At first Donut County feels like a Windosill—i.e. a pleasant tactile experience—that lacks the courage to stay in its wordless standalone toy-ish sandbox form: the story bits feel intrusive and the player will often spend more time reading than actually playing the amusing levels.

It’s a good thing then that both characters and plot are engaging enough for the player to care about them—to the point the levels act like a “pleasure delayer” and ultimately make the comebacks even more enjoyable.

The short campaign (around 2 hours) per se doesn’t pose a problem; but the game would benefit immensely from some Free Play, Sandbox or Level Maker modes of sorts since the mechanics—nailed so gracefully—are there already, begging to be played with more often.

Part brain rot, part gacha (the only corner of the game to actually get some thoughtful dopaminic polish) with hints of creepypasta, Vampire Survivors’ effectiveness can be a bit of a commentary about where the medium stands in the 2020’s—specially when that’s achieved through the devolution of an old genre already simple to begin with: the twin-stick shooter.

Despite mechanically butchered (down to a single stick) and generic/derivative on the art side, the game’s crucial bane is the clock: runs drag both in their beginnings and ends—at first because they take time to warm up, later due to everything becoming numb and “sensory overload”-meaningless—and the fact it’s so foundational to unlocking continuity one way or the other puts the inevitable pun-intendedly nail in the game’s coffin. (Even Hurry Mode—much welcomed in hopes of shorter, tighter runs—works badly since it doesn’t affect distances within the huge maps; that it can only be put to use through a relic found in the game’s penultimate stage doesn’t help a bit either.)

On top of everything else the game’s obtuse progression (invisible items, mandatory unstated side quests, luck reliant systems, and so on) makes Vampire Survivors an S-tier timewaster—both intentionally and not so.

As a cross of platformer and beat ‘em up, Guacamelee doesn’t quite shine in either front: in the platforming side it’s floaty and sticky—more so when lucha moves are mandatory for traversing a level section or solving an environment puzzle; on the brawler hand it’s a bit too stiff and convoluted (crowd control can get very annoying as colored barriers and shifting dimensions pile up against the player) for its own good.

Good thing then it’s a delicious game to inhabit. The día de muertos setting is exquisitely realized through some top notch presentation (both in sound and visual arts, even if some vfx don’t connect properly in fights), interesting characters (side quest NPCs included) and terrific dialogue, while also lending the metroidvania aspect of the game a crucial hand—shifting between “alive” and “dead” worlds makes wonders for keeping the backtracking fatigue present in so many titles in the genre away for the most part of it.

The addition of “Intenso” (a temporary superpower) in the updated iteration of the game, brings in a welcome extra layer of balance to its flow besides expanding the player’s agency on how to tackle the game’s challenges (specially when coupled with the not-only-cosmetic skins already there from the start).

Imperfect as it is, Guacamelee conjures a too-good-to-pass-up world dead/alive for a metroidvania buff who’s in for something beyond pure mechanics shenanigans.

The saddest part of Dicetiny conforming to the ubiquitous “I know the reference” fanboyism hook is wasting some actually decent, cohesive art assets on parody content instead of developing Fakedice an IP to call their own—which would drop countless copyright infringements along the way as a bonus.

Unfortunately it’s undercooked below surface level as well. Good ideas frequently don’t quite come together—at times because luck plays too much of a big role, at times for balancing/pacing issues, or even due to the eventual (sure as death and taxes) bug/crash hitting.

When planets align, levels feel like a blast to play. More often than not though, Dicetiny frustrates and wastes the player’s time.

First time I played Dungeons of Dredmor the usually intruding Achievements started popping up at an alarming rate. But instead of being annoying they were the first hint on what makes DoD really amusing: a grim sense of humor. It started with Heroic Failure: “Die during the tutorial.”; right after that, Normandy cracked me up: “Die on Floor 1; play a new character with the same skills... and die on Floor 1.”.

Such mood permeates the entire game, from the anti-hero ‘Eye-browed one’ to the monsters—and their names, lines, sprite animations—to the absurd items you can find/equip/craft.

Truth to be told managing those very items is the main hindrance to hold the game back: they pile up high above the limits of your inventory—or your crafting abilities, or some practical around-the-corner selling—to the point an inelegant fix had to be thrown in as the easy-to-stumble-upon Wizard Keys, which provides the player a portal to a… storeroom.

Still, some skills can take advantage of that baggage overweight in a more interesting fashion, be them a late bandage or not. In DoD skills are the practical tip of the developers’ poisonous tongue, making form overflow into content. Experimenting with different skills combinations (and their respective trees) lends the game a much meatier replay value and helps a lot on letting the player work around failure and the genre’s typical lack of clear intel.

The original build had 10 floors available for exploring—which could be even smaller/quicker with the handy tool called No Time To Grind, used for cramming the same amount of XP into smaller maps—but I was only able to beat it after the hundredth hour of play. Anyways that’s not necessarily a testimony of some brutal difficulty level or over-punishing permadeath—even if some stupid demises were ensued in that front; it’s more like an awkward environment being a catalyst to a more playful approach where failing can be as fulfilling as winning.

80 Days picks a solid source to draw ideas from—even if it isn’t the very best on Jules Verne’s catalogue it can be a reassuring one to work with due to the scope of the premise being pretty straight-forward from the start—and develops it into a multimedia piece.

When this take on the story flirts with steampunk upgrades, results are just bland; but the writing itself is interesting enough to keep a player hooked, even if some decisions aren’t necessarily meaningful—curiosity for the outcomes of a particularly intriguing dialogue tree will frequently be the fuel that keeps conversations going.

Mechanics-wise 80 Days can be better compared to another adventure series, more familiar to gamers than to literates: Carmen Sandiego. It unfolds as the player gathers intel that inform future decisions regarding the trip—available routes, paths closed and so on—but that comes at the price of spending time, by far the most important resource in the game. Just like with Carmen, asking around—and sleeping, and waiting—gives the clock a spin, and that may be decisive by the end of the game. The second resource to be aware of is money, but Mr. Fogg has quite a decent amount of funds available to draw from—as long as you can find a bank and wait for the funds to arrive (once again, draining time). At the very least, managing funds adds an extra layer of complexity to the gameplay itself, since you may learn people in New Orleans would pay a lot for harmonicas and maybe you should bring one there for some easy cash, for instance—it’s a bit on the light side but still a refreshing meta nevertheless.

In the eyes of a classic gamer, 80 days has a downside that may be game breaking for some: arbitrariness. Some careful planning can be thrashed to pieces in a second when unpredictable events come into play. But maybe that’s for the better; it steers the game away from a simplistic (and common in games as a medium) cause/consequence mindset to push it towards the piece of art it’s based on—or even further, being art that imitates life.

In an endless sea of retro-informed platformers, Super Dangerous Dungeons sets off to a good start by looking the part: the modern palette helps the crispy pixel art in both clearly communicating environmental hazards and making characters’ sprites shine.

But there are many ways to be retro, and some more complicated than others; for instance, easing pipelines of the level design burden via procedural generation can even produce a valuable feature per se in the form of some “infinitely replayable” face value—even when the rules behind the algo only output a boring level after the other.

Fortunately Super Dangerous Dungeons took the long way—and succeeded resoundingly in that front. While the gameplay mechanics are as simple as a platformer can get, it’s a masterclass in level design in every aspect: the learning curve is perfect, the very levels serve as fluid tutorials, and by the end of the road the player will have mastered even specific speedrun techniques without even noticing it.

Talking about speedruns, the same levels show their true handicraft nature when the player realize there are “ideal” ways to play them to maximize the traversal efficiency—while, of course, raising the risk/reward stakes and almost turning the game into a whole new beast.

Not that the adventure is without its downsides. Rewarding exploration with hidden items would be a plus if those weren’t used to artificially raise the short gameplay length by being mandatory for entering the final room; hit detection can also be finicky at times—particularly noticeable when boulders are an integral part of a couple levels’ design. But perfect or not, Super Dangerous Dungeons is a commendable—even formative—platforming experience, especially for gamers not contemporary to retro games before they started being called that way.

Not as elegant as Don’t Look Back before it or synthetic as Super Hexagon after, VVVVVV still builds up firmly on a single premise—just like any other Terry Cavanagh’s project. Mechanics here are simple enough for it to even afford dropping its single action button for a directional-only control scheme if the player chooses so: in a platformer where jumping is replaced with straight-up/down “flipping” (gravity-wise, that is) buttons can even be an extravagance.

The spacetime issues that move the plot forward also permeate the game (on purpose or not) stylistically, lending it a rough-around-the-edges feel: graphics, sound effects and gameplay emulate the Atari 2600 era, while the soundtrack and metroidesque structure is more akin to the following console generation. Also, execution is just as uneven—music transitions sound weird at times, the pseudo-infinite Defender-like outer space areas are too empty and bland for their own good... and spikes shouldn’t be allowed to kill from the side after Sonic the Hedgehog.

But when VVVVVV is good (for the most part it is) it rocks. Level design (when due) is brilliant and plays a huge role in rendering the game compelling as it is—such a tough challenge (almost 8-bit tough) could only be tackled nowadays with some modern, smart use of checkpoints and respawn rates, and that’s thankfully the case.

A first playthrough may pile hundreds of deaths by the end of an average 2-hour run; but in VVVVVV that not necessarily means discouraging the player while at it.

Weirder than seeing PopCap’s logo following Square Enix’s one is to behold the aggressive breed born from such unlikely partnership.

Gyromancer is somewhat oppressive in many levels: characters art pieces can be surprisingly wicked, the plot is dark and gory, and the gameplay—as far as gem-match puzzles go—aim to constrain the player instead of encourage creative problem solving. In fact, even simple actions as spinning gems counter clock-wise (something that could be intuitively pulled off with a right click of the mouse) cost an item, and must be executed sparingly. As it piles up towards the end, some concepts communicate badly and puzzles manage to become even cryptic, an unthinkable feature for an apparently casual setup.

But it still hooks. Finding, unlocking and training gorgeous beasts proves to be rewarding—and so does simply following the classic-yet-nicely-told story. To the point it’s easy to take “twisting gems” for granted and end taking the game more seriously than it has any rights to be.

Gyromancer succeeds by not only dressing PopCap’s stuff in a beautiful coat of paint, but also by adding meaning to mundane gameplay mechanics.

Oozing charm on the presentation side—including some fantastic sound design/music—Pikuniku doesn’t quite know what it wants to be. From a promising tactile digital toy, it unfolds as a (light): metroidvania; collectathon; platformer; puzzle; action; highbrow indie title. Unfortunately, for the most part it drags.

The bouncy aspect of the original premise makes everything else (exploring, jumping around, hitting buttons, fighting) a chore, and it becomes more evident when backtracking (an integral, unavoidable part of the experience) comes into play, rendering an underwhelming feel to the 3-hour main campaign run (taking into consideration the amount of time spent solely on traversal matters, that is).

As for ~ v i b e s ~ Pikuniku’s smartass attitude fits Devolver’s catalogue well and may act as a selling point in the current dystopian late capitalist world, but if it’s the case humans (and videogames) survive, such games might as well be seen as the 90’s mascots of our time: inadvertently silly and puerile.

Everything is a tribute in Blocks That Matter, but it’s by no means derivative; on the contrary, it spins the “Minecraftris” premise to a carefully tailored experience—and level/puzzles design here make it well worth its salt as heir of the giants whose shoulders it tactilely bounces from.

The floaty jump is a problem though, one that pitifully shouldn’t be hard to solve. Unnecessarily “fixed” (its arc, that is) as every other (rightfully, on the puzzle side) aspect of the game, it surely pumps some involuntary replays into many platforming levels—especially where time is an issue, like those “running from Mama” boss ones. A lack of “undos” hurts the game more, but checkpoints wouldn’t be feasible with all the material management going around; implementing rewind mechanics in the gimmick’s infancy (moreso among indies) was prohibitively out of question in 2011.

A solid puzzler as is, Blocks That Matter’s biggest value is the one of an artifact. It’s built upon previous gamedev history while acknowledging the names of those who came before—a particularly important of a role for a medium that’s prone to erase its own ways as it threads on (as easily attested upon realizing many of the honoured names aren’t promptly available around anymore).

Being a Nintendo portable spin-off of the high-end Castlevania subseries Lords of Shadow, Mirror of Fate is a beast of its own. High production values are crammed into the 2.5D metroidvania layout, as the traditional tactical/exploratory gameplay is overruled by some straight-forward action. Anyways, throughout the game its pros and cons come from the same place: the cinematic approach.

It brings an unprecedented (in Nintendo platforms, mind you) level of gore and horror to the series, and its flair for spectacle delivers. Regular skirmishes are as satisfying as boss battles, the camera ensuring you’ll get the best seat while at it; same goes for presenting new environments or showing off the gorgeous, eerie vistas—especially when strolling outside the castle.

Unfortunately its God of War-ly metroidvania-for dummies level design has nothing of “Mature” in it and would serve a younger audience better; and so would the Quick Time Events triggered in certain situations, the player helplessly travelling back to 1983 for an involuntary taste of Dragon’s Lair.

Elsewhere, the double-edged sword thrusts on. Almost an interactive movie as it is, lore and fan service go terribly well together—while the same can’t be said about the controls, for the sake of not dropping presentation (and a few animation frames in the process) over gameplay.

Ups and downs here and there, the real game breaker still stems from that very same root. Bosses are preceded by seamless cutscenes, and even though pumping the upcoming battle up they grow plainly annoying over fail-and-repeat. Worse, they are unskippable. Worser, they can even glitch in preventing you from reaching areas where you fought a boss before, thus rendering a proper completion status unattainable without starting a new game—with the very same unskippable cutscenes along the way.

Ultimately the later patchable HD version can rid it of some bugs, but not the stigma (for good and bad) of being a breed of such diverse creatures.

To fire the game and see my 3-year old deck (auspiciously named… DECK1—it looks like 3-years ago me wasn’t keen on dabbling with alternative strategies) winning 80% of the matches says a lot about how the glacial pace of progression in the game is very well in place. But, maybe counterintuitively, it’s for the better (not because I’m winning, mind you 😌). The tl;dr version of this post is: yes, my launch review still holds true—and I’d still recommend it favorably.

It’s astonishing that a basically Series 1 deck (with a single sole heavylifter from Series 2, Vision—can’t thank him enough) is not only playable but competitive amidst Series 5—which means I’m roughly some 350 cards behind the schedule; it does so because the sloooooow unlocking ladder keeps most players around the same capacities but also, critically, refrains the game itself to be flooded1 with new (and impenetrable to the expected/intended ever growing player base) mechanics too fast.

That said, the downside of it is you can’t outsmart a whale, period. Paying players will surely be ahead with their double/triple rewards ladder alone—and that’s not even counting the stuff themselves (cards—and their natural synergy when you’re able to actually pick them with money). Luckily, such encounters are fairly few and far between, but it will always feel like a mouse falling into a trap—2with a playful cat (or Galactus) already inside.

That leads me to another quite interesting design choice that was clearly there from the start but only got fully realized long after the project has been estabilished: peeping cards3.

Cards that allow a player to look into the adversary’s deck—or go even further: draw cards, copy cards, and so on—are lowkey vital for the community’s environment. Of course, there’s the technical aspect of helping balancing the game with agency on the player’s side; but the psychological impact can’t be understated. Every now and then a player will be able to control the cards they’re miles from actually obtaining… and getting to the playful side of it—with the bonus of a possible upset scratch through the contender’s very own weapons—injects fuel in the system in not-so blatant ways.

Lastly, two cents of criticism. Firstly, Second Dinner can be unnecessarily stingy at times. A tie, for instance, means both players LOSE; no rewards whatsoever (that outcome could be easily different in several ways). Also, it baffles me how some lenghty championships have cosmetics (as avatars) for main prizes—even if there are LOTS of players that go long distances for them (so maybe that’s just me?). Secondly, optimization in many levels would go a long way. The game is a lot heavier than on release date (understandably due to assets issues, but still) and I could only put it to work properly in my current phone after turning down haptics (?), which doesn’t smell good at all. Same goes for some sluggishness on the UI side, with unncessary double confirmation screens (buttons like “Next” and “Claim” could be the same in some cases, for instance) that are grating in the long run.

I got back for collecting the Weapon X (one of my favorite gibis4 back as a teenager) cards—got to know about ‘em through a Steam update banner—but I might stay an extra while for the sheer pleasure of it (Weapon X cards or not).

At times Mini Metro looks/sounds too trippy for such a mundane RTS premise; but even if it occasionally fails communicating so, it deals with good old solid numbers—little angry ant-like symbols accounting for citizens of the biggest cities in the world, but still solid numbers nevertheless.

Same goes for the minimalist overall approach: simple, touch-friendly controls and geometric shapes as tokens for stations—as much as levels’ gentle starts—can hide its potential to quickly escalate to overwhelm a player.

It’s true that many of the game’s tough moments stem from the roll of a dice instead of some particularly thoughtful decision—stations (and resources needed to integrate ‘em) pop randomly, and the player may end up with useless extra lines while waiting for a tunnel that never comes, for instance; but Mini Metro hints successfully at tackling modern, everyday issues in an absorbing, slick way.

You know the most successful aspect of a game is PR when professional reviews are unanimous in pointing out “it’s too generous a F2P” even if it blatantly throws the player through a tunnel of tempting seasonal rewards that can only be snagged through some ol’ real money dropping—as casual players pass them by just to watch their locks refuse to rattle—every 3 weeks or so. But market stuff aside, yes: MARVEL SNAP breathes some (welcome) fresh air into the genre without simply resting on the strength of the tied-in IP.

The trimmed down main setup—12-card decks, only six turns before a full match is over—works surprisingly well not only for its by-design casual appeal; the twist of randomizing available playfields/locations (and the way such are progressively revealed as a match unfolds) adds up a good deal of variety (as an extra pinch of luck) to the mix while allowing the devs to keep a healthy, expansive framework without necessarily having to spend tons of resources on creating/balancing new cards again and again.

As for climbing the prizes ladder and getting extra cards, the way to go is… expanding the very collection itself. This “Collection Level” system is meant to “auto-cap” the amount of new cards a player can add to their ranks, once again elegantly avoiding constant “manual tweaking” by the devs when it comes to regulating the game’s economics. It’s such a Swiss Army knife of a feedback method that it can’t help itself being both good-natured and noxious to the player at the same time: e.g., as it randomly digs prizes from an invisible “tier pool” it relegates casual players to their “rookie” level for a long time before handling them a “chance to have a chance” of getting real game-changer cards; when synergy starts coming into play this gets even worse, since the odds of pulling more cards that are both a) good and b) work well together are slim. On the other hand, allowing a player to increase their Collection Level by spending resources on cosmetic upgrades to cards they already own lends them a decent deal of agency on how to do it in satisfyingly personal fashion.

Talking about cosmetics, there’s no cohesion to be seen among the collectible cards’ art pieces: they’re all over the place both aesthetically and quality-wise. A sad (but perhaps unavoidable) departure from how solid a “historic” curation approach—like the one previously available in Marvel Puzzle Quest, for instance—would have been with such a decades old IP-focused project; regardless, results tend to be good enough to keep it afloat, given the fact that the current audience’s nostalgia only trace back to, roughly, MCU’s beginnings or so. Credit where credit’s due though, the game does pretty well in other presentation areas—especially VFX and sound design/music.

Issues aside, MARVEL SNAP is very well positioned to grow bigger by the day and become a F2P juggernaut—and an ever healthier one while at it. That’s only possible because the development team made the clever decision to plant its structural foundations far beyond some shallowly obvious Baby Groot fan service would.

It’s a shame that in a solid hardcore arcadey action game like Downwell the “flourish” roguelite elements end up bringing luck into the table in such a decisive manner: it’s not rare to spend an entire gameplay session running into useless free upgrades—or not running into the most valuable buyable ones at all (or finding them available in the shops only when having that kind of money is just plain impossible, and so on). That piles up upon relying on leaps of faith to keep going down the title well; and taking chances coupled together with funky collision boxes and some unpredictable wall jump mechanics may not paint a beautiful Virtual Boy-esque picture from the beginning.

But when it comes to the sheer pleasure of playing it, Downwell can sit comfortably among the old classics it emulates—and expands upon.

If Miyamoto’s quote about a single idea solving multiple problems at once hints at something about game design, Ojiro Fumoto is a worthy heir of the relatively new Japanese tradition of being good at it. The single action button (used primarily for jumping) unfolds as a jack-of-all-trades: while in the air, it shoots bullets from the character’s boots; those can kill enemies, but also make the character soar instead of simply falling; if the boots run out of bullets they will be promptly recharged upon touching the ground—or enemies’ heads for that matter (just like some old mustachio kappa-killer), and the gameplay can keep flowing depending on the player’s ability and reaction/prediction capabilities. But then there are enemies that can’t be stomped—as there are ones that can’t be shoot; and some of them give more gems than others, maybe worth the risk of getting hurt in the process of killing/reaching them; and just when the player starts to get too comfortable in taking their time to subvert the frenetic pace proposal, water levels—together with a brand new air meter—are introduced.

Downwell acts as a prism, expanding the gameplay field from a single premise—and with a level of elegance rarely seen in games, old or new.

There’s hardly anything left to say about Keiji Inafune’s Mighty No. 9 convoluted (and well documented) development. But as for the final product, gut feelings aside, there’s a faint soul to be found under the game’s debris; it’s just that it never quite shines through to the point of fulfilling its promising sparks of life in any front in particular.

Everything falls short due to a widespread lack of polish plaguing every aspect of the game. Beyond the most blatant tech issues (performance, vfx particles/shaders implementation, the eventual game-breaking glitch), even good ideas are held back by such hindrances—especially when it comes to balancing and fine tuning shortcomings. For instance, it rewards the player for keeping a fluent (and satisfyingly so) pace up with buffs, but the very same buffs disrupt the intended flow (more speed or damage affects traversal in both direct and indirect ways); levels and bosses sport interesting gimmickry premises but, for the most part, they overstay their welcome; a shoehorned stealth level towards the endgame annoys (instead of bringing something fresh to the table) the player who got that far by mastering entirely different skills; and so on.

As said before, it has strengths. When it flows, it feels remarkably good—maybe to a “good 2D Sonic level” degree, even; the characters/enemies designs are great, and the hint system (which pitches a formerly defeated boss against the next best level) intertwines plot, level design and appeal smoothly; battle/weapons mechanics are interesting enough without being hard to grasp.

In the end, an honest approach may grant Mighty No. 9 isn’t the dumpster on fire one might think for its infamous reputation. But it’s surely undercooked—despite the amount of time and money spent (mostly by faithful backers) on it.