A fun platformer side-scroller and a great love letter to Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse.

It has beautiful retro pixelart and an amazing level design. The character switching mechanic has a variety of strategies involving the unique abilities of each team member.
The game also gives the possibility of a more challenging solo run, or with a limited team, depending who the players decides to recruit.

The bosses turn out to be pretty easy once you learn the patterns, but that doesn't detract from the fun of the game that much.

I recommend it to everyone who enjoys the work of IGA and who grew up playing Castlevania, as Bloodstained is, in fact, its spiritual successor.

This scratches a very specific itch, but if you do have that itch, it feels like home. This is an honest to goodness spiritual successor to Shadow Tower and its kin, and if you know what that means, that'll either frighten you dearly or set off long-dormant bulbs in your head.

Combat is dicey, it's easy to get lost, and savepoints are sparse—you're afraid to stray too far from what's familiar, and every adventure is a risk, exactly as it should be (although when more content drops, I am definitely drawing my own maps, navigation is TRICKY). The first couple hours of this game are perfect, and I do not use that word lightly.

That said, leveling is too fast or scaling is too generous, I can't tell which, and it stripped meaning from specialising in certain stats by making me a tanky dps powerhouse even as I focused on SPD and DEX. Items that offer +40 to max health or mana would be SUPER COOL finds, if only that wasn't easily attainable from just one level-up's worth of DEF or INT points, and leveling up is never terribly hard. The pre-castle area's placement also feels like a misstep, fracturing an otherwise gingerly interconnected world with too much space at [what I assume will be] a pivotal moment and flaunting the game's tonal hand too early. This is all peanuts though, and thinking about this game is just as rewarding as playing it. Also it just casually drops one of the best areas in any dungeon crawler ever as an optional side-route hinted at the moment the game kicks into gear. Lunacid brings me joy

Coming out of nowhere Nightmare of Decay released on steam for 4 dollars and should have been among the many looked over indie projects that release on it. However something remarkable happened, somehow despite its low cost and unremarkable UI and key art, for some reason it hit it big. This could to some degree be related to all the streamers and youtubers that brought it to the eyes of people but I also think it's because of one other major fundamental aspect. It's absolutely fantastic.

What you get with Nightmare of Decay is about 2 hours of condensed classic Resident Evil that feels like a send up to the both the Resident Evil series and the genre of survival horror in general. It's style while simplistic I think works really well with most of the actual environments and models looking incredibly high quality. The gameplay itself similarly feels really good in that it has some of the sluggishness you would expect from those early survival horror games yet still feels responsive enough to mostly avoid feeling bad. Mostly, there are boss fights and some areas where the spring and exhaustion system do get annoying but most of those sections are over pretty quickly as the whole experience for a first playthrough will clock in at around 2 hours. However much like all Resident Evil games part of the experience is also replaying and speed running the game once you beat it and this game does have that same potential.

Subsonic steps bound off of idyllic tiles, a steadfast one-two sprint. Clasped tightly in his hand, divine intervention is executed by the thunderclap of .500 magnum, a heavenly send-off alternating between the gentle coaxing of automatic fire and the definitive blade of retribution. Closing in, denizens of hell launch bioluminescent bombardments, lethal brimstone sending you down a path 10,000 feet under. As if born to die, the demons are dispatched as quickly as they rise, beings materialized, analyzed, and pulverized within nanoseconds. Speed and focus become one, repetitions on idealized concepts pointing towards sublimity. Your holy arms holstered, your sanctified sword sheathed, you cast your sight upon diamond excellence, an eternity encapsulated in the blink of an eye. Now, beyond the safety of three-round bursts and lead ripostes, you see her.

Her heliotrope hues leave psychoactive cigarette burns; if true angels drive one to madness, her presence in Heaven is well established. Like sewing needles piercing taut eardrums, her voice spikes out, an aural trepanation. More lethal than chambered rounds and heavy ordinance, she implants in your brain the same innate fear that courses through you as you enter convention halls, the same fight-or-flight micropanic as the first step within a college’s Japanese Culture Club, for she is the eidolon of modern otakudom. When you breach the seal on Neon White’s world, what resides underneath isn’t the long-forgotten Y2K Japanimation mecca, but a puréed distillation of the wretched refuse of anime fandom, the Anitwitter and r/animemes congregation speaking in post-post-ironic references, where every man is either a razor-edged twink or a hulking himbo, and every woman either an e-girl yandere or a wannabe mommy-dom that covets humanized mediocrity. Buried under the pretense of being “by freaks, for freaks”, the reality of Neon White puts you in the nightmarish scenario of living through the dreams of the most typical of indie weeb softboys.

Such is the loop of Neon White: for every moment of precise platforming bliss, an hour of Young Thotticus making your amygdala fire on all cylinders, a century of watching history’s straightest couple verbally hate-fuck, an eon of remembering Tumblr-Sexy-Man-ified Junkrat saying “you were my Sasuke!”, an eternity of knowing that the core message of the game is that you have a moral imperative to forgive those who abused you in life, lest you literally go to Hell. Both sides of the equation, fraught and unstable, struggle to maintain a semblance of balance.

When Ben Esposito, Enemy of the People, claimed this project as a game “for freaks”, it masks the reality of what Neon White stands for. Decked in the style of the forums of yesteryear, Online Signature UI and Neocities buttons intact, with a heart beating to the 200bpm pulse of breakcore, the aestheticism of pre-Web 2.0 culture is broken by the asphyxiating smog of The Modern Anime Fan. Sincerity and passion die at the cross of venomous disingenuity, nailed down by ironic detachment and love in the key of “Waifu of the Month”. The work of Angel Matrix, the latest in rebrands of Esposito's predictable shtick, axes even the most optimistic of readings: Neon White is the new face of pretension, wearing the oh-so-relatable mask of an adored time for the sake of drawing attention, not out of love, nostalgia, or passion. Soullessness masquerading as soulful.

and someone please tell the writers that run-on sentences don’t read as like, relatable or quirky. It just looks bad. It’s like, your job to Make Text Read Good. come on.

Elden Ring is a stellar game. A portal into an alien and unknown world. There is no other game that I've played that made me take every step with caution and intrigue. There were moments throughout this game when I felt actual fear, and I had to psyche myself up to continue the journey. One of the most immersive experiences I've had in a long time. It was also just pretty darn good. It truly feels like a culmination of all of their past efforts. I may still prefer Bloodborne, but this game is undoubtedly a masterpiece. Recommend the big ol' swords.

I wish I hadn't been The Witness to Jonathan Blow being a COVID truther. Or pro-Blue Lives Matter. Or anti-'cancel culture'. Or an advocate of political horseshoe theory. Or his belief that women aren't genetically suited to tech jobs.

In most cases I can forgive and forget the machinations of a creator's mind and create some mental separation between art and artist. However, The Witness is so inextricable from Blow's self-aggrandizing bullshit that it's impossible here. The notion that the search for truth is an everlasting but uncompletable journey is noble in theory and when not spouted by a QAnon nutter. This isn't even me imposing some sort of negativity onto Blow and his work with seven years of retrospect; Blow ousted himself as a misogynist loon in late 2017, only a few months after The Witness released on iOS. Should we even be surprised at this though? As Leigh Alexander put it, "he's that guy who made the Mario about women running away from him right"?

Blow's masturbatory belief in his own superiority, as a man, as a white man, as a right-wing white man, as a right-wing white male programmer taints his messaging to the point of it becoming an insurmountable task to read certain moments of The Witness as anything but Blow blowing himself. Good on him for making puzzles inaccessible to the deaf and hard of hearing, how great for Blow that he wasted at minimum an hour of many people's lives as they traced that fucking moon across a screen. Wow, after playing The Witness I see patterns in everything just like the creator, bra-fucking-vo. And it's a shame because the puzzles are fine and most of the game is serviceable. Everything surrounding it coalesces though and you realise it, well, blows.

At least its better than that game Soulja Boy laughed at.