Recent reviews by Yal

Really blown away by the presentation of this game after having gotten through the first real area! Tons of variety thanks to the space travel theme, and both enemy patterns, abilities and platforming mechanics feel very alien and unconventional as well (there's things like the pattern-movement bugs from Galaga, blocks you can switch places with as long as there's line of sight, and your emergency healing ability being a squirrel-operated slot machine).

Both the visual style, mechanics, and overall slower floatier pace makes it feel like the sequel to Cave Story we never got, or perhaps a lost 1990s PC game thanks to the lowpoly prerendered cutscenes for important events like discovering a new planet. The soundtrack is MASSIVE and really catchy (and the main reason I got interested in the game after seeing it on Youtube) so make sure to pick it up as well.

I really wish I could give this game a positive rating, because it's got a lot of things going for it (the level design and enemy design is on par with FROM's) but there's fundamental issues with both the gameplay and interface that completely ruins the game feel and makes it hard to enjoy the good bits. If you thought DS1 was janky, turns out the rabbit hole can go even deeper.

- Most importantly, lack of hit feedback. If something hits your shield, the animation simply plays out without particle effects, pushback, any sense of physicality. You can never tell if you blocked an attack or it whiffed while you coincidentally had your guard up, and this makes it almost impossible to learn timings and hitboxes. And importantly, this also means you can't tell if a block/whiff cost you any stamina, because...
- the health/stamina/mana bars fading off into transparancy makes it hard to tell how much you have! And on top of this baffling design decision, they're also pretty small which excurberates the problem.
- And just to top it all off, hit feedback is just as bad when you get hit when NOT blocking, and several times I died from being stunlocked by an enemy combo without even realizing I was taking damage before it was too late. (Not that realizing it would've helped, since there's no way out of a stunlock - being able to dodge while mid-stun as long as you had stamina left would fix a lot of unfair-feeling deaths)
- Many other UI elements also have inconsistent sizes, often with a combination of too large visual graphics (e.g. equipment icons) matched with too small text that additionally is hard to read thanks to the stylish font. I think this could work for the Spellcrafting menu but the lack of consistency really hurts basic menu navigation.
- Speaking of spellcrafting, the UX here is an utter pain because of the formatting of the ingredient list making it unclear which quantity is your held vs the required quantity, and I really wish things you are missing would be red so you can tell at a glance whether making a spell is possible.
- It took me way too long to realize I had a bunch of consumables, because the inventory menu was so annoying to navigate (thanks, absolutely tiny text!) I just stopped checking new items assuming everything I found was a spelllcrafting ingredient. Having little icons or text color differences to differentiate ingredients from equipment and consumables would've been nice considering the sheer amount of random junk you stumble over each time you turn a corner.
- Speaking of missing information, tooltips that tells you what the spells you choose during character creation DOES would be nice because even with the explanation for the magical schools, I'd still want to know if there's any quirks differentiating "arcane AOE" vs "electric AOE" instead of just going on what's my favorite icons.
- The spellbook menu also has some issues: the hitbox for selecting a spell slot should be the entire scroll icon, not just the text below it. Locked slots should be grayed out so it's more clear which ones you can actually assign spells to. Clicking the tiny spell names is also a pain with a gamepad.
- Speaking of spells, I held down spellcasting buttons to charge spells out of habit for a while before realizing it's not an option. It would be cool if it was, because standing still is super dangerous in this game and the long casting animations makes it hard to time ranged attacks properly, so being able to delay a bit to let enemies catch up and being rewarded with a little bit of extra damage would add a little more depth to the combat.
- And an actual gripe again, there's a hotkey to cast your 4 first spells with the face buttons, but it doesn't show you WHICH spells are assigned to those buttons, only the button icons. How did this slip through...?
- Blood and Water mushrooms dotted around the world to reduce your estus usage is nice in theory, but even at Lv.1 they restore such a pitiful amount it felt pointless to even bother picking them up (especially since the fading gauges issue made it hard to tell if I was full and would just waste them). You could probably triple the healing from these things with no effect on game balance, since anything that kills the player tends to take them out from full health in a couple seconds anyway.
- Speaking of death, there being no easy way to return to the library and spending your hard-earned souls once you enter the first open world section really got on my nerves. At the start you'd merely have the hassle of going through a loading screen to get to the end of the village and then waiting for the elevator, but if you press on you'll die in a boss room and have your bloodstain stuck in there until you give up or beat the boss... and then right after that boss there's a point of no return drop (so if you drop down there thinking you'll at least get a bonfire, congratulations, now you're locked into the next major area until you mess up or clear THAT). Every checkpoint I found before giving up was just a Memory Font, or basically a Stake of Marika, and not having a single "real" checkpoint after getting four areas deep into the game felt downright excessive. And considering how easy it is to die without even realizing you're in danger, this turns the game incredibly frustrating with most of my time spent on runbacks trying to save that pile of 7 levels' worth of souls.
- Enemy projectiles don't emit sound when they whizz by you, only when they impact the terrain, which draws your attention in the exact opposite direction of the threat...
etc etc

I could keep listing more issues I've got with the game, but these are the big ones. For every cool idea or surprisingly high-production-value setpiece there's a kineasthetics or menu flaw that actively makes the game harder to enjoy. And believe me, I really tried to enjoy it.

Amazing presentation and I especially like all the accessibility settings (I've never seen a tile-based puzzle game with a run button before!), the game takes a bit longer than necessary to really get going but once you reach world 2 and start seeing more complicated mechanics, the difficulty picks up to a more reasonable level.

I was a bit worried that the core mechanic of never touching the same tile twice would get old. but since it's often unclear where you're supposed to end up at the end, it's not just a manner of pathing backwards from there but often requires some thought and attempts to figure things out.

Excellent to play in small bursts on your commute, I would've played for longer but my brain caught on fire from thinking too hard so I need a break.

As someone that played FF1 a bunch, I can confirm this gives an authentic experience but MUCH smoother than the NES game. And as someone that only dared watching videos about classics like Wizardry and Ultima but never dared trying them, I'm much more inclined at checking them out after having tried this game.

The game is quite intimidating (instant kill and poison enemies on the SECOND FLOOR and then it somehow keeps escalating from there) but overall difficulty is still manageable. Has some fun twists on roguelike mechanics where the actual dungeon doesn't change, but loot and encounters are randomly placed each visit, so all the confused wandering you'll be doing (the dungeon is VERY confusingly laid out with looping edges, illusory walls, one-way-doors, teleporters etc everywhere) still pays off with some goodies and occasionally other adventurers you can trade with or rob blind, depending on your alignment.

While character builds isn't really a thing, you can get equipment with unique mechanics (e.g. a ring that can be used in battle for a very generous chance to instakill all enemies) and there's a class changing system to promote characters when you reach a high enough level so there's at least a little bit of leeway, and the way the damage system is focused on manipulating hit chances it even feels like a game where having a healer is not an absolute necessity which is a refreshing change of pace.

This game has finally made me subconsciously comprehend just how unfathomably big the sun is, and I'm really, really, REALLY glad I don't have to fight it in real life.

It's part soulslike, part movement shooter, with a bunch of MMORPG mechanics as well. It's got a really fun parry mechanic where enemies announce their parry window the moment it starts, letting you turn the tide on massive groups if you just can get them all synced up to get knocked down with a single parry - I've never seen anything like it and it's the first game I've bothered to actually try using the parry system other than Sekiro. Other than parries you've got a dodge that feels nice and a big list of different weapon types and skills that all feels unique, and because of all the constant chaos constant positioning shenanigans are necessary to survive - it even feeds into the counterpart to the estus system, where your heal skill is a full heal on a very long cooldown, which can completely turn the tide of a battle but also gets cancelled if you get hit; you NEED to figure out a time where you can easily dodge stuff for a while in order to use it effectively.

It's got some MMORPG grind stuff with level-locked gear artificially limiting your build options and "do thing 20 times" quests, very simplified stats, and some other gripes, but the core gameplay loop is very enjoyable and the game has some surprisingly good N64 vibes (down to area layouts and sound effects I SWEAR I've seen somewhere before)

Did you ever wish Armored Core had put more focus into the arena mode? And that it had the cat sidekicks from Monster Hunter? That's this game.

It's got some regular missions where you fight off waves of lesser enemies and bosses, but the big focus is on the 3-vs-3 arena tournaments, where you fight themed opponents with silly dialogue and very different loadouts and tactics.

Between squad tactics and having to customize three mechs to both deal with the opponent at hand and work well together, there's a LOT of stuff to keep track of both in the garage and in the heat of battle. If you like blowing stuff up with giant robots, with a little helping of spreadsheets on the side, this is the game for you.

This is just a demo but it's one of the best "vertical slices" ever created. There's like a dozen mini-levels that each show off one major gameplay mechanic (some of them are so big it takes well over 30 minutes to beat them, even longer if you try to grab every collectible) and a flippin' MASSIVE overworld connecting them all together.

My only concerns are that some levels are really stingy with checkpoints, and some inputs are needlessly clunky... three buttons for a longjump (crouch+attack+jump) when there's no concept of crouching while moving? (I.e. crouch+jump while moving would suffice). Dashing out of water is so finicky I didn't even realize you COULD do it until I looked up a guide (you need to hit dash+jump when under the surface and close enough that you can breach the surface before the spin animation ends, instead of the more logical "holding dash + pressing jump at the surface" (eliminating the precise positioning aspect) or "move into the surface while dashing underwater" (which makes more sense momentum-wise). Also I still don't quite understand the physics of the fast-travel ferrets you hitch rides from in the overworld, but barely being able to control them feels OK since they're wild animals.

I love blind jumps over instant-death pits, a complete lack of damage feedback, hitboxes that are twice as big as my character, weapons that feel like peashooters, tons of bland dialog to skip through, and enemies with so janky movement they're essentially unavoidable damage. But my favorite feature is the dedicated hotkey to mute the audio at any time - it elevates the game from "completely unbearable" to "inoffensive".

The perfect rage game if you grew up playing free Flash games and want to relive that level of quality.

I've played FROM Software's games for thousands of hours, and I really hated Sekiro. This game somehow manages to do everything Sekiro was trying to do but better, from the feel of moving around fighting tough-as-nails bosses to the upgrade system to the plot twist where an area you've already cleared out gets taken over by The Bad Thing and you get to fight through a remixed version of it.

It's not perfect; I've almost gotten softlocked due to glitching into terrain and getting stuck twice before managing to glitch out again and area readability can be a bit hard due to how much visual stuff is going on all the time, but for such a small team it's an amazing achievement to get both gamefeel and environmental storytelling done down pat at this level of quality.

The game's also got a nice level of difficulty, it's super hard even for a Souls veteran like myself but there's like a dozen accessibility options to let you tone it down if desired (all the way down to being invincible and able to kill everything in one hit) so pretty much anyone can enjoy it. (Unless they're afraid of crabs, because this game has a lot of crabs)