Roguelite turn-based tactics. You have your standard normal attacks and resource-consuming attacks (though ranged abilities can only be used in the four cardinal directions, which can be annoying at times), but what sets this apart is that the further you move in one turn, the more dodge-points you accumulate, which reduces damage taken the same way staying on a shield/cover tile would. This means that you'll sometimes be able to take no damage from attacks if you can get your combined dodge and cover high enough. It's a unique mechanic that's executed well. Plus, there's no miss-chances or fog-of-war, so you can focus on the main tactical gameplay.

In fact, a lot of the individual components of the game are well made; my main issue is that it's a roguelite. Besides new team members (whose unlock requirements pretty much demand you to beat the game first anyway), the only permanent unlocks you get are the chance for new upgrades to show up during future runs; other than that negligible detail, a single failed mission makes you lose all your progress, forcing you to start the entire 5-8 hour campaign over from scratch. Plus, like you'd expect from a game without fixed progression, the difficulty curve isn't too great, either: on my first run, I got wrecked by a tower miniboss on the third level, and on my second run, I never encountered a single miniboss at all--and that was the run where I beat the game. There were "survival" missions in the late game where I managed to defeat all the enemies and just had to wait for the turn counter to run out, in contrast to the early game where I actually had to survive for the set amount of turns.

However, the worst part was when I finally beat the final boss, only for him escape and the game to cut back to the base without any kind of epilogue or staff roll. Turns out (according to this reddit post at least), the only way to reach the actual ending is to do FOUR MORE RUNS, with each unlocking exactly one new boss fight that wasn't available before. Yeah, I'm not doing all that. If that's what it takes to truly beat this game, then I give up.

Overall, this has the makings of a solid tactics title, and it deserved better than being a roguelite. I wouldn't recommend trying to get 100%, but if you're okay with just finishing one run, I'd say wait for a good sale.

Platformer. Left stick moves, A double-jumps (though the second jump isn't nearly as high and it also kills your forward momentum), X does a spinning attack that not only hits enemies and objects around you, but it doesn't lock or interrupt your movement like so many other games. Bosses even have checkpoints between each time they allow you to deal damage to them, which I greatly appreciate after having to play wait-to-attack bosses in one-hit-death games that don't do this. That said, the game can be a bit gimmicky with how spread out the introductions of each mask power and new character are, as well as how underutilized they tend to be. Heck, the side characters often don't even get full levels to themselves for their limited appearances, with the levels' second halves switching back to Crash/Coco for a harder version of one of the main levels (and exactly how much harder they are varies greatly, from "way harder" to "almost no changes"). Still, level design as a whole is pretty good for the most part.

There were a few moments where it felt like enemy hitboxes were too big and I died from hitting the space beside them, but the bigger issue for me is that checkpoints are sometimes spaced about twice as far apart as they should be. Keep in mind that this is a one-hit-death game, so there's no pretending that this would increase the difficulty; all it does is make the game more tedious by forcing you redo a bunch of stuff you've already cleared before you can retry the part where you died. If there's one trend I really hate about modern games, it's this. I remember seeing the video of the Celeste dev talking at GDC where he tried acting like this was a valid way to design games and would actually make the game harder, and even back then, I remember thinking to myself "No, you're wrong; stop using your platform to make games worse." But lo, Celeste made a lot of money, so the industry blindly follows without thinking about whether its success was because of certain details or despite them.

Plus, you can tell the devs/publisher truly believed that fewer checkpoints was real difficulty because if you trigger the built-in dynamic difficulty by dying enough times, one of the things that changes is an extra checkpoint is placed where there should have been one from the beginning. The other thing that changes is you start with an extra hit before you die, which sometimes makes the game easier, but other times has no effect due to the section's hazards all being instakill stuff like pits. Still, I would have preferred a way to toggle off dynamic difficulty and just make the extra checkpoints permanent from the start.

However, the game is at its worst with how it handles optional stuff. For example, I'd always try to break all the crates in each level, but out of all the main levels, I only managed to do it in one of them (the second level); for all the others, the game would keep telling me that I missed a few somewhere, even when I was confident I'd checked everywhere. On top of this, there are bonus platforms in many levels that'll take you to a short, optional challenge segment (which of course has its own set of crates that count to the level's total). The early ones are decent challenges, but for a few of the late-game ones, I couldn't even figure out what actions the game expected me to do to get through the segment at all, let alone get through while breaking all the crates. Turns out, the tutorials really don't tell you all the controls or mechanics: it isn't until world 6 where the level design shows you that sliding off a platform keeps you hovering in midair until the slide is over, and the game never tells you about the Triple Spin until AFTER YOU BEAT THE GAME. Who knows what other mechanics those bonus segments require that I missed entirely?

And that's just for breaking all the crates. The game also has a set of short, optional levels called Flashback Tapes that you can only unlock by reaching a certain point in each level without dying (so again, more tedium). I only unlocked four of them legitimately, with the rest being accessed by using the Everything Unlocked mod, and ironically, many of these levels are better designed than the main levels. No enemies means no hitbox issues (challenge is still there due to pitfalls, timed blocks, and exploding TNT/Nitro crates), their shorter length means dying doesn't usually make you redo too much, and their linear 2D nature makes it harder to miss crates, so I even managed to get 100% in most of those levels. Unfortunately, when these levels falter, they falter hard. The timed blocks are fine when you're running against the clock, but then the game also sometimes makes you wait for them to disappear, so if you're having trouble on a segment after the waiting but before the checkpoint, you have to redo that waiting each time. This is so much worse than redoing segments in the main game because not only is it boring to have to do all that waiting each time, but Flashback Tapes don't have any grace checkpoints to alleviate the tedium if you die too much. Oh, but the waiting isn't limited to timed blocks; this also includes waiting on fruit-crates to break (they take five jumps) and Flashback-Tape-exclusive bounce-crates to transform into destructible Nitro crates (three jumps for each one). Almost every Flashback Tape where I didn't break 100% of the boxes, it was because I got tired of waiting on the same stuff over and over in order to regain my progress. The only exception was the final tape, which I gave up on entirely because it demanded way too much precision compared to what the controls reliably allow you to do: you have to land on the edge of a bounce-crate while moving away from the spring so you don't die to the Nitro Crate above you, then pull back and do the same thing again for the bounce-crate/Nitro-crate combo above it. I'd sometimes manage the first, but I could never do it twice in a row.

And then there are the four colored gems. The Everything Unlocked mod doesn't actually unlock the gem platforms, so you have to get the gems yourself if you want to unlock those segments, but when I looked up how to get them, it was bad-Adventure-game levels of "how was I supposed to figure that out?" and since I'd already given up on the final Flashback Tape, I just didn't bother with the gems at all.

Overall, I definitely wouldn't recommend trying to get 100% on this game, but if you're okay with simply beating games and skipping the optional stuff, wait for a good sale.

I didn't really notice this until my brother made an off-hand comment about a year ago, but there's been a new subgenre of 2D plaformer for some time now: Celeste-clones. These are distinguished from ordinary 2D platformers by having no real enemies or combat of any kind, with challenge based pretty much entirely on avoiding pits/spikes and with chase sequences instead of boss fights. Also, while they start with a decent amount of challenge, they also don't have much of a difficulty curve, just like their patron game. Sure, Celeste does a lot right, so these games usually won't be too bad, but because they also blindly copy its formula without really thinking about what worked and what didn't, they also inevitably copy some of the problems Celeste had, so they can never be better than just okay.

Between all these games copying both the general formula for Celeste as well as its lack of a difficulty curve, they all start to feel the same--not just within themselves, but also as each other, and this game is no exception. The main gimmick this game does to try to stand out is that pushing RT pokes the ground with your stick, which causes you to jump higher than a regular A-button-jump on solid ground but will stick you to red-cushion ground so you can launch yourself left/right, but this isn't enough to give the game its own identity; ultimately, it just got me confused sometimes where I'd accidentally push one button when I meant to do the other button's action and I'd get killed because of it.

Another way this game tries and fails to set itself apart from Celeste is by giving you new abilities that you can take back to previous areas to get collectibles you missed. The problem here is that this game isn't a metroidvania; it's a very linear Celeste clone, and it misses the point of why Celeste doesn't let the player take the double-dash into other levels: to help showcase that all optional collectibles can be obtained the first time you see them. No matter how hard it is to get that strawberry, you can get it with the knowledge the game has given you beforehand. In contrast, if you're having trouble getting a golden music note, it can sometimes seem like there's no way you can get it at all…because there isn't; you HAVE to bypass and backtrack for it after getting another ability. Sometimes, the game has an optional room in a split path, and in those cases, it'll even display a message explicitly telling you that you have to come back later:

As for the backtracking itself, the game does give you a fast-travel ability you can do by pushing X, but each section only has three fast-travel locations at best, so you'd still have to replay a bunch of rooms you already got everything in before you can try to get the golden notes you missed. Sure, it's better than Celeste having zero fast travel points, but it's a downgrade from Super Meat Boy letting you go directly back to the level with the warp zone you passed up. Oh, how quickly people forget the past…

By the way, even though I took the time to get around 2/3rds of the golden notes, I still beat the game in only around 2 hours and 30 minutes (not much longer than the Steam refund window), so on top of the game not really having much of a difficulty curve, it's also quite light on content.

Overall, it's not a bad game, but it's very much not worth $20 USD. Play the original, free version, play the free demo for this version, but the full game? Even if it were half price, I'd say wait for a sale.

Fast-paced Hack 'n' Slash with slow, Shmup-influenced enemy projectiles. I've never been a big fan of the hack 'n' slash genre, but having movement-based challenges instead of reaction-based ones combined with enemies only taking a few hits to die really helped this to be an enjoyable experience for me. Granted, it's not always enough to encourage fighting enemies when the game doesn't go into lockdown and force you to, but even running away still results in some challenge since you have to avoid all the bullets being shot at you (it may even be harder to run away in some cases).

The game is somewhat nonlinear. Not only does the map have many winding, interconnected paths, but quite a few of the areas and bosses can be tackled in any order (though there are a few progression upgrades you'll need to access certain places). The downside of this is that it can be hard to figure out which path is forward and which path leads to an optional upgrade, so you'll sometimes find yourself teleporting back to the previous respawn/fast-travel-point to see what's in the other direction.

If I had to say one problem with the game, it's that not all attacks have sufficient warning. For example, the Shmup elements sometimes don't account for the fact that this is a hack 'n' slash: you're often gonna be right next to the enemy/boss to attack them, yet bullets appear and move immediately. And sure, some attacks have red !s pop up to warn you, but others seem deliberately designed to trick you, like how some enemies shoot immediately after landing from a jump despite most enemies just having normal, non-shooting jumps. The worst example is probably the boss Grief: it tries to incorporate your recently-acquired digging ability into a boss fight, but there's no spot to dig in the boss arena at first. What the game does is subtly spawn a dig spot during one of the boss's attacks that spawns thick crowds of spikes across the arena, then its next attack hits the whole stage, so you only have a couple seconds to 1) realize it's even there in the first place since it's graphic isn't all that stand-out, and 2) perform the jump+ground-pound move wherever it spawned to get to safety. Even after you know what to do, it can be a bit challenging, but going in blind, it's quite a cheap hit.

…and if I had to say two problems with the game, it's that postgame super isn't worth it. I tried it since there weren't many other Game Pass games I was interested in, but it just reinforced my decision not to do other games' postgames. Not only does the game suddenly take a turn into arbitrary riddle territory just to gain access, but even after you figure out how to light the cat statues, you still have to find the upgrades needed to light each statue in the first place, and without a walkthrough, that's it's own aimless chore. Plus, the postgame itself is pretty bland and disappointing: the entirety of it consists of 1) a quiz about different story/gameplay details, some of which are rather obscure and easily missed/forgotten (you have to fight six enemies for each question you get wrong), 2) a series of lockdown battles ending with one that's way too long--easily 8+ waves (it's not even in the top 5 hardest lockdown battles in the game; it's just pointlessly long for no reason), and 3) yet more basic platforming across crumbling blocks that isn't meaningfully different than the jumps the game has already been making you do (the enemies here don't even shoot at you, so it's honestly easier). Plus, the cutscene you get after finishing those segments is rather disappointing. The dialogue fits the characters, but it's short and nothing really meaningful or even funny happens.

Wait for a sale.

Solid Donkey Kong Country clone that also does a couple unique things to stand apart. Small issue is that if you don't already know from prior Donkey Kong experience that you can jump mid-air after rolling off a cliff, that one enemy in the waterfall level is absolutely not enough to teach you about it (but then again, I don't think that specific maneuver is required). Another issue is that the bramble level (unlocked after getting 100%) is WAY too much of a difficulty spike that also simultaneously requires you to learn new mechanics and pull them off with precision; I actually gave up because I was convinced a certain part of the level wasn't working right. Still, the rest of the demo was enjoyable, and the devs did promise to build up to that level of difficulty better, for what it's worth.

Once you get past the tutorial, the entire demo consists of just four very short levels, like <1 minute short (and there are some story moments like a choice that you can immediately go back and change to unlock the other path). Those levels were fine, though.

Not much platforming in this platformer at first, and it's easy to forget you can double-jump off of certain projectiles by the time you first need to do it (and lockdown/enemy-wave rooms are always a pet peeve of mine), but the demo does pick up a bit afterward. Fine for free, but not sure I'd pay for a full game of this.

This one leans a bit too far towards atmospheric hallways, but when it does have some actual platformer challenge, it's not half bad.

The game has a bad tendency to put optional items in areas you either can't reach or won't learn how to reach until later (including requiring items that aren't in the demo), but the level design is okay and the bullet-controlling gimmick is pretty fun. Side note: apparently, they redubbed the voices from the original anime, yet the voice acting here is kinda bad.

Decent platforming challenge and backtracking that is actually meaningfully different when going the other way. Only real issue is that jumping felt slightly too quick and ball-form jumping could be a bit finicky sometimes.

Enemy attacks can be iffy, but other than that, the level design is okay, even when taking account branching/looping paths when you need to look for collectibles to progress.

Despite what its description might lead you to believe, the game is actually an open-world take on the Super Meat Boy formula, and you never NEED to use the death platforms despite them being the main selling point (with the game even having a dedicated suicide button so you can make mid-air platforms). Level design also isn't too bad, though checkpoints might be a bit too far apart.

Despite only having two enemy types in the whole demo, the game still manages to have solid Metroidvania level design and fair challenges. It did bother me that enemies could only be stunned, not killed, and a couple lines of text could use some clarification, but it's still enjoyable overall.

Jumping physics feel a bit off in this Celeste clone, but it doesn't take long to get used to it. After a bit, you'll get the ability to grapple blocks, but the game never tells you it won't work on single-tile platforms, which threw me off, but overall, it's worth trying the demo since it's free.

The limited ammo/reloading mechanic and the Dark-Souls-style "hold button for long enough to use healing item" mechanic are two of my biggest pet peeves in all of gaming, but the level design is solid enough that I can recommend this free demo in spite of that. It also bothered me that this metroidvania demo blocks off content several rooms from the nearest save point, meaning when the full game comes out, you'd have to re-retraverse those rooms.

Level design is decent, but the hub you access the levels from is a very open, very empty metroidvania, with only one level per large room (and some of those levels are locked because it's a demo, so you just have to keep wandering forward until you find an unlocked one). Plus, you can't fast-travel to unbeaten levels; you can only go to designated fast-travel spots that are quite a ways away from each other. That'd be one thing if this were an actual metroidvania, but this is really just a bloated hub world. Also, I couldn't get the turn-things-pink item to work.

Oh, and the game never makes it clear which spikes you can pogo off of and which you can't. You just have to figure out on your own that some spikes can be pogo'd off of.

This fixes practically every problem I had with the first game: seesaws stop before they get too vertical (and the game won't suddenly drop a box on them to screw you over), levels have fast-travel points so you don't have to retraverse the whole stage to get a collectible you missed, bosses don't make you pointlessly wait for no reason nor do they have bloated health bars, and you have a map screen that shows exactly where each collectible is, so you have a better idea of how to reach them. My only real issues are that the map doesn't pause the game (you have to pause first and then bring up the map if you don't want to be cheap-shotted) and that using a fast-travel point doesn't bring up said map to show where you're going; you just have to go by the text description and your own memory of the level. Still though, highly recommend this one. Say hi if you read this.

The first level here is rather flat and dull, but the outer-space ship level picks things up quite a bit.

The first, second, and fourth levels aren't too bad, but the third level has a darkness gimmick and also requires abnormal precision for getting below underwater spike pillars. Checkpoints could also stand to be closer together.

Nice little platformer, though you do get a new power every 5 levels, so I'm worried the full game will just be gimmicky and monotonous. For these short 20 levels, though, it's fine (though the last level required some tight timing).

Despite the tag, the demo doesn't really have any puzzle-solving going on, but maybe that's for the best since the action-platforming is pretty good. Only issue I had is that the lighting changes at the end, making it hard to see the ropes you need to shoot.

Controls and level design are okay, but I'm really not a fan of how you have to beat earlier levels fast enough to unlock later levels. Even for the demo, I couldn't access the boss fight at the end until I went back and shaved a minute off my previous times in the first two levels, so I'm not exactly looking forward to the full game.

It's mostly boss fights with SHMUP-inspired bullet patterns, but their attacks are varied and rather fair. The last boss in the demo was quite a difficulty spike, though.

Attacking forces your character to be completely stationary, including causing moving platforms to move out from under you. However, there's never a situation where you'd really benefit from doing this, and the rest of the game is designed fairly well.

Decent SHMUP/Bullet Hell, but there's only one level, and the boss fight was pretty damage-spongy (and the dev would only "consider" reducing its HP). Also, apparently, 60% of the full game is going to be Adventure-Game-style exploration and riddle-solving, and this is not represented in the demo AT ALL; it starts at the beginning of the Bullet Hell level and ends shortly after you beat the boss. Not promising, but at least the demo itself is still fun to play.

The demo has one level that's pretty fun to go through, but it also very blatantly has a lives and credits system, so as far as the full game's concerned, you might be better off emulating the PSP port so you can use savestates to avoid being sent back to the beginning of the game on game over. I hate how so many otherwise-well-made SHMUPs have limited continues.

A twinstick-shooter where you can only move via gun recoil (and a dash move). It starts off kinda bland, but the demo does have some levels that don't make you kill all the enemies to progress, and I was having some fun by the end.

Once again, the single available level is fun, but the game has a lives system despite having zero reason for one since it already sends you back to a checkpoint when you die! Forcing progress loss beyond that is just pointlessly punitive.

Unlike the dev's previous demo, this doesn't let you play any of the levels; you only have access to a 5-minute "caravan" mode where bosses appear rather frequently. What's available is very well made and polished, though.

A rare example of an arcade-style SHMUP that saves your progress between levels! Unfortunately, enemy waves are randomly selected, so sometimes you'll breeze to the boss with no trouble, and other times you'll lose all your lives just a couple waves in (and yeah, again with the lives system, but at least you only restart the level).

You know how, when a lazy dev is tasked with converting mouse input to a controller, they'll just make it so you drag a cursor around the screen with the control stick? This game's default controls make you do that even when you're using keyboard/mouse! It's a mindbogglingly counterproductive decision, and the dev knows that many people would hate it since there's an option to switch so that the arrow keys/right stick snap your reticle between the boss's weak points instead (surprisingly no option to map it to the freaking mouse, though!). Once that option is enabled, though, the game is pretty fun with some tough bullet patterns.

A pretty fun bullet hell where you teleport through bullets and hazards to power up your own shots. Story is kinda weird, but maybe it'd be funnier if you knew about 1800s Japanese history. Only three levels in this demo, but they're well made.

Pretty tricky puzzles, though your magic vision doesn't always show which obstacles are connected to which switches because those icons can still somehow be blocked by other stuff sometimes.

The gimmick here is that there are arrow tiles on the ground that enable/disable your ability to move in certain directions, and they even affect other blocks so you can move them on their own instead of pushing them. No music, weirdly enough.

The main levels in the demo were kinda boring, but the postgame levels were a bit tricky.

The NPC moves in the opposite direction as you, and you have to bait him to the goal. There's no undo mechanic, but at least the puzzles aren't that long.

You can pick up cards on the ground to increase your stats, but enemies can do the same thing, so you have to figure out which cards you can allow them to take and which route you need to bait them towards to kill all enemies.

More decent puzzles, though the difficulty curve is a bit off since 5-1 is harder than any level in world 6.

The puzzles are pretty easy at first since you're just clicking and dragging tiles, but they start to get a bit tricky near the end of the demo.

The entire first world is quite easy, but the six available levels for worlds 2 and 3 are fairly challenging (except 3-3; that one went back to being fairly easy).

An Advance Wars clone with some minor differences here and there, like tanks costing more or injured units still dealing 10 damage to enemy properties. I didn't like how planes couldn't attack; they can only "spot" units to decrease their defense slightly. However, I REALLY didn't like how the demo doesn't save, because it meant I lost multiple levels of progress when I went to take a break, so consider this recommendation tentative as I didn't actually finish the demo.