Um metroidvania que segue a fórmula à risca, não oferece nenhuma inovação ao gênero, mas que te vence pela fofura, personalidade, e principalmente diversão, isto é 8Doors. Situando-se no purgatório da cultura coreana (obviamente,em ruínas, como qualquer metroidvania que se preze), o jogo dispõe de personagens carismáticos que dão vida a um mundo tão desolado, mundo esse que também é muito agradável de se explorar, com uma estética... diferente, que juntos conferem uma identidade única ao jogo; isso, junto dos diálogos (que por sinal, não vejo motivos do por quê a Arum ser uma protagonista muda), te mantém engajados na história, por mais que a narrativa seja repetitiva e até mesmo confusa por vezes, você provavelmente vai se emocionar com qualquer final que você pegar.
O jogo não abusa de backtrackings, e até pega na sua mão, te indicando pra onde ir ao conseguir uma nova habilidade (algo que não sei se amo ou odeio); possui um sistema de armas francamente pífio; os bosses não são desafiadores, e, por vezes, são ridiculamente fáceis; o mapa não é estressantemente grande, e nem te induz a ficar confuso; sendo então tão "básico", o jogo provavelmente não será atrativo para aqueles que já são veteranos do gênero, mas pra quem não é tão habituado (euu), é um prato cheio, o jogo não se estende para além do que deveria, e nem te força a fazer 100% de todas as áreas pra conseguir o final verdadeiro, tornando a experiência em algo simples e divertido.

Um dos metroidvanias com movimentação mais inventivas e criativas que já joguei, a criatividade das armaduras e transformações pra exploração são muito bem feitas. O visual é lindíssimo, esse estilo com pixel art me lembrou bastante o Blasphemous (que inclusive tem até uma homenagem no jogo, que me chamou bastante atenção), que é um dos jogos mais lindos que já joguei.
A progressão de dificuldade eu achei bem interessante, o jogo te recompensa bastante por jogar agressivamente com a recarga da barra principal dele, mas na reta final do jogo esse recurso é meio que tirado, deixando a última batalha bem diferente do resto e sendo pra mim, a mais dificil de todo o jogo.
Eu acho que faltou algumas paradas que hoje em dia agregam demais nos metroidvanias que joguei, por exemplo marcadores para o mapa, que não tem no jogo, e a história eu achei um tanto sem graça, apesar de achar legal o design dos personagens.

I'm really starting to hate how I can just tell "Ah yes, this is a kickstarter game" the moment I encounter minibosses. Also the backer gallery was placed in the most obnoxious possible pace-breaking position.

Yes the pixel art is stunning, but the actual design of the game here is pretty average to sub-standard imo.
The health regen mechanic trivializes the bulk of the game until the very very end. I was at first willing to recommend this as a newbie friendly metroidvania, but the final boss difficulty spike is totally out of place with the rest of the game.

Also the game is badly written. The scene that supposedly explains the motivation behind why "the curse" was put in place? Total non-sequitur. Am I to believe the entire reason any of this shit happened is because some kid was upset by a painting? What am I not getting here? The scenes read like they were supposed to be revelations but they were incredibly flat "nothings". Characters make vague allusions to undisclosed bullshit and tell each other how they suddenly "understand" and then you're once again off to "wander" down the nearly linear pathways of Talos using your powerups in the exact order and locations that the developers have laid out. There's minimal exploration to be had, though thankfully player movement can feel pretty smooth so its not a total slog.
Sadly there's an entire backend to the campaign after you've acquired every ability (kinda) that does basically nothing to iterate upon 9 Years of Shadows' threadbare game design. This part is just needless padding that I suspect only exists because modern players throw a shitfit if games don't waste enough of their time to delude them into thinking they got their money's worth.

I was initially going to rate this 7/10, but the final sliver of the game sufficiently pissed me off to not do so. The game is fine, but I wanted Mahou Shoujo Super Metroid, not what feels like a middling action platformer with spritework that belongs in a better game. I can't be bothered go hunting for my remaining 6% completion.

The music is good though, I'll give'em that.

I read some impressions of 9 Years of Shadows when it released last year, and many of them spoke about how it's basically just Symphony of the Night, which is one of my favorite games so just more of that sounded like a pretty good thing to me. Sadly, though, it's mainly Symphony of the night in the sense that the pixel art looks very, very good, and not quite in how it plays.

Not to say that I dislike 9 Years of Shadows. Not at all! It's a perfectly fine Metroidvania, but also maybe misses the point of the genre a bit. I don't really play enough modern Metroidvanias to generalize too much, but outside of games like Hollow Knight or Bloodstained, I feel like they're developed by people who are too afraid of players dropping their games if they get lost, so a lot of their maps are quite linear, don't really necessitate much backtracking, and their challenge mainly comes from combat rather than exploration, which is bad since somehow almost no Metroidvania other than Igarashi's Castlevanias (through leveling up and loot) even to this day know how to make combat worthwhile.

I say this because 9 Years of Shadows, as much as it wants to be Symphony of the night aesthetically, doesn't even come close to it as a Metroidvania. There is barely any exploration, combat is completely pointless while enemies have way too much health, and backtracking is rarely wortwhile. At the same time, though, it's got some really interesting abilities that don't feel like the mandatory Metroidvania staples that are used in really clever ways for fun platforming challenges that can be decently challenging but still fair since the controls are so responsive and smooth. Despite having a few too many boss fights (which as far as I can tell is because designing bosses was a backer reward when the game was being crowdfunded), several of them are also surprisingly creative in how the game wants you to fight them, and the final boss especially was a nice challenge after what was otherwise a fairly easy romp.

Honestly, though, what probably saves 9 Years of Shadows from a lower rating is just how short it is. I'm a big fan of shorter Metroidvanias, and while six hours on a first playthrough might be even on the "too short" end of the scale, it feels like the developers knew the limitations of what they'd designed and made a game that lasts for exactly as long as it could without the linearity and slow combat becoming too annoying, with some light backtracking to please a sicko veteran like me while still not scaring off people new to the genre. Probably would have been better as a linear action-platformer than occasionally pretending to be a Metroidvania, though.

The soundtrack's just ok. A bit like Mega Man 8 but without the vibes, to explain it in a way that everyone can understand.

This review coming to you from inside the fucking wall of Blue Mountain Zone, which I clipped through several days ago. Please send help! There's something in here with me!!

If there's two things I love in this world, it's kart racers and complaining about Sonic the Hedgehog. You might view that as a problem, but I don't have a friend group that tells me things like "George, you're loved, you don't need to play Dr. Robotnik's Ring Racers." Nope, it's just me and my brain, so with the help of my instructor, Jim Beam, I finally buckled down and spent an hour getting my class Robotnik operating license in Ring Racers' infamously long tutorial.

While the experience of jumping into Ring Racers has been streamlined after the game's first major patch, I would still encourage anyone who wants to pick it up to go through each lesson in the tutorial. Ring Racers is the most technical kart racer I've played in my life, and that might strike you as being a bit funny considering it's essentially Sonic Kart, but keep in mind this was made by Sonic fans, and those people are psychopaths. You'll want to know the ins and outs of your vehicle and what it's capable of before hitting up the Grand Prix, and though I've seen a number of people complain about it, I see the wisdom of blocking off the online mode until you clear the first cup. I can't imagine what it would look like if players skipped the tutorial and jumped headfirst into multiplayer, but I'm gonna guess it'd be a disaster for everyone involved.

I'm confident in that considering half of the single player experience could also be characterized as "a disaster." Managing ring consumption, learning where sneakers spawn to break shortcut barriers, understanding how to maximize your 3rd-tier drift burst, anticipating when you should "hold" your cart rather than drift, figuring out where and when to use your spindash... it's a lot to manage even without all the stage hazards and player-laid traps that are out to straight up kill you. Pico Park is my god damn storming of Normandy, I've seen people lose limbs on the straightaway, and good men stretched to the width of an atom after colliding directly with a Drop Target that bounced them back into the path of a Gardentop careening around the corner at maximum velocity.

Even the pre-race is a nightmare. You don't just line up all nice and neat like in Super Mario Kart, patiently waiting for the green light. You can roam freely so long as you don't cross the starting line, which means you can also bump into other players and force them over the line to penalize them. I said Pico Park was a nightmare, but I didn't even survive the first three seconds of Carnival Night Zone, because everyone kept bumping me into hazards in the pre-race, and when I was sucked into the magnetized tunnel that serves as the track's opening straight, I was flung directly into several hazards that caused my kart to explode. I died and I barely made a single input.

For the last week you could find me hunched over my laptop, drenched with sweat because it's 80 degrees here at night and my computer is overheating, gripping my controller and hissing "fuck you, FUCK YOU," and you might assume I'm not having a good time... but I am. Despite how chaotic and complex and downright vicious this game can be, I'm into it.

Maybe I'm just in the market for the kind of depth and sadism Ring Racers offers, or maybe I've played so many kart racers that the problem I'm having is that they don't have enough esoteric bullshit in them. Mastering Ring Racers' mechanics is satisfying, but understanding how they play off one another achieves an even greater high... I've graduated to a stronger drug. Naturally, courses are constructed around these systems in a way that's both mindful of low- and high-level play, and the loop of replaying tracks and developing better strategies to maximize your ring consumption and attain better clear times feels good, with few exceptions (Balloon Park and Blue Mountain can eat me.)

I really like the visual design of the game, too. The stylized menus, expressive character art, and detailed tracks all lend a high level of production to the game that's genuinely impressive for a fan game born out of a fan game born out of a fan game using the Doom engine. It can be difficult to parse the action sometimes, especially in levels with more unconventional color pallets, but I think the game has a look to it that really makes it stand out while feeling like an authentic progression from Sonic Robo Blast 2's aesthetic. I will add that this is one case where IGDB fucked up by allowing a cleaner thumbnail, though. I prefer the original, which looked like a magazine scan of a grainy off-screen photo taken at a CES. Much more fitting, if you ask me.

Of course, like everyone else, I still have issues with Ring Racers that I think really sour the experience. The pandemonium of the aforementioned pre-race wears out very quickly, with stage outs and starting line penalties becoming more annoying than humorous, especially given how long it can take to recover. There's also a lives system which feels wholly unnecessary when you consider that the capsule minigames that appear every two races could otherwise be used as checkpoints if you don't place high enough in a circuit to advance. The trick system is also interesting in concept but utilized so rarely that I often forgot it was a thing until I needed to exploit it, and I typically found myself fumbling it as a result.

I've said before that Sonic fan games are in something of a golden age, with hobbyist-led projects being of a caliber that genuinely blows me away. Credit where it's due, Sega appears quite comfortable with letting fans create games like this without interference, something I think has helped give the scene space to mature and which has helped to keep Sonic so relevant. Dr. Robotnik's Ring Racers' kinetic gameplay and strong art direction impressed me the moment I saw it, and I think there's a lot of potential in introducing a higher level of technicality to a kart racer, but it does need some adjusting in places and falls a bit short of its promise.

Addendum: Apparently the game also controlled worse pre-patch so I may be benefitting by having waited just a bit to really dive into it. Seems worth mentioning.

Bad news guys/silly

I think… I got a little too into Ring Racers; no, it definitively won't break into the "the Games of All Time" list, but like, it certainly is a spectacle. I think I got on and off of this game so much, that I just- play it, without any hesitation. Definitively a "world gone mad" moment regarding my relationship with this game. Tho some tracks doo need some slight retouching, I guess.

3/5, defintively an accquired taste.

BTW; Battlemode ROCKS and time trial is obscenely fun.