Mancheg00bfusc8r
2019
An extremely impressive effort for a solo developer, mashing up first-person puzzlers, Metroidvanias, and a dash of Zelda and collectathon platformers. Lots of clever environmental puzzles that are well-integrated into the exploration, and lots of rewards for carefully exploring nooks and crannies. that said, it does start to overstay its welcome before the end, and it very much suffers from a lack of design polish: the map is an optional collectible you don't get until quite far into the game and is the top-down 2D kind, which is definitely not adequate for finding your way around this kind of dense, interconnected, and heavily vertical world; while many of the puzzles are very satisfying to solve, others lack sufficient visual or auditory feedback about what a given switch does or what exactly your objective is; and the combat is generally awful and mainly serves to get in the way of the exploration and puzzle-solving (most action-adventure games have the sense to maintain a decent degree of separation between combat and puzzle areas so that enemies don't interrupt you while you're trying to solve a puzzle, but sadly not this one). Will give Six Inches Under a try at some point now that it's on Game Pass; hopefully, it sands down some of the original's rough edges a bit.
2020
Solid puzzle-platformer where you switch between a girl who can move in 3D (but can’t jump) and her shadowy 2D-platforming counterpart. Maybe slightly longer than it needed to be, and the difficulty curve is a bit out of whack (the puzzles steadily ramp up in challenge for the first two acts, then get much easier for a longish stretch before ramping back up again in time for the end), but a strong execution of this concept overall.
2021
Gave this one a couple hours and I don't think it's going to be for me. The art direction, presentation, world-building, and production values are all pretty great, and the combat is fun with an interesting injection of dice and card mechanics into real-time battles, but there simply isn't enough to do aside from combat and fetch quests, and consequently the world isn't much fun to actually explore; this is a game badly in need of platforming or additional puzzle elements in between battles. It also doesn't help that the map isn't very useful, showing which zone of the level you're currently in but not where you are within it. Thunderful should have made this into an animated series or a proper action-adventure game instead, sorry.
I haven't touched this game in about six months, and after finally admitting to myself that I'm probably not coming back to it anytime soon, I uninstalled it and decided to write up my thoughts here. Yes, it's very much an Ubisoft open-world take on Breath of the Wild, but it's pretty good as such, with fun combat and puzzles that are decently integrated into the world, on top of the many, many Vaults (its equivalent of BOTW's Shrines, which unfortunately all have similar stone-platforms-floating-in-a-starry-void aesthetics). I ended up shelving it while I was only midway through the second of five or so major areas, but I think that's more a reflection of my personal taste and preference for shorter games than of Immortals' quality; I've never played BOTW or TOTK, but I'm fairly certain I'd end up dropping them well before the end as well. Maybe I'll come back to it the next time I get a craving to play a Zelda-like on PC, IDK.
Very much an iterative sequel, but it's a strong one, even if the story leans a bit too hard into misery porn for my taste and the stealth/combat systems don't always work quite as well as I'd like. Overall, though, the storytelling, pacing, and polish are quite strong here even with a longer running time than the original.
2021
solid, very short walking simulator with fairly minimal interactivity. Not sure this takes full advantage of the medium, as there's a lot of standing in place listening to dialogue, but the story is mostly compelling and it doesn't overstay its welcome
2023
Free 20-minute platformer with a clever meta premise - you're a sentient game character (voiced by Nolan North!) tasked by the game designer with testing out her unfinished game before the publisher visits. Admittedly doesn't do anything that novel with that premise, but hey, it's free and 20 minutes long, so it doesn't really need to.
Doesn’t reinvent the Metroidvania genre, but a strong entry nonetheless, with fun brawler combat, decent level design, and gorgeous 2.5D visuals. A few annoying difficulty spikes and points where objectives are less clear than they should be, but not enough to drag down the experience too significantly.
Even if it hadn’t been for this year’s events surrounding Justin Roiland, I’d probably still say that this is too much of him for one game, and that’s after a mere level and a half. Maybe it’d play a bit better in VR, as it was originally designed to, but probably not enough to significantly change my opinion of it
2021
A cute, charming, low-difficulty, combat-free 3D platformer take on the A Short Hike-like subgenre. Writing sometimes seems like it's trying a bit hard to be wholesome and whimsical in an affected "UwU smol bean" register, and the last level in particular goes on a bit too long (hence why I ended up shelving it), but still a nice way to spend a few hours, even if Tinykin still holds the crown for this specific type of indie 3D platformer.
Solid Monkey Island game, shame about the deliberately anticlimactic ending, which just does not work at all. Appreciate the effort to make the story accessible to people like me who have lost patience with the P&C genre over the years (gamepad support, casual mode, the generous hint system). Not really laugh-out-loud funny and there's way too much backtracking in Part 4.
2022
One of the most visually stunning games I’ve ever played, with a truly incredible realization of its Giger-inspired art direction in real-time 3D (the title screen transitioning into the opening of the game is a stunner in and of itself), but I can already tell from my brief time with it that the deliberately obtuse design and Myst-style puzzles aren’t going to be something I’d enjoy playing. Will watch a playthrough on YouTube instead.
2022
A short, very pretty, and polished isometric walking sim/puzzler, with mechanically simple puzzles that are nonetheless generally satisfying to solve. Might have given it an extra half-star if it weren't for some pretty poor voice acting, but otherwise an easy recommendation if you're looking for a relaxed, story-driven game to play through in an hour or two.
2022
A triumph of sci-fi horror audiovisual design, with a narrative that some will find frustratingly oblique but whose deliberate ambiguity largely worked for me. Gameplay-wise, it’s not quite on the same level (it could have stood to be a bit shorter, as the backtracking does start to get tedious by the end, especially given the strict inventory limit), but as someone who hasn’t played many old-school survival horror games, I still enjoyed this homage a lot.
Bramble is a very pretty, very linear... action/adventure? 3D cinematic platformer? in the Little Nightmares vein, with a beautifully realized Scandinavian folk horror setting. While the strengths of Bramble's art direction, atmosphere, and varied level design were enough to keep me playing through most of its duration (less so its story, which doesn't ultimately add up to much), it unfortunately commits a lot of game design sins that lead to unnecessary frustration: readability is often lacking, making it difficult to distinguish scenery from traversable paths; fixed camera angles lead to unnecessary difficulty gauging the distance of jumps; stealth sequences are tedious; the handful of boss battles generally go on for too long and make for frustrating difficulty spikes, even with mid-battle checkpoints, given that one hit always means death (I ultimately gave up at the last boss and watched a playthrough of the rest of the game on YouTube instead); and there's just too much reliance on trial and error in general, which is exacerbated by the previous points in this list. I'd still give it a qualified recommendation for fans of cinematic platformers or very linear horror action/adventure games, but definitely play it on Game Pass or wait for a sale.