#pc
#pc
by Amr (@siegarettes)
I was totally wrong about SNK Heroines. It’s not the followup to SNK Gals’ Fighter nor the girly themed KOF14 style game I got on first impression. In fact, it completely ditches the familiar mechanics of King of Fighters or any other SNK fighters and goes for a pared down approach to tag style battles.
It’s astounding how many genre conventions SNK Heroines has stripped away. For instance, you can’t even crouch. You won’t deal with any high low mixups, or even any jumping cross ups, since blocking has now been moved to a Smash Bros style block button. Blocking can even be used in the air to do an air dodge, or combined with a direction to perform a dodge roll. Dodge rolls can even be done during blockstun for a small amount of meter.
by Amr (@siegarettes)
If Shape of the World was an, open chill out session, then Anamorphine is its tonal complement. Taking place in a series of intimate, even claustrophobic spaces, it explores the emotional world of Tyler and Elena, a couple dealing with trauma and depression.
Anamorphine makes clear from the go it takes its subject matter very seriously. It opens with a content warning, giving players not only the option to skip the most upsetting scene, but also the option for a more detailed content warning containing spoilers for it. It’s an admirable approach that seems almost obvious in hindsight, and allows people to engage with the game on their own terms.
Which is good, since Anamorphine is a confident study in using space to communicate emotional states. There’s not a single spoken word in its entire run time. Instead it mixes the familiar with abstract, distorting otherwise everyday spaces into reflections of the characters’ mental worlds.
by Amr (@siegarettes)
Russian Subway Dogs is pure arcade joy. It’s nothing more than a series of levels where you scare train passengers out of their food and watch a combo multiplier go up. What makes it work is the way you juggle items, and the increasing complications each new stage introduces. It’s tricky and taxing, and while it sometimes gets tough, it’s a clean design that makes the endless score chase appealing.
By Amr (@siegarettes)
I started Airheart captivated by its beautiful world. A land set in the clouds, rendered in painterly style, populated with appealing mechanical designs. The story seemed intriguing too, setting up a journey through the clouds to the top layer, with revelations waiting for me. Instead I was surprised to find that Airheart was almost free of direction. Ascending cloud layers and upgrading my machine provided an implicit direction, but after the tutorial it was largely free of objectives or guidance. So I wandered the clouds, fishing, fighting bandits, and scrounging up enough money to try and push higher each time.
For a while this provided a pleasant grind. Flying about the clouds and catching fish almost put in the same mindset as thatgamecompany’s Flow. There was a similar relaxed vibe, and a back and forth between the layers that recalled the same changes in intensity. That all changed after the first plane crash.
by Amr (@siegarettes)
[TRANSCRIPT BELOW]
Rising Dusk is an atmospheric, anti-coin collecting puzzle game. You traverse Japanese landscapes while dealing with various yokai. You can only fail by falling offscreen, so despite the spooky theme it’s not violent one. Blocks in the environment will react depending on how many coins you’ve collected, becoming boons or traps depending on the context. But mostly traps.
This results in interesting challenges, like a rainy level where you dodge coins falling from the sky, or one where you climb a mountain, being forced to collect coins along the way so that the footholds below will disappear if you fall.
by Amr (@siegarettes)
The first thing you learn when you start getting serious about fighting games is DON’T JUMP. Jumping is an aggressive move that makes you vulnerable, and should be used when you’re ready to go in or desperately need to get away. Despite that, most players are gonna end up turning every fighting game into an air brawl, where fighters feel like they’re on pogo sticks half the time. So I guess Indie Pogo saw that figured, why not make a fighting game where every character is perpetually jumping. In doing that it creates a fighter that moves the competition for territory from the horizontal plane into the vertical one. It’s a curious creative decision, and whether or not it pays off is a complicated question to answer.
By Amr (@siegarettes)
Super Skull Smash GO! 2 Turbo has a pretty ridiculous name. Thankfully, it also has a pretty simple pitch. It’s a retro style puzzle platformer where you jump on skeletons then collect their heads to smash into a holy temple. It’s about as fun as that sounds. The platforming feels good, the feedback on delivering craniums to the cross is great, and the boss fights are tense and satisfying. It feels a bit like My Owl Software’s Apple Jack series in the way it takes simple platforming and throwing mechanics and creatively builds upon them.
What holds SSSG2T back is how it manages to feel retro in a different way, which is how it tests your patience. SSSG2T is a challenging game, filled with instant death pitfalls and tricky platforming. It’s thankfully never feels unfair or ridiculously precise, but its easy to make a few wrong moves and find yourself restarting the stage. Stages are relatively short, taking only a few minutes or less to run through, so it’s never a huge loss…until a few worlds in.
by Amr (@siegarettes)
By the time I’d got around to playing games, I’d associated Atari more with middling licensed Dragon Ball Z games than their early videogame contributions. By the time the last generation ended, Atari had pretty much become a company failing to capitalize on those early games with middling remakes and reboots. So it’s a trip to see the Atari logo on a new game, let alone a new Tempest. Doubly so, considering it was just three years ago that the previous incarnation of Atari had threatened legal action against Jeff Minter for his work on TxK for its resemblance to Tempest 2000, a Tempest remake he created for Atari.
Given that context, Tempest 4000 almost feels like an apology to Minter. It’s recognition of the absurdity of the situation created by the previous holders of the Atari name, and an invitation to make it good by paying Minter to return to the well. And Minter isn’t shy about returning to the source.