My brother got me a Steam gift card for Christmas, so I figured it was about time for me to start buying games again after stopping back in 2018 (both because of my backlog and because I kept getting burned by trash like Apotheon). Unfortunately, the first game I decided to buy was Boiling Bolt, a SHMUP that neither the trailer, the description, nor any of the negative reviews mention has LIMITED CONTINUES. This unbelievably backwards decision completely re-frames the issues that do get mentioned in the negative reviews: it’s not just that the levels are bland and the fourth boss is unfair, it’s that when the fourth boss drains all your continues with its erratic, unpredictable pattern, you have to replay an entire hour’s worth of bland levels if you want a chance to try again. I had to switch to a predominantly defensive build (more lives per continue at the cost of slower movement and weaker attacks) and I still only barely beat the game on what I’m pretty sure was my final continue because it turns out the final boss is somehow even more unfair than the fourth boss. Not recommended. This experience single-handedly made me not want to buy another SHMUP because–apparently–limited continues are such a staple that it isn’t even worth bringing up when talking about the games’ flaws, so I can never be sure if other games even do that in the first place unless they have a demo. Oh, and none of the challenges unlocked despite me having beaten the game and being repeatedly told that challenges had been unlocked; the list was entirely greyed out and unselectable.

Thankfully, I did manage to buy a couple good games:

• Doodle Adventure of Chameleon
  

  3 hours playtime

  10 of 14 achievements

2D Platformer. Fairly standard left/right move and jump, but you can also push the other three face buttons to solidify like-colored tiles at the cost of the other two colors-of-tiles becoming background objects. The level design is decent, but it never uses this gimmick to its full extent (not even for its optional apple collectibles that do nothing besides unlock three bland, superfluous minigames). In fact, the game introduces more gimmicks that only last for the world they’re introduced in, like the enemies in world 3 that you can’t attack directly despite the world-3-intro-cutscene’s implication (you have to bypass them until you unlock the also-world-3-exclusive white paintbrush, and collecting one of these lets you eliminate exactly one enemy on contact) or the hidden spikes in world 4 that barely have any indication that they’re there until you jump on said tiles and hear the sound effect.

It’s basically a poor-man’s Celeste, so if you haven’t played that game yet, definitely start there since it has more content and goes for way cheaper on sale (Celeste’s lowest historical price is only $1.99!). If you liked Celeste and are interested in this game, I say wait until it’s at least 45% off.

• Frogun
  

  8 hours playtime

  18 of 31 achievements

3D Platformer. Left stick moves you, right stick moves the camera, A jumps, B shoots your titular frogun (which can grab enemies and grapple walls), and there’s no way to remap shooting to the X button, which is annoying. Instead, holding X aims your gun and visualizes its range, which–while useful sometimes–isn’t something you’ll need to be doing frequently since the game has relative autoaim: as long as you’re facing close enough to your target, a reticle will appear on it and pushing the B button will throw whatever you’ve grabbed straight to it.

Not only is the level design good, it also has a decent difficulty curve as well, which is something I don’t see that often. The game starts off quite easy, but still manages to be engaging, gradually getting just a bit trickier at a pace you can easily keep up with, and before you know it, the game starts having genuinely challenging moments, but it all feels natural. The game even manages to have a lot of content for a base-price-$15 game: 7 worlds with 6 levels each.

Levels also have optional objectives, which is always a bonus since them being optional doesn’t interfere much with casual playthroughs. However, I’m pretty sure you can’t get all of them in a single playthrough and I’m not a fan of having to replay content, so I didn’t check; I just got what I could on my first go and left unobtained objectives behind. Getting enough of certain objectives lets you open chests on the stage select, but the game only saves when you beat a level, so if you pass up a chest with the intent to go back for it later, you have to remember to do that at the start of your next session.

That said, the game even has some unexpected quality of life improvements: if you die before reaching any checkpoint in a level, it doesn’t count as a death, so you don’t have to manually reset if you’re trying to get the “no deaths” objective.

The game’s biggest issue is that it’s hard to judge depth sometimes. You can never be completely sure if the platform is past a one-tile gap or if it’s right next to the platform and just one tile down unless you stop and rotate the camera around (which you aren’t always able to do since some platforms collapse). Sometimes, the game will have platforms be both a tile away and a different height, effectively making it so no matter which camera angle you choose, none of them give you a decent way to intuit how to get across accurately. There was even one (optional) segment in world 7 where I’d always end up having to grapple a platform toward the camera, where I most definitely couldn’t see what I was doing. The worst is in the world 6 race level, because not only are the skulls you need to bounce on at varying heights and distances, not only do they disappear as soon as you touch them, but they also have different hitboxes as well, so it’s easy to accidentally destroy two at once and you have a split second to change your trajectory to the next one, possibly even forcing you to grapple onto a spiked edge and take damage to avoid falling into the pit and having to restart the entire race.

You’d think the game could use fog/shading to indicate depth since it’s modeled after PS1 games, but it kinda doesn’t–at least, not when it matters. The only time I really noticed this detail was in the world 6 race level, where you’re expected to drop onto a platform so far down, the game blacks it out and it just looks like a pit (and the coin trail meant to hint at the platforms existence is blocked by the sheer-face cliff of said drop). On my first couple attempts, I instinctively bypassed it, then got the letter collectible at the dead end and couldn’t for the life of me figure out what I was supposed to do until I saw my racing opponent jump into the pit.

Bosses are okay, but they’re all wait-to-attack bosses–with quite a few of them taking more than three hits to beat, so you really start to feel that waiting, especially if you die and have to start the fight over. Some of them also have less-than-fair attacks, like the world 3 boss shooting icicles from a direction your camera isn’t pointing or the final boss shooting a vertical shockwave at you that moves so fast with such ineffective warning, you can only really avoid it if you’re already mid-walk perpendicular to it (which could cause you to run into the boss’s non-aimed vertical shockwaves).

Overall, it’s an okay game, but you should wait for a sale.

• Frogun Encore
  

  3 hours playtime

  14 of 23 achievements

Same as the previous game, but there are a few new mechanics added, like a double-jump that prevents you from using the frogun again until after you land. They’re not mandatory for the most part–in fact, it kinda feels like the game was mostly finished when the devs suddenly decided to go back and try to work in these new mechanics to what they’d already made–but the new mechanics are needed enough that if you played the game’s free demo and didn’t immediately buy the game to continue your playthrough, you should at least reread the game’s description on the store page to reacquaint yourself with them before starting from where you left off.

Another major change is that you no longer have camera control: the camera is at a fixed angle and adjusts its position for different sections of the level. You’d think this would fix the depth-perception issue, but…not really. It sometimes even makes the game less intuitive since you can’t stop and spin the camera to a position you’re happy with for those times the game’s camera position is disagreeable. I swear, a few of these camera choices were made to make the game harder. Heck, there’s even one point where you have to grapple onto a platform towards the camera, except unlike when it happened to me in the first game, this was obviously deliberate! The only thing this really changes is that you don’t have to spin the camera around every corner looking for secrets, but even this has its drawback in that you’re no longer able to readjust the camera to help you find secrets. In world 4 of the first game, I got to the end of a level and realized I didn’t have all the coins, so I spun the camera around and was able to see that the one I missed wasn’t too far back, so I went and got it and earned the all coins objective. Can’t do that in this game. Plus, this game also has at least one moment where a purple-skull teleporter was hidden behind a solid wall, so it’s not like there’s any real benefit to the change. Best I can think of is that you never have to deal with anything like the first game’s world 6 race level, but that’s more of a level design improvement than anything to do with the camera.

Tutorials are a bit different. This game tells you that if you collect a purple skull, you have to reach a checkpoint flag to keep it (unlike all other collectibles that stay collected even if you kill yourself to get them), which is something the first game also does but never tells you. However, unlike the first game, this one doesn’t tell you that falling in water will kill you. One step forward, one step back.

Also, despite its base price not being much lower than the first game, this game has quite a bit less content: only 4 worlds with 5 levels each, and one postgame level you unlock after beating the game. You could argue the game is more polished and fair than the first one–such as the game saving as soon as you open a world map chest, and also how the final boss’s vertical shockwaves are a bit slower and have better warning–but there are still some cheap hits, like when the final boss summons a row of columns on one side of the arena, and you don’t always have enough time to run towards them before the final boss summons spike rows across the entire arena except beside the initial columns.

Overall, this is also an okay game, but if you played its free demo and are interested, I still recommend playing the first game first. Its discounted price is cheaper than this game’s discounted price and it has more content without being much less polished. If you liked the first game, this one’s pretty much more of the same, so it shouldn’t be hard to figure out if it’s for you and how much you’d be happy spending on it.