Being a dense block of granite that I am, I had no idea Hush was apparently just a demo until I started actually playing and noticed the obvious where it says “Play Demo” in the main menu. Huh. I have no idea how or where I got the game, but it would still be nice to know that it's not the real deal considering dev is charging 10€ for it. So other than being a candidate for a very short review with its 10-15 minutes of play time, what is Hush?

Going by visuals alone you can tell game appears to be an action adventure of the most catch-all type, but I like how it incorporates things like light play aka you need to loosely stick to light sources or bad things will happen to you. This feeds into what brief snippet of the story you get where our titular girl is running away from someone or something and finds herself tumbling down a set of stairs leading to the basement in order to get away. Did I mention she goes there through drawn doors? Yeah, there are fantasy aspects here. There could be something way more foreboding at work, especially when you come across children locked into cells saying “they're safer” in there, but what you'll come across as enemies are weird animated barrels and flying books who have decided to sprout arms and attack our heroine. Which is where Hush's problems really begin – controls and combat. Now, I've read some opinions post fact and while I can see their issues with controls I used my Xbox One gamepad to play and didn't really experience any. What was unavoidable, though, was clunky and inadequate combat which has this “land a punch with your trusty toy, roll away, do the same again” routine instead of an actual combat system. Does that wreck the game or make it unplayable? No, but it's just awkward and shows either incompetence or lack of thought put it into designing something appealing. Which is an issue all you're left with are pretty appealing visuals, for what little we saw of the basement, and a single block dragging puzzle. I could do without that last one.

Hell if I know how you should spend your quarter hour or not in this case. It's not a broken game in any real sense and some issues can be alleviated by not using the M&K, but it's real short and needs fleshing out in all departments. This is one of those reviews that will require amending or complete rewrite when/if the game comes out.

Beware of Darkness, beware of Sadness.

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Bullet hell games, especially the twin stick variety, aren't exactly my strong suit and when you boil them down to essentials it's about mastering higher levels of difficulty or chasing high scores. Neither is necessarily how I would spend my time with games which leaves me with typing a brief take on Nex Machina having now finished it on the easiest difficulty and partway through one higher. Amusingly enough, Rookie is the recommended difficulty for newcomers and considering even I got through it without dying until the last few stages you can assume it's definitely easy enough for anyone to give the game a whirl and walk away with something.

Story? Man, I don't know. Robots have gone crazy and seem intent on killing humanity. You're a badass dude riding an even more badass bike who swoops into levels and proceeds to kick robot ass. That's gist of it and game's ending is about as satisfactory as that. That's besides the point, anyway. What we're here for is to shoot some metallic contraptions apart and we'll get it. Over the top perspective and twin sticks control scheme work just fine in keeping visuals clear enough to not get bogged down in too many particle effects. Keep in mind that jumping in difficulty absolutely makes enemies more numerous and faster, their deadliness is never in question because one hit without a shield and you're toast, but you have a tools in up your sleeve to even the odds – trusty dodge with invincibility frames to get you out of sticky situations, which can be upgraded with power ups you get on levels to become a triple dodge and even cause explosions upon landing, to additional weapons when your basic blaster isn't enough even with wider spread. Laser, rocket, sword, etc it's all here and if you wait for the power up to rotate said offering you can usually choose which one to take. Whenever you die you also drop one of the upgrades you had, but it's not gone and you can collect it again. And I realize what I'm saying is probably 101 to experts, but you really really want to hang onto your pickups because it's the shock of forgetting you no longer have that charging laser to clear the screen that will get you. Other than wasting robots you will also be doing things like rescuing humans, destroying emitters and specific enemies, finding secrets exists and stuff like that before you clear individual levels and proceed to the next world. Good stuff.

Drawback I'd still list is inability to save during Arcade mode because developers decided giving you unlimited or 99 lives, on easy and medium difficulties respectively, was a fair exchange. It's not like the game is long or anything, but I found myself just wanting to take a break and you can't without starting all over again. What brief time I put into Nex Machina I enjoyed and might even check out other modes... even if multiplayer/avatar customization seems borked for some reason.

Stills fail to convey the idea of a bullet hell. Good luck taking a screenshot mid-action, though.

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I'll be perfectly honest with you – I gave up on Saturday Morning RPG about halfway into episode five. Before I even get into review proper and why I did something I basically never do it should be noted this is an incomplete game seeing as episode six is still missing. So that's already something going against the game, but it turns out it really didn't matter in this particular case because base product had enough problems.

At its core this is effectively a JRPG albeit one styled after Saturday morning cartoons of yore. Admittedly, not being a US resident it did not speak to me on that level specifically, but I get what it was going for. I was personally less into G.I. Joe and Transfomers, more into Conan the Adventurer and Bucky O'Hare myself. Game comes with that kinda derpy protagonist + geek friend included. So much so the entire first episode is actually a dream that sets you up for way more... or does it? Setting and episodic, literally and figuratively, approach to it is not one of the problems game suffers from. There's a HOOD commander who will totally get you next time, suspiciously familiar vehicle transforming robots who have a show-off of their own in one of the episodes, and plenty of pop culture references anyone in the know with media should recognize. For god's sake, the Wizard with his BAD glove is your spiritual guide early on.

It's mechanics and design where game fails, sadly. Episodes are mercifully relatively short which still manages to be a problem because for overwhelming majority of play time you'll be fighting couple of re-skinned enemy types. Pair it with simplistic combat system itself relying on timing defense hits to reduce damage or varying degrees of annoyance to execute attacks of your own and you have helluva time ahead of you. See, all of that isn't really a problem and other JRPGs have done it to varying degrees of success, but the real problem with Saturday Morning RPG lies in just how common place combat is. I got bored with it by the time episode two ended, and inventory management was a separate source of annoyance that reared its ugly head at about the same time. Your attacks depend on items you've found to equip and out of about three dozen I've found probably six that weren't completely annoying to use? Add to that sticker scratching you can do before combat to gain bonuses and you're looking at a prospect of tiring your thumbs out real fast.

Should you play this one? I'd advise against it unless you've tapped out all other JRPGs under the sun. If I was honest with myself I would've probably stopped way earlier, but I hoped game would improve as it went on. It does go up in scale, at least.

Screen you'll be staring most of the time as you mash, pattern match or time QTEs.