Klonoa: Empire of Dreams is just a better Moonlight Museum. It has the same format, design philosophy, and shares a lot of similar mechanics. the only difference this time around is that the level design is a lot more varied and there is a lot less fluff.

Empire of Dreams introduces two new types of stages to the handheld series; those being the surfboard stages from Klonoa 2, and brand new auto scrolling levels. The surfboard stages are fast and hectic. They're genuenly the hardest levels to grab all gems in, with the later ones taking me multiple tries to get down. The auto scroller levels are strange. they're designed in a very similar way to the levels in the original PS1 game, making them easily my favourite. but the forced scroll speed ruins it. If these stages were reworked to be time trial stages instead, they'd easily be the best part of the game. we even get a taste of that in the first EX mission, which is basically an auto-scroller level that you tackle at your own pace.

I believe Klonoa's gameplay is at it's best when you're platforming over parreless pits and using the items in fun and creative ways. This is something that the console games focus primarily on, but the handheld games don't (at least so far) I understand that these games are trying to be more so their own thing rather than an appropriation of what the main numbered games are going for, but it's hard to separate that preference. That's not to say that this game isn't worth playing because it is a lot of fun. The last world is especially a great time since it asks you to use enemies in ways that haven't been attempted in the series up until now.

Empire of Dreams is a fun side episode that you can knock out in an afternoon. It never feels like it overstays it's welcome but at the same time, lacks the ambition of the console games, which is understandable even if a little disappointing. Give it a shot if you liked what you played of the main games and wanted to get a slightly different spin on the core mechanics.

(Ascension 10 on Ironclad, Heart with all characters)

- If you are on Ascension 0 (default/first difficulty), losses are 100% your fault and you just need to rethink your strategy.
- Adding cards instead of skipping makes your deck stronger on average in the early game, but bigger decks are less consistent later on.
- Look for card combos for the mid-late game that stack in power over time (aka "scaling")
- Many powerful cards and potions with downsides use debuffs which can be negated with artifacts.
- The Act 3 soft counter bosses can still be beaten with those decks and you have time to pivot from the start of the Act.
- Snecko Eye isn't good because it randomizes costs, it's good because you draw 2 more cards every turn.
- You don't need to block an attack if the enemy dies.
- Kill Elites now to get power for later.
- A less consistent deck is a slower deck.
- HP is a resource you are spending to buy encounter rewards.
- Bludgeon can be card draw, block, or energy gain. Read this MTG article until you understand why: https://articles.starcitygames.com/articles/innovations-the-theory-of-everything/

Favorite character: Ironclad, favorite cards by character: Bludgeon, Calculated Gamble, Biased Cognition, Blasphemy.

Better balanced than your favorite RPG.

Sort of a precursor to today's Itch.io horror microgames. Too slight to leave much impact despite being a cool idea that's theoretically well-suited to its short runtime, and includes one of the worst, most esoteric puzzles I've encountered in a while. The moral choices, supposed to be a test of character, are so obtuse it's hard to even parse them as choices on the first run let alone for them to feel meaningful.

On the other hand frantically opening a door and then locking it again while something closes in on you is the best part of these games and there's an extended, multi-room instance of that in here which is further heightened by the permadeath. Worth a spin if you have the collection.

Ugly, cringe, amateurish, and insulting to anybody who ever played and enjoyed its predecessor. Oh, and it runs like shit.

Normal difficulty is an utterly impossible hitscanner nightmare where you will be shredded instanteously upon rounding any corner, and on easy difficulty all enemies do 1 damage and your weakest gun instagibs any normal mook. They thought that made sense.

This has to be the nadir of early-3D shooters, or close to it. I find it extremely difficult to believe that DAIKATANA is worse than this.

way better than Doom, Doom II: Hell on Earth, Quake, and likely other alumni. also way better than many games aping it and its peers: Dusk, Prodeus, and so on. it's actually kind of surprising how good it is, actually, given details regarding its production. is way harder than any of the aforementioned games. that can largely be pinned on something of a signature and infamous feature: the Cultists (and Fanatics): a common mook, the second monster met, is a fairly long-range high-damage shotgun hitscanner, with an elite tommy gun counterpart. they can't really be dodged or outranged, and they kill faster than an enemy first met in the penultimate episode. their presence alters the first-person-shooting on a close-to-if-not fundamental level, requiring peeking and pre-firing given that every half-second spent around a corner could cost ~50 health. learning how to counter them is counterintuitive and excruciating but rewarding; it's something special and not a sort of experience that would be replicated in the genre for around two decades.

there are only two real issues. first, the use of bullet-sponge boss enemies as recurring enemies after their boss fights -- boss fights which aren't even good. second, some maps (more parts of maps) are relatively and needlessly labyrinthine, bordering on reminiscence to contemporaries, but this is basically a nitpick in the face of largely above-par level design.

This game is metal as hell.

On paper this should be something you’ve already seen, but in execution it isn’t like anything you’ve seen. Blowing up zombies with dynamite, blasting cultists with a double-barrel shotgun, eating hearts to heal instead of medpacks, everything in this game feels equal parts edgy and extremely fun. The main character, Caleb, is betrayed by the god he worships and comes back to life to get his revenge and after killing him, the words spoken from his mouth are “Good, bad… I’m the guy with the gun” and in the cutscene that plays second after he blasts a poorly modeled dude (the cutscenes in this game are something) with the tommy gun one-handed and just leaves without saying a single word like he didn’t just kill a demonic god.

Even if it’s really tough, the enjoyment I get from this game is simply unmatched. The variety in the arsenal is quite interesting, instead of a pistol as a one of the first guns you get (the actual first gun you get is a pitchfork), they give you a flare gun, which is fine to take out enemies one by one, but has a secondary fire that can take out a bunch of enemies by setting them on fire at the cost of like 6 flare ammo, but the gun you’ll be using the most is the sawn-off shotgun. A really, really powerful shotgun. If there’s one word to describe the arsenal in this game, it is powerful. Not just the shotgun is powerful, but also the dynamite - blowing stuff up is powerful, and you’ll be doing that A LOT, it’s even necessary to progress in certain moments so get used to it -, and the rocket launcher sorry, the NAPALM launcher, which not only acts as a normal rocket launcher but can also put on fire nearby enemies due to splash damage, and even the tommy gun. If there’s one thing Blood has, it’s that it makes justice the word “power fantasy”.

It’s no secret that First Person Shooters have always been inspired by cinema. Duke Nukem is basically an Arnold Schwarzenegger knock-off. Blood is inspired by horror and gorefest movies. Every enemy has like two or three, probably more, different ways to die, but all of them can be blown up into pieces. Zombies’ heads fall off and you can kick them a soccer ball. While Caleb might not be the most memorable FPS character - although he's still a total badass -, Blood is a really memorable game. I would say that “it is great because it just wants you to have fun”, but basically every other game from that era just wanted you to have fun, ESPECIALLY First Person Shooters. What makes this game good is not what it wants but what it does, and what Blood does is putting a bunch of cultists and zombies gathered together in an enclosed space so you can use the alt fire of the spray can (did I mention there’s a makeshift flamethrower?) and watch all of them burn. At a time when videogames were at the center of discussion for allegedly promoting violence and satanism, Blood provides just that and goes full-on with it.

The levels look more like actual places and seem to be interconnected, at least in the first chapter, so there’s some kind of continuity to it, it feels like some kind of progress is being made. Unlike Duke Nukem 3D, in which levels consisted of a bunch of arenas that kind of resemble real life places but lack any continuity from one to another, here in the first chapter you wake up in a grave next to a chapel and the you blow up a hole in a wall that gets you to a train station in which you get on a train and the next level is in the Phantom Express and then you crash the train and now you’re at Dark Carnival, and there’s a secret level that takes you to the House of Horrors. It feels like you’re going somewhere, like progress is being made, even if the story isn't that important. This is what I like the most about the Cryptic Passage expansion, the continuity between levels. At the start of each level, most of the time, and not just on Cryptic Passage, you can turn around and see the place you just came from, and at the end of some levels you can even see the place you’re going. The level of detail in every level helps the sense of place. I mean, the devil is in the details, so…

Everything in this game screams personality. From the little nods to horror/slasher/B movies to the speed of the combat. Even if some of the later levels don’t live up to the greatness of the first episode, as well as some abrupt difficulty spikes - the balance is sometimes pretty weird, I had certain situations in which I’d round a corner to be greeted by a shotgun blast to the face I had no way of predicting. The alt fire of the dynamite makes it a timed explosive so it bounces on walls, you even have proximity and remote dynamite, but the correct way to use them is to throw them around a corner full of enemies you already know they’re there, but for that you have to see them before them see you so most of the time these options are useless and it’s best to roll with it, shotgun blast included. That is, unless the game expects me to quick-save quick-load every corner, in which scenario the tension and pace of the combat are gone -, it is still fun to blow up with dynamite everything that moves.

At the risk of sounding like an edgy teenager, I’ll say that gorefest movies or games are usually not my cup of tea when they're all about the gore and nothing else, but I can’t help it, Blood is just too goddamn fun.

Also, I forgot to mention that enemies like the zombie, the cultist, and probably some more are pixelated sprites of (or were modeled after) modified dolls/toys. Some other games did similar stuff; Human enemies in Rise of the Triad: Dark War were sprites of real people in costumes, you can find some recorded footage of the making of around the web. This kind of stuff is always super cool to see and brings an extra charm that games nowadays can't allow themselves to have.

Circus Electrique is a game that wears it's inspiration on it's sleeve.

As a more accessible Darkest Dungeon set in a Victorian steampunk world you play the role of Amelia Craig, a journalist returning to the newly opened 'Circus Electrique'. The circus is run by your uncle Randolph, a man she blames for her mothers death. Finding herself coming to a place she vowed never to return to at the same time as London is beset by 'the maddening' where people are turning vicious and attack for no reason leaves Amelia and the members of the Circus left to find out what is causing it.

The story premise is actually pretty good overall and some of the characters are well realized but it does take time to truly get anywhere and revelations fell a little flat or were predictable with a truly nothing of an ending final scene really deflating the entire experience. In a similar vein the gameplay initially seems interesting mixing circus management and exploration and combat. Despite London's current event 'the show must go on!' after all. However it feels overly drawn out towards the end with no variation leaving it feeling rather rote.

Initially the circus shows must be set up meaning you have to split your characters into two teams, the circus performers who will put on a show and the circus combatants who will explore outside on a tile like map in regions of London. Each battle counts as a day completed which will often also complete the show. Each show requires certain stats to preform (music, awe, happiness and whatever the other symbol means) and will gain certain resources and rewards at the end depending on how you do. Each member of the circus you recruit has different stats and requires resource to level up skills or even food to maintain. Even on hard however these resources were coming out of my ears to the point I had 2.5k food and used 15 a day n the final chapter. It all became rather meaningless.

Each troupe members vocation is their combat class in battle. Clown, Strongman, Snake Charmer, Belly dancer, Juggler, Ventriloquist, Acrobat etc. The character designs for each class are pretty good though I must admit. They had a very stylized almost caricature version of circus performers from that era that are pretty striking. Each class has different skills and even among the same class there is some variation on both skills and circus stats. They get recruited from a random pool you can refresh meaning to get the best characters for what you want to build party wise involves a lot of save scumming for the RNG or just making do. Exploring the map aside from battles will reveal scenarios to choose from for the right answers for prizes and you can choose different paths that you can then later replay. It's all kind of the same though and the lack of variety is really felt including in combat where I used the same team for most of the game. It felt like I was just going through the motions by the end.

Aside from dragging a little and the disappointing ending I had other issues too with trophies just not unlocking for no reason and though I reset the game and got some of them at least one is completely locked out meaning I would need to do a full playthrough again to obtain which further soured me at the end on the whole affair.

Overall the Circus Electrique isn't a bad game however, in fact aspects of it are good both mechanically and artistically but it's missing that headline act for a really sell out experience. Still if you ever though Darkest Dungeon was too hard and what you really want is to see a clown throw a ball at a robot bear then this might be the game for you.

+ Nice premise.
+ I like the character and art designs.

- Ending was kinda disappointing.
- Gets stale towards the end.
- I experienced some trophy bugs.

Pretty mixed feelings on this one where I’m not sure if an original controller would have made me like it better, to be honest. I think I decided I was done after I used up all my healing items and was tossed into a gauntlet with endlessly respawning enemies that had you trying to navigate flame jets while wind constantly blew you to the right. I kind of got the impression that it wouldn’t exactly get better from there, exactly, so I decided I was done.

I think the presentation here is really great, actually. While the plot itself isn’t anything groundbreaking it did its job to set me off on the adventure, and I was pretty struck by how nice the opening cutscene looked, and the soundtrack… is trying, even if the sound chip isn’t up to snuff for what this is trying to do. The sprites and animations are also really nice!

I’m not sure how I feel about the combat, though, as I’m not really used to beat ‘em ups. I think I had a little trouble figuring out what registered as quick taps and full presses, so pulling off some moves could be a little tough. The spirits were kind of a neat idea, but I found them a little unreliable both due to the genre unfamiliarity problems and the fact that they wouldn’t really keep up with Ali if you ran too fast. I only managed to get the first two, but I was kind of intrigued how differently they operated and was curious to see what the final two would be… but not enough to keep powering through. I also just kind of hated jumping, and the double tap run felt considerably weirder to control than other instances where it’s been the control scheme.

I think this game is definitely for someone, though, even if it’s not for me. I don’t know, I mostly wish there were a few more cute little towns and cities to break things up at a certain point… maybe that would’ve kept me going instead of just feeling like I was slogging through.