Found it much less engaging and charming than the main game. There's no sense of wonder and exploration, you're basically just solving one isolated puzzle level instead of piecing together the mystery of an entire game world.

The light-based mechanics are very nice, and the planet is a cool addition to the roster, and obviously much bigger than all the main ones, but the things that made me look past the more annoying aspects of Outer Wilds are just not there anymore. Space plays virtually no role in the DLC, you're just booking it to the same place over and over again. The mystery seemed small and inconsequential compared to the multiple intertwined mysteries of the main game.

The annoying aspects themselves, however, are still very much there. The runback in the main game could feel brutal, but you just couldn't wait to explore more of the story, so you just bite the bullet and retrace your steps for the tenth time. In the DLC the runback is many times more exhausting (go into the DLC world, swim to the location you need, enter the subworld there, runback to the place you need there), and there's just not that much that compelled me to come back.

Might return to it later, but for now it even began to tarnish the good memories I had of the main game, which is just unacceptable.

I'm a self-taught musician and been practicing daily for the past 10 years. I can play three instruments, and have released four albums of, dare I say, very much rhythmical music. Just as I started playing Rhythm Heaven Fever, I was going through an online course on West African polyrhythms.

Imagine the shame I brought on my family, when a monkey in the first level of a Nintendo rhythm game was repeatedly hitting my player character in the nuts with golf balls because I fucked up half of its musical cues.

The music in this game is amazing. I'm not a huge fan of Nintendo's hyper colorful aesthetic, but it works great here, and the mini-games are constantly inventive. But. The difficulty curve is straight up sociopathic. Hidetaka Miyazaki looked at the monkey watch level in the second stack and wept.

To somewhat cover my musician dignity, I can say that, from a musical point of view, Rhythm Heaven Fever just isn't very musical. Don't get me wrong, the rhythms themselves are great, there's a ton of syncopation, contrasts, all the good shit. And there's a lot of variety in musical styles. Rather, it's what game wants from the player that is not musical. You're required to hit every beat right on the money. A fraction of a second late or early, and it's counted as a failure.

In other words, the game wants you to be a sequencer, not a musician. Every instrument player worth their salt knows that the sweet spot is in playing just a skosh behind or ahead of the beat. That's what gives the performance life, makes it less robotic.

These imperfections of an individual playing style are the hardest to replicate with sampling and sequencing, and I imagine they would be just as hard to evaluate in a rhythm game. Maybe a different, more forgiving approach altogether would benefit such a game. Making it about the joy of music, rather than programming those 4s, 8s and 16s right on the head.

Yet another one of the somehow-legal-crack-cocaine-on-Steam-store roguelites, on par with Vampire Survivors with how good it pumps the ol' dopamine drip and eats the time allocated to your responsibilities, social life, and hygiene.

Its pool of mechanics is concise, shockingly well-balanced for a game in early access, and, as of 20 hours of game time, still producing new results every run. In sheer variety of approaches, Tiny Rogues easily beats Vampire Survivors, and gets close to such giants like Isaac and Dead Cells. The interaction between skills gained on level ups, innate character abilities (and there are so many characters), equipment, and consumables is really rich and varied, and makes planning a build a delight each time.

The tiny SNES-like action of the game is, again, shockingly satisfying, dynamic and, unlike Vampire Survivors, never lets you just kick back and enjoy the show. The first 5 levels or so are usually very breezy, but they let you focus on perfecting your build. The later levels are the real test of both the build and your skill, where the bullet hell aspect of the game comes through full force.

The only downside is that the game pretty much doesn't have any lore or story. It has a cute 8-bit aesthetic and even cuter homages to Dark Souls, but that's the extent of aesthetic engagement. It's so fun, that you don't actively notice it, but I imagine it will impact how much I remember of the game and how much I'm willing to return to it after, say, 40 hours.