Recent reviews by arbor daze

This is like 16 years too late, but this developer sent me a free key when I was deployed in Iraq back when it launched because Steam wasn't letting me make purchases. Because of that, I'm more than happy to buy a copy for someone else if they want this game and can't get it. First come, first serve, obviously.

The one thing that puts this above Vampire Survivors or Army of Ruin for me is the fact that an overwhelming majority of the character roster has a starting weapon that allows you to play this as a twin stick shooter.

What if your high jump boots were instead a bird that let you briefly fly? Or a weird one eyed cat... thing (?) that lights up dark areas?

Metroid meets Pokemon, but with much deeper and interesting combat. Each monster has a full skill tree with multiple branches, allowing you to customize your party to meet literally any situation. You can also equip gear on your pets to further tweak their stats and effectiveness, allowing you much more agency than you ever had in a Pokemon game.

Combat also has a mechanic that ranks your performance after each fight, and earning five star rating in a battle will force rare items to drop, which is a really nice incentive to really explore the creature skills and gear, and build your perfect team.

Basically this is a point and click style puzzle game that changes genre and setting a lot, using humor (hit and miss) to mimic classic games from the medium. Pong and Lucas Arts adventure titles show up early. Think Evoland crossed with Professor Layton or something. Not so much in that you're solving some case, but each scene can be a different interaction like the puzzles in Layton.

It's a pretty unique game and interesting to poke around in, even for a little bit. There's not really many games like this, and this one is priced cheap enough to make this is a really easy recommendation.

edit: completed it, and it was well worth the nine dollars. Looking forward to more from this developer.

What do you get when you take a masterpiece like Ys 8, and strip out all of the interesting characters, the rescuing castaways, the town building, the crafting, the fishing, and the fun?

You get Ys 6, and it is very bland. Please don't let this be your first Ys game. Get 8.

Some of the slipperiest controls I have ever seen, and paired with a jump that feels like it's delayed on purpose to make you run off every ledge at least four times.

Might be fine if you can put up with that kind of thing.

Amazing dialogue and skill check system that mimics natural conversation. Also you can talk to your neck tie, among other things. That is, if you don't fail the skill check trying to grab it off the ceiling fan and have a heart attack and game over in the first room.

Super cheap, super fun, really unique, and genuinely funny. Hug the king. Go in the sewer system. Trip on a rock. Be Santa.

This game is early access, and I try to stay away from early access things these days, but this looked exactly like the type of game I was looking for so I picked it up. This feels like a good blend of Binding of Isaac and something like Rogue Legacy. Gold you earn in a run can be spent on upgrades that persist through multiple plays. You can up your stats, or unlock things like extra potion slots. As you save more npcs in the mine, more options will become available, so you should be making some type of overall progress each run, even if you die.

Also, the sound design is on point. All the little chimes and fanfare noises sound great.

Guys, it's really good. You don't have to worry about having another Mighty Number 9 or Yooka Laylee on your hands. Igarashi and his team made a great game that is clearly a love letter to Symphony of the Night. Is it as good as SotN? No, that's impossible if only for the reason that SotN was the first time we had seen this formula. Castlevania stayed pretty true to that style of game throughout most of the handheld titles. Bloodstained has a lot in common with Aria of Sorrow and Dawn of Sorrow, given one of the central mechanics.

Enemies you kill have a chance to grant you a shard (among other loot) that behave nearly exactly like the souls you steal from enemies in the Sorrow games. Instead of having 3 categories of ability as in Sorrow, you have a few more options here. There's the standard special attack triggered with a button press, a directional attack that you can control with the analog stick, a passive slot, a manipulator slot (which seems to mostly be a catch all for things that don't really fit anywhere else), and a familiar slot. You will use all of them at the same time, and this gives you a bit of freedom when picking which elemental types you want to focus on or otherwise adjust your loadout to your playstyle.

Each shard can be upgraded in both rank and grade, with grade being an overall power boost to most abilities, and rank having various effects depending on the ability. It might increase the range of an attack or make the area of effect wider. If you fully upgrade the rank on passive shards, they become skill shards which are always equipped, freeing up your passive slot for something else. Or you can double stack the ability in both skill and passive slot for extra effect.

There's a crafting and cooking system, with food you make giving you stat bonuses that are always in effect the first time you eat each meal. These can really add up late game, and you'll probably be trying to find freakin' soy sauce forever to craft some of the food in your list. There's also a quest system, but it isn't anything special. The quests have three main varieties; bring this NPC a certain food item, kill a certain number of a certain type of demon, or bring an NPC a certain item.

There are a lot of weapon types, similar to SotN, and each type behaves differently. Knives are fast but have almost no range, whips have a slight wind up but cover a pretty decent area in front of you, and guns do gun things by shooting bullets, just to give a few examples. The weapons and armor also have various elements and damage types that they can deal or protect against, so stacking the right resist for a boss can really make a big difference.

The map is pretty large, and has a bunch of nods to SotN. If you are familiar with SotN, you'll come across many places that you remember such as the huge underground waterfall. You'll notice familiar enemy types as well, even if they look different. Flying medusa heads are here, but they aren't actually medusa heads. Still, when you see them you'll know you're gonna get petrified. The game is harder than SotN, but it isn't a hard game. It just doesn't have any super broken gear that is easily obtained and lets you faceroll the whole game without trying, like the Crissaegrim. (edit: Okay, I found this game's Crissaegrim so I take that back.)

It sure doesn't look as amazing as SotN, however. Symphony has some of the best pixel art of all time, with some gigantic ass enemies that are only in one or two spots and would be bosses in any other game. It isn't ugly by any means, but I don't think it holds a candle to the game it is mimicking.

If you like this style of Castlevania, get it. If you've played SotN, you know what to expect with the story and playing past the "final" boss, but even then it's still a ton of fun.