Recent reviews by Kernel Panic

Expertly crafted tactics game that is consistently as fun and clever as its core concept.

In controlling a magical team of operators, you're gradually given a broad set of of abilities and options that allow you to approach scenarios in different ways, but each combat encounter is contained to a room (that you start by "breaching"), which keeps individual engagements tightly-scoped. Early on, these feel like puzzles to be solved, as you consider how best to clear a room with the tools available to your team. As your team and their spellsets grow, more potential strategies become available, but there are still optional objectives that encourage you to consider how you might clear rooms most efficiently, or by leveraging abilities in novel ways.

One of the best new gameplay ideas is the incorporation of the idea of having "foresight" (enabled by Zan, your team's "Navy Seer"), which lets you see the moves you make during your turn will play out, and the response from the enemy. This enables the sort of planning in anticipation of the enemy's next move as seen in other games like Into the Breach, but in a very player-friendly way that encourages experimentation. Not happy with the move you just made? Then you can rewind and make different choices, instead of save-scumming. This allows me to try out different ideas, and makes it infinitely less frustrating when an ability turns out not to do exactly what I thought it would, because it doesn't cost me time or progress.

The game is also in that rare company of games with great writing, and in particular great comedy writing. Tactical Breach Wizards has an entertaining story, distinct and interesting characters, and very funny dialogue. The game strikes an excellent balance of incorporating humor - lots of it - without undermining the stakes of the narrative and the impact of key moments of character development.

One of my favorite games of the year so far. Do try out the demo, or better yet just jump into the full game - it's worth it.

Very funny parody of The Witness that doesn't overstay its welcome. Few games pull off humor as well as The Looker - and it's free!

This game is pretty short (I reached the end in a little over 2 hours), but also among the most delightfully satisfying puzzle platformers I've played. You play as ElecHead, a power-generating robot who supplies electricity to machines to which you are connected by metal, and use this ability to progress through each screen. As a twist on this basic ability, you are able to detach your head from your body, allowing it to power something while you navigate elsewhere.

The level design thoroughly explores the potential of this limited ability set, but best of all leaves it to you to figure it out. There is no time wasted on heavy-handed tutorials - in fact, there is a clear design choice to have as little text in the game as possible. Between the title screen and the end credits, I was not shown any text aside from minimal one-time prompts indicating the available controls. The game is divided into a number of "areas" where you are guided toward identifying a new "trick" for interacting with the world, and then challenged with puzzles that iterate on the theme, requiring you to exercise this technique in new ways, and in combination with others previously learned, often challenging assumptions you may have developed as a player.

There are some interesting and challenging puzzles in this game, some of which stumped me for a matter of minutes, but nothing of the brain-breaking, show-stopping variety found in other games like Baba is You or Stephen's Sausage Roll. ElecHead strikes a balance that makes you stop and think without killing the momentum of the experience.

There are apparently a number of secrets that I missed, and the game is so good that I might actually go back and look for them. If you like puzzle platformers at all, definitely check it out.

Lair of the Clockwork God is one of those rare games that does comedy right, with great writing and a well-paced story that doesn't drag or over-stay its welcome. Most of the humor plays on tropes of the game's dual genres: Point-and-Click Adventures and Platformers, along with some commentary on recent trends in indie games. If you like retro games and indies, they made this for you. (If you don't, wow, how'd you even find this game?)

The blend of Point-and-Click and Platformer works well here; the game features plenty of opportunities to combine items in bizarre ways to solve contextual puzzles, without the infuriating pixel-hunting that too often plagued classic games of the genre. The platforming, mechanically, doesn't compare to the "indie darling" games that it lampoons, but its inclusion adds flavor to the adventuring, and is mined consistently and thoroughly for jokes.

Without spoiling any parts of the experience, there are at least a couple of surprises that made me realize I had underestimated a game that I already thought was fairly clever from the start. This one is worth checking out.

Necrosphere is a game about death. In my 3 hour playthrough, I died about 850 times, or once every 12 seconds. But my character only really died once, in the game’s introductory sequence. Fatally wounded, Terry is sent to the Necrosphere, the place people go after they die to “do nothing all day forever”. Fortunately, Terry’s friends aren’t having it and send helpful notes and equipment from beyond the veil to guide their fallen partner back to the land of the living.

Necrosphere’s standout gameplay feature is its uniquely constrained control scheme. Unlike most platformers, the game is played using only two buttons: one to move left and one to move right. Early on, this affords an opportunity to explore what can be done in a platformer without jumping. The player may need to drop between platforms to avoid dangerous spikes and fireballs, or rely on bouncing between stationary “gravity bubbles” to gain elevation. As the game progresses, new techniques become available that incrementally pack a surprising amount of complexity and interactivity into just two buttons.

These techniques are also necessary to access new sections of the map (for example, by quickly dashing across small gaps). Necrosphere isn’t just a platformer, it’s a minimalist Metroidvania. This aspect of the game offers the usual fun that comes from discovering areas that were previously out of reach, but it doesn’t feel fully realized. The absence of a map forces the player to aimlessly backtrack in search of the next place they are supposed to go, tediously breaking up the core gameplay loop. Different sections of the map at least feature different background colors, but the pixel graphics and retro color palette offer little help in the form of memorable landmarks for getting your bearings, even within these distinct zones.

The game shines in more linear sections where you are challenged by increasingly difficult and complex platforming segments. These consist of short sequences broken up by “soft checkpoints”; upon death, you’ll immediately respawn at the beginning of the current sequence so that you can get right back into the action. Over time, new obstacles and mechanics are introduced, requiring the application of new techniques and greater precision to progress. The platforming level design is interesting, varied, and offers challenges demanding skillful execution.

Having already cut my teeth on countless Mario games and more sadistic indie creations like Super Meat Boy, the first half of the game gave me little trouble. However, Necrosphere later ramps up the challenge to an extent that violates the expectations established in those earlier sections. As segments become longer and timing requirements become less forgiving, the player is expected to execute increasingly complex maneuvers with almost no room for error. In my playthrough, the hardest segment of the game was a 20-second platforming challenge that I repeated for about 20 minutes before finally completing.

Other modern platformers have been praised for challenging players, but the best of these generally start out difficult or gate their hardest content behind a higher difficulty setting or an optional “endgame” outside of the main story. Necrosphere instead lures players in with simple but creative platforming puzzles before later subjecting them to a fiendishly difficult hand-cramping platforming crucible. I can’t think of another game with such an astonishing difficulty curve.

In the end, the initially lighthearted story is wrapped up with a bizarre and tonally inconsistent ending that felt like a poor reward for my efforts, suitably mirroring the shift in gameplay. Nonetheless, I was satisfied by having completed the game. I like this type of challenging platformer, even though it’s not what I was expecting (or even what I got in my first play session). The tight, unique controls and interesting level design create a memorable challenge and I had fun. Unfortunately, many won’t, including the people I saw enjoying (but struggling through) the early part of the game at PAX. Unless you’re a glutton for punishing platformers, stay out of the Necrosphere.