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chuckroBeautiful Mystic Defenders - An H-game Kingdom Rush clone, basically adding visual novel scenes between the battles to create a plot (gamer geek from our world is drawn to a world full of monsters and catgirls, becomes the strategist for their army because he’s good at video games, and wins all of their hearts) and H-scenes incorporated into that. The game is actually pretty decent, if a little unbalanced and repetitive: The upgrades really impact the effectiveness of the various towers, and once you have them in you can win pretty much every battle with just acid, bombers and missiles. Several of the maps are just repeats with different wave formations, and there are only a dozen different enemy types. There’s no “endless” mode or anything like that. That said, I was most of the way through the easy mode when I realized there was a “win” button so players could skip right to the h-scenes. Said h-scenes are decent, though the art style makes all the girls look basically identical and the writing is much weaker than what Belgerum puts out.
The World Is Your Weapon – A very clever RPGMaker semi-action game (it’s turn-based top-down and feels like a roguelike, because enemies only move when you do). You play a weapon shop owner with the goal to go out and collect weapons to sell at your store and become the best store owner around…but with the twist that every single thing in this game world can be a weapon: Objects, scenery, NPCs, monsters, even dungeons! You can sell anything as a weapon and it’ll respawn for re-collecting afterwards. All sorts of ridiculous things have special weapon abilities, too, like the washing tub with a bubble attack. (The magic wands and legendary swords do actually make the best weapons for fighting through dungeons, but you’ll want to try out everything.) It’s got multiple endings and I got most of them in 5 hours of play (I wasn’t crazy enough to try to collect 100% of the items). It doesn’t take itself seriously and delivers solid entertainment with a twist on a fairly familiar concept.
Wirewalk()| – Heavily inspired by Link’s Awakening, this has a Game Boy design style and a top-down Zelda sensibility that doesn’t outstay its welcome. There are three real dungeons, one town to explore, three minigames and a bunch of sidequests. It took about three hours to 100% the game, and that was partially because one of the arcade challenges and beating the final boss both took me a bunch of tries. If you want a quick Zelda experience, it’s short but solid.
Mystik Belle – While this looks and plays like a metroidvania, it actually has more of the elements of a puzzle adventure game, because there’s a lot of gathering items and using them in the right spot or combination. You unlock navigation abilities (lightning attack, double-jump, dash, brick-breaker) by defeating bosses, but the meat of getting to those bosses is collecting and using items, sometimes in really obtuse ways. (This is particularly evident in the last segment of the game, where you need to return to a previous boss, and then retrieve an item from an earlier area which wasn’t there before, both of which feel like unfair violations of the genre.) If you let a walkthrough tell you where to find items, the action gaming difficulty is mid-range; I only had to retry one of the bosses. Not the best example of either genre, but entertaining and didn’t outstay its welcome.
Terroir - This seemed vaguely appealing, as it’s a wine-making simulation game on a hex-based map. The thing is, wine-making is actually pretty boring. You spend most of the gameplay loop either praying that there will be enough rain and fungus won’t get your grapes, or that the wine merchants will sell your wine fast enough that you can ship them next year’s selection. Disappointing!
Tokyo Xanadu eX+ - This comes off as a mix of Xanadu/Ys games and Persona games, in that it alternates fairly linear dungeons that are driven by switches and 3D platforming, and wandering around making friends and dealing with sidequests in a Japanese school setting. This takes place in 2015 Tokyo, featuring a high-school boy who goes to school, works odd jobs, and gets sucked into extradimensional rifts to fight demons. (Aka “the Eclipse” and “greeds”.) It’s extremely Japanese, with dozens of characters who are only differentiable by their hairstyles unless you understand the social cues of how they wear their school uniforms or carry their backpacks. This has a really long “start-to-slime” time, mostly introducing all the characters and letting you wander various areas. I actually did the opening sequence and first dungeon back in 2020 and it took me this long to try it again, but there was plenty more tutorial where that came from—side missions, friendship sequences, a virtue meter, how equipment and upgrades work, and then more special attacks and moves in the second and third dungeons. (I also tried it with both controller and mouse/keyboard, and the former is significantly better for the dungeons but the latter is kinda better for the social sequences.) This landed right on the edge of my wanting to play it thoroughly and my wanting to cull it; but I decided after four hours that there were other games I’d rather be playing. It’s not bad, but there wasn’t enough of it that was for me.
Anodyne 2: Return to Dust – The original was very much a 2D Zeldalike. This is a cross-genre mesh, in which you need to do 3D PS1-era platforming to reach the dungeons, a short rhythm section to enter them, and then 2D Zeldalike action to complete them. The prologue segment is a tutorial, then the first chapter is “the city”, where you need to find the four dungeon-people and retrieve Cards from them. The second chapter is “blue vale” outside the city, where there are only three dungeons (without bosses, even) but eight Cards to hunt down. Then the third chapter is a long story interlude without any cards (or missables), and afterwards you get a whole new set of collectables and bonus meta-areas and commentary you can access...and it introduces a new pico-scale mechanic, where you can shrink in the 2D areas and play Atari-style Zeldalike puzzles. This is a mass of mixed-genre gaming, unclear artsy philosophy, meta-narrative commentary (and meta-game commentary) and overall experimentalism. It’s interesting! It’s weird! The difficulty is reasonable if you’re familiar with 2D Zeldalikes and 3D platforming, and it’s recommended if you’re not put off my the idea that it’s up its own ass, philosophically.
Overall: Generally a lot of good stuff here, which is nice considering that while I got these all on sale, I still paid “real” money for them as opposed to $3 for a giant bundle. Terroir was the only one I’d really call a clunker; all of the others can be recommended if the concept seems appealing to you.
The World Is Your Weapon – A very clever RPGMaker semi-action game (it’s turn-based top-down and feels like a roguelike, because enemies only move when you do). You play a weapon shop owner with the goal to go out and collect weapons to sell at your store and become the best store owner around…but with the twist that every single thing in this game world can be a weapon: Objects, scenery, NPCs, monsters, even dungeons! You can sell anything as a weapon and it’ll respawn for re-collecting afterwards. All sorts of ridiculous things have special weapon abilities, too, like the washing tub with a bubble attack. (The magic wands and legendary swords do actually make the best weapons for fighting through dungeons, but you’ll want to try out everything.) It’s got multiple endings and I got most of them in 5 hours of play (I wasn’t crazy enough to try to collect 100% of the items). It doesn’t take itself seriously and delivers solid entertainment with a twist on a fairly familiar concept.
Wirewalk()| – Heavily inspired by Link’s Awakening, this has a Game Boy design style and a top-down Zelda sensibility that doesn’t outstay its welcome. There are three real dungeons, one town to explore, three minigames and a bunch of sidequests. It took about three hours to 100% the game, and that was partially because one of the arcade challenges and beating the final boss both took me a bunch of tries. If you want a quick Zelda experience, it’s short but solid.
Mystik Belle – While this looks and plays like a metroidvania, it actually has more of the elements of a puzzle adventure game, because there’s a lot of gathering items and using them in the right spot or combination. You unlock navigation abilities (lightning attack, double-jump, dash, brick-breaker) by defeating bosses, but the meat of getting to those bosses is collecting and using items, sometimes in really obtuse ways. (This is particularly evident in the last segment of the game, where you need to return to a previous boss, and then retrieve an item from an earlier area which wasn’t there before, both of which feel like unfair violations of the genre.) If you let a walkthrough tell you where to find items, the action gaming difficulty is mid-range; I only had to retry one of the bosses. Not the best example of either genre, but entertaining and didn’t outstay its welcome.
Terroir - This seemed vaguely appealing, as it’s a wine-making simulation game on a hex-based map. The thing is, wine-making is actually pretty boring. You spend most of the gameplay loop either praying that there will be enough rain and fungus won’t get your grapes, or that the wine merchants will sell your wine fast enough that you can ship them next year’s selection. Disappointing!
Tokyo Xanadu eX+ - This comes off as a mix of Xanadu/Ys games and Persona games, in that it alternates fairly linear dungeons that are driven by switches and 3D platforming, and wandering around making friends and dealing with sidequests in a Japanese school setting. This takes place in 2015 Tokyo, featuring a high-school boy who goes to school, works odd jobs, and gets sucked into extradimensional rifts to fight demons. (Aka “the Eclipse” and “greeds”.) It’s extremely Japanese, with dozens of characters who are only differentiable by their hairstyles unless you understand the social cues of how they wear their school uniforms or carry their backpacks. This has a really long “start-to-slime” time, mostly introducing all the characters and letting you wander various areas. I actually did the opening sequence and first dungeon back in 2020 and it took me this long to try it again, but there was plenty more tutorial where that came from—side missions, friendship sequences, a virtue meter, how equipment and upgrades work, and then more special attacks and moves in the second and third dungeons. (I also tried it with both controller and mouse/keyboard, and the former is significantly better for the dungeons but the latter is kinda better for the social sequences.) This landed right on the edge of my wanting to play it thoroughly and my wanting to cull it; but I decided after four hours that there were other games I’d rather be playing. It’s not bad, but there wasn’t enough of it that was for me.
Anodyne 2: Return to Dust – The original was very much a 2D Zeldalike. This is a cross-genre mesh, in which you need to do 3D PS1-era platforming to reach the dungeons, a short rhythm section to enter them, and then 2D Zeldalike action to complete them. The prologue segment is a tutorial, then the first chapter is “the city”, where you need to find the four dungeon-people and retrieve Cards from them. The second chapter is “blue vale” outside the city, where there are only three dungeons (without bosses, even) but eight Cards to hunt down. Then the third chapter is a long story interlude without any cards (or missables), and afterwards you get a whole new set of collectables and bonus meta-areas and commentary you can access...and it introduces a new pico-scale mechanic, where you can shrink in the 2D areas and play Atari-style Zeldalike puzzles. This is a mass of mixed-genre gaming, unclear artsy philosophy, meta-narrative commentary (and meta-game commentary) and overall experimentalism. It’s interesting! It’s weird! The difficulty is reasonable if you’re familiar with 2D Zeldalikes and 3D platforming, and it’s recommended if you’re not put off my the idea that it’s up its own ass, philosophically.
Overall: Generally a lot of good stuff here, which is nice considering that while I got these all on sale, I still paid “real” money for them as opposed to $3 for a giant bundle. Terroir was the only one I’d really call a clunker; all of the others can be recommended if the concept seems appealing to you.
