Maybe it’s just me, but it felt like there weren’t as many demos this time that really wowed me and made me interested in their full games–and I even looked through more tags time! Still, there are plenty of demos that are worth playing just on their own merits, so here are my demo recommendations in no particular order:

And one Zeldaclone:

A faithful spiritual-successor to the Game Boy Color Zelda games. However, you can’t rebind jump, grab, or attack, and the dev has only promised to fix one of those. Plus, the dev has also stated that you won’t get the game’s compass equivalent until after the first dungeon (after the demo is over), but the first dungeon could really use it with all the backtracking it makes you do (IIRC moreso than even the official GBC Zelda games).

I’d planned on writing my next post about the Next Fest demos, but then I suddenly won another game on SG, so…

• Patrick's Parabox
  

  13 hours playtime

  21 of 22 achievements

Puzzle game. All you can do directly is move up/down/left/right and push blocks, but the game’s central premise is that some blocks can be moved inside of, shrinking everything that goes in and regrowing what gets pushed out. The premise is expanded further by having some blocks be duplicates of the play area, allowing for various recursion effects.

The game starts off great. The difficulty curve is very gradual, with many levels only being minor variations of earlier levels so you can get used to the minutiae and edge-cases of how the mechanics work…or at least that’s what I thought the game was doing at first. But then, you start to notice that the game is taking a really long time to start introducing harder puzzles, instead opting to introduce more and more mechanics and gimmicks. For the first 2-3 hours of the game, the most difficult puzzles only took around 5 minutes to solve, 10 tops. I was already starting to get annoyed at the “Clone” world, but the game kept introducing (and even abandoning) more and more gimmicks, and when I got to the “Flip” world and the game introduced yet another new mechanic, I started to wonder if I was the one being played. Some gimmicks are even only used for a few levels in an optional side path, so it’s not even like you have the implicit promise that the game will keep building on them like the other mechanics. There are even levels that replace the graphics with ASCII, and the entire challenge is deciphering which characters represent which game objects. Some levels also lock your ability to zoom in/out, which only serves to make levels more annoying rather than challenging.

Worse still, a lot of the challenge in later levels comes from the fact that there are so many mechanics, you either start to forget or were never taught about the minutiae or edge-cases required for their solutions, completely undoing the ONE potential positive its light difficulty curve could have had! It’s not like B.i.t. Lock or Klonoa: Moonlight Museum where you can solve puzzles you’re stuck on just by thinking about the level design and game mechanics after you’ve turned the game off; you NEED to do trial and error. This even extends to levels that are supposed to be easy tutorials, like the first level of the “Transfer” world, because the new mechanic is just different enough from how the rest of the game worked that you won’t be able to intuit its existence, only blindly stumble into it. If you’ve ever wondered how some people think the game is too easy while others get stuck on early levels, this is why. This game doesn’t have “aha!” moments; it has “oh yeah, I guess I can do that” moments.

However, I think the worst example of this mandatory trial-and-error are the first few “Infinite Entrance” levels because they hide crucial information until after you make it to a point-of-no-return zone that you can’t see from the main play area (not even if you zoom in or out). This is in stark contrast to every other level in the game (except Challenge 32, which has the same problem). The third level in that world even has an obstacle course in that zone, effectively guaranteeing you’ll have to reset the puzzle because you wont know what moves would screw you over until after you get there, at which point you’ve likely already screwed yourself over from not doing the specific setup needed to win before entering the point-of-no-return zone in the first place.

After you beat the game, you unlock an additional “Challenge” world and three “Appendix” worlds. The Appendix worlds each have their own exclusive gimmick that reverses a previously-established rule (e.g. entering a block has priority over pushing said block instead of vice versa), so you’d think the Challenge world would focus on testing what you’ve been taught in the main game instead of introducing even more gimmicks and never-before-seen edge-cases, right? Ha ha, nope. Some of the Challenge levels are decently tricky and some you’ll solve in just a few minutes like before, but those remaining ones go right back to testing your patience rather than your puzzle-solving skills. When that became undeniable after I solved Challenge levels 15, 24, and 37 (and tbh 32 as well), I finally looked up a walkthrough for one of the four remaining levels I had no idea where to begin solving: Challenge 4. Sure enough, it was more unintuitive, bespoke edge-case nonsense, so I gave up and left Challenges 5, 6, and 12 unsolved.

Overall, this is a good example of why I stopped buying puzzle games, no matter how well-made they seem or how well-received they are. It’s too easy for too long, and when it does get hard, it’s for the wrong reasons half the time. It does have plenty of fair, tricky puzzles the other half of the times it gets hard, but I cannot in good conscience recommend a game that I myself did not complete. At least wait until it gets a much bigger discount than what it’s been getting.

I recently beat Mahou Warrior, and it’s a pretty good Mega Man clone. Although levels are longer than most Mega Man levels (and you never get powers from defeated bosses), the level design is generally easier, so if you’ve been hesitant to play the series because of its difficulty (or maybe you were turned off after hearing about the grindy achievements shoehorned into Legacy Collection), this free fangame is a good place to start. Even if a boss’s pattern is abrupt enough that you die on your first try, you can always just use an “increase atk until you die or beat the level” item on your second try and beat the boss no problem while still having more than enough money to buy another one afterward.

Plus, this game thankfully does away with the lives system, so you never have to worry about being forced to replay parts of the stage you’ve already gotten past (unless the game crashes, which only happened to me once when I disconnected and reconnected my wireless Xbox 360 controller). Instead, the punishment for dying is the soulslike “take away half your currency, but you get it back if you reach the next checkpoint without dying again” fare, but even this isn’t as big a deal as it may seem since 1) there were only a few places where I died more than once, 2) there’s plenty more money laying around each stage to make it up within two or three levels (and it’ll only take that long because of how much you’ve already accumulated), and 3) there isn’t much you can buy in the first place, and you can only carry two consumable items at a time anyway, so even if you die three times in one place, you’ll still end up with enough money to buy back the one item you used in the level.

There are some problems to keep in mind going in, though. The forest boss has an attack that’s hard to figure out how to dodge even after you know what’ll happen. The lava stage has you climb and fall from a row of ladders while being shot at from above; it was the only time I used the “20 seconds of invincibility” item because I couldn’t figure out how to avoid getting hit there. The gravity ship has one part where the “horizon gradient” background tiles are placed next to solid tiles and directly above “starry outer space” background tiles to make the former look like solid tiles (thankfully this is right after a checkpoint), and the level’s boss sends a ghost that jumps when you do, but only the first time, and it turns around shortly after it passes you rather than at a fixed point in the arena. The tower levels reuse the “trap yourself in a bubble to go upward” gimmick with more spikes, but the game never tells you that you can shoot to pop the bubble before hitting a solid tile, and not knowing that makes those segments harder than they were probably intended to be. Lastly, the final boss’s second phase has the boss be above where you can shoot around 3/5ths of the time, which is annoying. It does mean that this is possibly the only time where the health refill consumable is more useful than the temporary invincibility consumable, though.

Oh, and the secret level you’re told about in the credits is fine, but its boss is disappointingly simple and the only thing you get from it is a permanent attack upgrade (which is kinda useless after you’ve beaten every other level), so it’s really just for if you like the game and want another level to play through.

Still, despite those problems, it’s a pretty good game, and it’s free. Recommended.

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.

Mega Mage by J-tr is a Mega Man fangame with some neat ideas I haven’t seen done in other Mega Man fangames, such as giving you a different power if you go a different route within the level. There’s even a split path after you beat all 8 Adjusters, each with its own set of 7 unique levels and bosses (and even a different ending!), so make sure to use a different save slot if you want to try both routes. However, there are also a lot of cheap hits that require either trial-and-error memorization or liberal use of your Leaf-Tanks to heal (such as Virgo’s sword attack, which I’m still not sure is even possible to avoid at all)–and the game knows this because said Leaf-Tanks start showing up more frequently as you get closer to the end (of both routes). Also, the game makes you re-fight all 8 Adjusters on both routes, which is extra annoying. Overall, kinda hard to recommend despite being free, but if you’re a fan of Mega Man, you might be able to look past its flaws and appreciate what it does well (you don’t need to know Japanese to beat it).

Crash Test Oliver was also close to being an okay game, but there’s no music and the level design can be kinda bland and repetitive at times, like when you have to avoid 9 pairs of two chasing dog enemies in a row while being shot at by a turrent. It doesn’t help that the final boss abruptly and secretly changes your mechanics: you shoot instead of punch–which you do rarely because all enemies are immune to punches (punching is only for activating switches)–and yet you have to shoot the final boss a bunch to defeat it.

And now, after putting this off for a while, I continue my tradition of posting about my SG wins:

• Bomb Rush Cyberfunk
  

  12 hours playtime

  3 of 23 achievements

This is a spiritual successor to Jet Set Radio: there’s some light platforming while you wander around the city trying to find spots to spray graffiti on, and doing it enough has the cops come after you to beat you up, but there are a few notable differences.

First of all, I don’t remember being able to fight back in Jet Set Radio, but here, you can actually beat up the cops in return! Unfortunately, combat mechanics are extremely bare-bones (there isn’t even a dodge button) so there’s no real way to do any skilled play or reliably avoid enemy attacks during forced battle segments, especially after enemies get guns. You’re better off just running past enemies unless the game makes you fight them. The closest you get to variety are a couple boss fights where you have to spray graffiti instead, which would have been neater if everything else about combat wasn’t such an afterthought. The worst I found was a(n optional?) segment in the 4th area where if you fall in a hole to collect another graffiti pattern, you’re forced to fight two shielded enemies. You’d think you just have to get behind their shield to attack, right? Nope, they abruptly shift position so you hit the shield instead. Maybe you have to attack them while they’re attacking? Nope, same thing. Turns out, you have to do both at once, hit them from behind while they’re attacking, despite their attack animation having their shield go behind them. The game knows its combat sucks, too, because you have regenerating health.

Another addition is the tricks system, where you can push X, Y, or B on rails to build up points for a combo and increase it by leaning into rail corners or parkouring across long billboards. However, this is also barebones and only really comes into play for optional achievements and five 2-minute segments. Admittedly, I had a lot of trouble on the first one, and the game saves you into the segment so you can’t back out and practice. On top of this, there are no in-game descriptions of how the mechanics work, so I looked up a guide. Turns out the problem wasn’t me like I initially thought, but that the game didn’t explain its mechanics properly to the point there’s even a Steam Guide literally called “Things the Game Doesn’t Tell You” (always a good sign /s). See, although you’re told that you can lean into rail corners by holding left/right to increase your multiplier, you’re NOT told that this won’t register if your character is in the process of doing a trick animation from pushing X, Y, or B. After I discovered that crucial detail, I never lost another tricks segment.

All that said, the main difference between this game and its spiritual predecessor is that this one is more of an open-world game rather than being stage-by-stage-based. This also means the challenge isn’t so much in getting to each graffiti spot (like it was in Jet Set Radio) as it is finding where they are and finding how to reach them. I was originally gonna try to get all the graffiti spots thinking the game was gonna be more like a collectathon platformer, but after struggling to find all the spots in the smallest area, I looked up another guide and found out that not only is the game more Hidden Object than Collectathon, but some graffiti spots straight-up aren’t there until you progress far enough in the game, so it’s not even worth trying to look for them until after you’ve beaten the final boss.

I’ll end on a somewhat positive note: between each chapter are dream sequences where the game actually focuses on platforming for a bit. They’re okay, albeit simplistic like the game’s approach to other genres. Only issue I had was one started off where you have to break through a blue glass wall, and you do this with a mechanic the game may have told you about but that you’ve never had to use until this point: hold LT to boost forward quickly.

Overall, I don’t think I can recommend this game until it starts getting MUCH bigger discounts than what it’s been getting. It’s like the devs were only focusing on how they could expand upon the original game rather than trying to incorporate best practices for the genres they were borrowing from and thinking about which new mechanics would improve the game as a whole rather than be ignored until their designated mandatory segments.

Although Momodora 1 is free and an okay linear platformer for the most part, I’m hesitant to recommend it because of how many problems the final section has: 1) one of the frequently-used solid tiles looks too much like one of the frequently-used background tiles, 2) a newly-introduced enemy can pop out of unindicated solid tiles with only half-a-second of warning or so, 3) the final boss’s first phase requires you to do the Ocarina-of-Time knock-the-boss’s-projectile-back-at-it, but the way the game and fight are structured, you’d think it’s just a normal projectile you have to avoid (I had to look up what to do at this point), 4) the final boss’s third phase is extremely variable in difficulty depending on where you defeat the second phase, but most frustrating of all is 5) the game doesn’t have a save point before the final boss, so unless you edit your save file and change the 72 to an 80, you have to redo the entire final section every time you die against the boss. Despite this, the game does have a health-restoration point before the final boss, so there’s really no reason not to have a save point there as well; it’s just unnecessary tedium.

I also beat this game:

• Quilts and Cats of Calico
  

  6 hours playtime

  10 of 25 achievements

Card game. Tiles are one of six colors with one of six decorations; you have two in your hand at a time, and at the end of your turn, you pick one of three available tiles in the draw pile to add to your hand. Three same-color tiles placed next to each other always gives you a button worth three points (with bonus points if you get at least one button of each color), but the number and shape needed to get extra points for same-pattern tiles is different each game. For one last layer of complication, you pick three (out of four available) Goal Tiles to place on the board, and if you eventually surround them with tiles matching their pattern, you get even more points (extra if the pattern is matched for both color and decoration instead of just either one). The goal is to have more points than your opponent(s) once the board is completely filled, but they all have their own boards, so the only thing you can really do to interfere with their plans is to take a tile from the draw pile that they were hoping to get. Honestly, that detail makes the whole “having opponents” thing kinda superfluous, like the 2-player mode in the original Super Mario Bros.

As someone who isn’t a big fan of card games, I played this because the store page promised the campaign would be more puzzle-oriented, and in fairness, this is partly true. You’ll often be given a unique board, a specific objective, and always have the same tiles given to you in the same order. Unfortunately, the card-game-isms leftover from the original mode result in some unnecessarily cumbersome mechanics. The main one is that even though you often have zero opponents, you’re still restricted to two tiles in hand and three in the draw pile; you can’t just pick any tile, even though most levels have zero placement restrictions. Extra annoying are the “no hand” levels, which ironically still make you drag your chosen tile to your hand before you can place it on the board (instead of letting you take it straight from the draw pile to the board). Heck, the tutorial never even tells you that it’s possible to see which tiles will get added to the draw pile next, so I didn’t even know it was possible until near the end of the second act; I just assumed you had to place everything down with limited info until you inevitably failed before you could actually start to solve the puzzle. Turns out, the preview window is on the lower-right corner of the screen, partially obscured by some decoration that serves no gameplay purpose (you can also click a little bag icon below it to see the rest of the upcoming tiles). Even after you figure that out, though, the pointless tile-selection restrictions mean you’re often better off just taking a screenshot and solving the level in paint.net or something.

However, the worst part of the campaign, in my opinion, is the fact that several of the levels aren’t actually puzzles as promised, but are just standard vs matches with maybe one or two extra requirements tacked on, like “get at least one of each button color.” These all play out effectively the same, and the only time I lost one was when I was holding out hope to get the extra bonus points for a Goal Tile instead of surrendering to the inherent randomness and resigning myself only to getting the standard Goal Tile points. For further disappointment, the cutscene after the final level promised postgame content, only for said content to be more vs matches instead of more puzzles: I tried two and they were both vs matches with the “get at least one of each button color” extra objective, and not only will the game not tell you what type of level it is beforehand, but once you start, you can’t quit back to the overworld; the game saves you into the match, so even going back to the title screen won’t get you out of it. Because of this, I didn’t bother to check if any of the other postgame levels were different and just stopped playing.

Overall, this isn’t for me. There are a few decent, tricky puzzles near the end of the campaign, but unless you’ll also enjoy the base card game mode (and you have plenty of people to play it with), there isn’t enough here to justify its $20 price. Maybe if it ever goes for 75% off, but that’ll probably be a while.

I kept going back and forth in my mind about whether or not to recommend this game, but it is free and there’s a lot of things it does right.

• Danger Cliff
  

  10 hours playtime

  no achievements

2D Collectathon platformer. Left/right moves with momentum, A jumps, B dashes left/right with increased momentum, and X does a “cone rush” (dash attack) in the direction you’re pointing. If you keep holding the direction you were moving after finishing a cone rush, your momentum is maintained, but if you’re not holding a direction when it ends, you’ll come to a dead stop when it’s over–but only for left/right cone rushes; letting go on an upward cone rush keeps you moving upward, like a double jump. I 100%ed the game and never quite got used to its controls.

The game’s first impression isn’t very good. Not only does the first level (after the tutorial) have lots of seesaw-like physics platforms that have boxes fall on them from off-screen, causing them to become heavily slanted and hard to use, but the boss of the first level is really tedious: it does two passes at the top of the screen–where you can’t attack it–before finally flying one pass just above the ground where you can finally deal one point of damage…out of eight HP. Other early bosses have similar problems: the boss of Sand Dunes frequently gets knocked into a spike pit when you attack it (and your attacks are what deal damage, not the spikes), so you have to wait for it to regain composure and jump back out before you can safely attack again. Then, the boss of the game’s first “boss course” does need to be knocked into the spike pit to deal one point of damage, except each time, the boss jumps above the screen and you have to wait several seconds for the boss to come back down…EVERY…SINGLE…HIT. Again, the boss isn’t even that hard–you can easily knock the boss back into the spikes right after he comes back down–it’s just really tedious.

If you can make it past all that, though, you’ll find the game’s level design is mostly pretty good: those seesaws only appear in one other level IIRC, so you don’t have to worry about them much after the first level, and there’s lots of variety and challenge without straying from the game’s core mechanics. However, the game has quite a few spots where you have to run towards small Bullet-Bill-style cannons that can shoot at you from off-screen without warning. Plus, levels are awfully linear for a collectathon, and you don’t have the option to quick-travel to checkpoints, meaning missing one can force you to replay a lot of the level. On top of this, checkpoints can be pretty far apart–presumably to balance the fact your character also has 8 HP, but this means that you can be forced to replay a lot after dying, once again adding unnecessary tedium (especially when what kills you is an insta-kill pit).

Another good detail is that the other bosses are actually designed around having 8 HP, and as such, they don’t make you wait as long before being vulnerable again. That said, the bosses for the Minor Courses get reused with negligible level design changes, and the difficulty curve even just for Major Course bosses isn’t consistent (one of the easiest bosses is the “hard” variant of the Major Course 6 boss).

You also always have a sidekick character flying behind you who points to a collectible in the level that you haven’t gotten yet. This is a really good feature that the dev immediately defeats by having some collectibles in a come-from that can only be reached from other levels, and these specific branching paths aren’t pointed out by your sidekick since the collectible is technically in the other level. Your only guidance is an NPC by the initial dead end who tells you which other level to search in, but besides that, you’re on your own. They could really benefit from being pointed to as well: I only saw the clock level’s inter-level path because I missed a jump, and I didn’t see the power plant’s inter-level path until my second run through because of how much it blends into everything else. Compounding on this are two things that otherwise would have been kinda neat little details: some inter-level paths just lead to an ordinary spot that you can reach directly, and four inter-level paths loop back around to the level you were just at before finally giving you the collectible you were after. The first time I encountered the latter, I assumed it was yet another of the former and backed out to the hub from the pause menu to get the other collectibles in the level, only to realize at the end that I really did have to go that way to get one.

Still, the game wasn’t too bad despite all that, but the main reason I questioned my recommendation is that some solid tiles are easy to confuse for background objects and vice versa. In Doomsday Colosseum, there are single-tile-thick rows of yellow and orange sand against a dark background, so you’d think the darker orange sand is the background sand, right? Nope, the brigher yellow sand is the background sand. The game also has wireframe tiles that are a thin square with a slash through them; it’s not too bad in the easy first level, but it’s really bad in later stages like the power plant and the lunar base, where they’re arranged similarly to their background-object counterpart and don’t have many opaque pixels to distinguish them at a glance. However, the worst example is the Ex version of Richard’s Tower on the hub’s fourth floor: the solid tiles are the same dark grey color as the background, and the eye-catching red tiles are the background tiles!

By the way, the game has some unique water physics, in that water doesn’t alter your physics at all; it only keeps your cone rushes recharged so you can keep doing them as long as you’re underwater. If you’re falling fast towards water at the bottom of the screen, you need to time your cone rush well, lest you pass the water and die in the pit.

Overall, this game is kinda hard to recommend because every good thing it does has a catch. Level design is pretty good, but the controls are awkward; you’re pointed to collectibles you haven’t gotten, but not if you can only get there from another level; large missiles have warnings for when they’ll shoot you from off-screen, but small projectiles from Bullet-Bill-style cannons don’t have warnings. Meanwhile, not every bad thing it does has a silver lining: graphics are sometimes unclear, some bosses are tedious for no reason, the seesaw platforms and off-screen boxes in the first level are just straight-up a bad idea to begin with, etc. All that said, though, the game is free, so you’re not losing much by giving it a chance.

If you’re like I was and you feel that there aren’t many games coming out that you’re interested in, definitely make sure to check out the Steam Next Fests if you haven’t. They have hundreds of free demos, and you can filter by tags so you only see the ones that either you’re interested in or that killed and wore the skin of a game you’re interested in as some sort of perverse mockery of your likes and interests. I always manage to find at least a few hidden gems to add to my wishlist this way, and frustratingly, there’s no real way to go back and see them once that particular Next Fest is over, so you really gotta make sure to be on top of things and check while Next Fest is active. I came to this one a bit late because I was focusing on Game Pass, so there were a few demos that got removed before I could play them, but there were still a bunch of really good ones that I can recommend:

By the way, feel free to leave a comment talking about any demos I didn’t mention that you feel are worth a look.

Seems like each time, there are fewer and fewer interesting games on Game Pass, though part of this is that some are repeats like Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night or Steamworld Dig 2. I did manage to find a few games worth recommending, though, at least on sale. (I’ve learned not to post about the games I didn’t like)

Plus, I swear that the Xbox PC app (or maybe Game Pass itself) doesn’t support local save: there was one time a while back where I got a pop-up telling me that my local save was different from my cloud save (with the cloud save being labeled “newer” even though they both have the same timestamp) only to realize I’d lost quite a bit of progress in the game I was playing (LevelHead), but at the time, I chalked it up to the system lying about the cloud save being newer, as that’s what I had chosen. Now, though? I lost count of how many times I lost progress in Wargroove 2, despite the fact that I chose the “local” save this time. It’s not the game’s fault, either, because Wargroove 2 has auto-save: even if you hit alt+F4 in the middle of the enemy’s turn, the game will save which level you’re at, what units are where, and even which ones have moved already so you can resume EXACTLY where you left off. On Game Pass, though, there would be times the game would crash and I’d end up restarting in the middle of the previous level, and there were two times where using the game’s “undo turn” feature would also send me back to a different level! The only other thing I noticed is that I had some internet trouble a few times in the last month, so between that and the fact it happened with two separate games a few years apart, I don’t know what else it could be.

Anyway, the recommendations:

• Monstro: Battle Tactics
  

  14 hours playtime

  9 of 23 achievements

Puzzle game. Sure, it has the mechanics and theming of a tactics game, but there’s no resources/unit-building like Advance Wars (the units you’re given in a level is all you have to work with), nor are there any reinforcements or random-chances (thank goodness) like in other tactics games; the only range on stats is for how far away units can attack from. On top of this, many levels require specific actions to win–to the point the game even previews where enemies plan on going if you mouse-over them (they can be blocked if another unit stops there first), as many levels require you to bait enemies towards/away from things. In fact, you can even undo individual unit actions, even going back to previous turns or back to the start of the battle! This helps with less-than-intuitive parts because if you get caught off-guard by the fact that moving onto traps means you can’t attack with that unit or you didn’t realize locked enemies can still attack units next to them, you can just click the back arrow and try again without starting the level over.

Although there are some tricky levels here and there, most of the puzzles aren’t too difficult. Even the “++” campaigns don’t always bring the difficulty up much further than the main campaigns. Some maps can seem long and complicated at first, but more often than not, you’ll find that your first instincts on where to send units will only require minor adjustments at best to achieve victory. That said, some levels have optional objectives, but they’re not told to you in-game; they’re only mentioned in the game’s achievement list on Steam, so you wouldn’t even know they’re there until you get one by accident or you go out of your way to check the list when you’re not playing. It’s also sporadic which levels have them, so you’re probably better off just beating the campaigns normally and going back for achievements afterward. Plus, two achievements are glitched (and have been for years): the “beat Monster++ 19 with five units alive” is triggered simply for beating that level at all (even if you only have two units left), and the “kill all enemies in Monster++ 16” is awarded for beating Monster++ 4 (a different level).

Overall, its okay. I can recommend it since it’s free.