Golvellius is a fascinating game from a period when genre conventions had not yet been firmly established and developers were still throwing all kinds of ideas at the wall to see what stuck. Taking clear cues from The Legend of Zelda, Golvellius takes several of the same ideas and goes in a completely different direction with most of them.

The quest is simple, even if accomplishing it is not: find seven magical orbs in seven different regions of the titular valley. Each orb is kept in secret by an old lady in a cave - there are lots and lots of old ladies in caves in this game - and you have to explore a large overworld in a top-down view, slay monsters with your sword, find and collect gear, and defeat the boss of each area before she'll give up.

If that sounds like a familiar structure, the actual gameplay loop in each zone is not. In nearly every screen of Golvellius, there is a hidden entrance, and every screen is a small puzzle of sorts as you must figure out how to reveal it. Some come from killing enemies, some from striking certain trees, rocks or other objects, and a few have other requirements. Most of these caves have helpful characters offering advice, items or healing. A lot of them have old ladies, and they want money. So much money.

You start out with tight limit on how much gold you can carry, and the first order of business in each zone is finding old women in caves who will sell you bibles to raise your gold carrying capacity. Yes, actual bibles. No, I have no idea why. The second order of business is to find still more old ladies in caves and buy life meter-extending potions to withstand the steadily increasing onslaught of strong monsters. Still other old women in other caves sell herbs that act as potions when your health meter runs out, or other items. Even when it comes time to fork over the magical orb, they want money. Lots of money. This is basically a game of exploring and getting extorted by old women.

The caves are where Golvellius further differentiates itself from Zelda. While that game featured mazes to explore, Golvellius features gauntlets to survive, in two flavors. One is top-down and auto-scrolling, where the challenge is not getting scraped to the bottom of the screen and kicked out. The other is a very fast, simplified side-scrolling action platformer with lots of enemies, platforms and mini bosses. After either type of cave, there's a boss fight, and they are all well designed.

One of my favorite details is how the overworld music changes: not when you enter a new region, nor when bosses are defeated. Instead, it's when you find a powerful new piece of gear. Finding a great new sword and emerging to find it was so powerful it changed the overworld theme felt great.

The gameplay has one major flaw, in that you can only attack up down, left and right, but the monsters are designed to attack from all angles. This makes many areas a gauntlet of difficult to hit enemies and some areas are pretty tough for it. The caves are not especially hard - the most difficult to took me four attempts, and and they are all only a few minutes long - but they are very simple and repetitive affairs.

Despite these issues, I had a great time with this. Tons of secrets to discover, a challenging and reasonably long quest, a superbly well designed overworld and a terrific soundtrack. The game structure and gameplay loops are quite unique and I found myself really wishing more games in the action-RPG genre had this kind of experimentation. So long as the extortive old women hanging out in caves stay here, in the valley.

Turning a 3D shooter series into an RPG may seem odd if you are unfamiliar with the prior two Panzer Dragoon games. On paper, they are relatively brief rail shooters. Which is true, but for the breathtaking imagination on display, and the richness of the world building each game packs from end to end. In each game we glimpse a small part of a larger world, filled with history, mysteries, political factions, struggle, danger and wonder.

Turning to an RPG to explore some of that world makes perfect sense - Team Andromeda had build too large of a world to be contained in shooters alone. Revisiting Panzer Dragoon Saga for the first time in 15+ years, I'm struck once again by how audacious it is on all fronts. At every turn, this game defies convention and goes its own way, and all if it works. The world is almost relentlessly bleak, with humanity scraping for survival on the ground and fighting over access to ancient secrets in the sky. The art and music combine to create a mood and set a tone that his wholly unique, making the world where humanity is knocked so far down the food chain that hunters are constantly in fear of being hunted themselves feel vividly real.

The combat system has - somehow - never been imitated, despite it's brilliant adaptation of Panzer Dragoon's core gameplay, a system that looks and feels like a shooter but has the bones of turn-based positional battle.

The story seldom takes a predictable turn, yet there's never a twist for the sake of it; this is a character-driven story through and through. The events in and around the gorgeous, ethereal water ruins of Uru form a key sequence where enemies become tense allies, motivations clarify and alliances blur - and the story flows entirely from the clash of personalities and ideas, not contrivances.

I love the world this series, and this game, create. I love the feeling of flying our dragon through valleys, fields, tunnels and the epic Tower. I love the aching, mournful tone that feels rooted in real struggle. The undulating, cohesive soundtrack where every track is perfectly evocative of it setting. And how in an era when developers were discovering boob physics, Team Andromeda had an absolute refusal to sexualize Azel or deploy a male gaze upon her, creating one of gaming's most compelling characters along the way.

The one knock on Saga is the difficulty - simply put, the game is easy. But it's also relentlessly compelling and engaging. Being hard was never the goal: Panzer Dragoon is all about immersing us in a unique, beautiful, evocative and strange world, and it succeeds on every level. A timeless masterpiece.

A reasonably good entry in the roguelite genre. Or what I call, do randomized dungeons, then do something relaxing, then repeat, genre. Cult of the lamb has a great juxtaposition between the cute and creepy, leaning into a mix of cult and cosmic horror, with adorable characters.

Where it falls down, at least on the Switch version, is performance. Frame rate drops and hard crashes were numerous in my game. But worse was the repetitive boss design, cramped building space and catastrophically bad final boss, where the combat design really fell apart. I'm still shocked at the geometry traps, poor perspective and poor enemy design in finale.

Some fun humor in here and it plays decently, but there was a lot that just didn't click with me.