through, and there are about 5 items that are really weak. I've gotten every single bad item and still made it to the final boss, although I died there. Sometimes you get only amazing items and then your run is pretty trivial. The final boss is still challenging. The rooms are carefully hand-crafted and it shows. Unlike the nonsensical random rooms in other rogue lites, you can actually learn and get better at each individual room. They are connected in a random fashion, so no two dungeons are exactly alike. I like this much better than "real" random rooms. You can still die unexpectedly, but I must've played it a thousand times now.
