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chuckroElderand – A metroidvania title that advertises itself as “souls-like”, which generally means a cruel level of difficulty. And yeah, I died half a dozen times in the first half-hour, because you can take maybe four hits between save points. (Also, they give you too many combat options to the point where they need R3 to be the subweapon button.) If this had an easy mode I’d be more inclined to play it—it seems like it’s got a fun map and some interesting strategy, but the difficulty level is a turn-off for me.
Clunky Hero – A metroidvania without all that XP and equipment junk, instead going with the large number of consumables that you need to navigate a non-pausing menu to use. It reminds me of the Shantae games to some degree, though it replaces the cheesecake with fart jokes. (And it’s mildly sexist from a completely different angle.) Another thing they have in common is that the bosses are giant piles of HP. But the thing that really irritated me with this one is that save points don’t recover your health—there’s one health-restore point in the middle of the first big dungeon area, and otherwise you’re limited to consumables. And if you save with low health? All respawns keep that low health but also respawn every enemy, meaning you can lock yourself in a nigh-unwinnable situation relatively easily. (This is another case where I might give it more time with an easy mode—I got further in this than Elderand--but I got sick of throwing myself at the first dungeon’s boss, which included a long and dangerous trip from the save point.)
RESTLESS SOUL – This ended up being the surprise hit of the bundle: Half rpg-style adventure game (including minigames and lots of collectables), half twin-stick shooter, this game features a recently-dead ghost in the Afterlife trying to find the Portal back to Life. It doesn’t take itself seriously and sometimes the goofiness works; but it also has a brisk pace, some interesting puzzles, and a generous respawn feature for when you aren’t actually great at the shooter or dodging sections. I played through the whole thing and was definitely entertained.
Orbital Bullet – The 360° Rogue-lite – This is a shooter/platformer where the gimmicks are twofold: One is that it’s a “die, upgrade and restart” roguelite where you try to collect as many upgrade points and materials in each run as you can so you can unlock skills and better weapons for the next run. The second is that it’s a side-scrolling platformer, but each stage wraps around a small hub so you are always running in circles (and either running around or shooting around to the other side often plays a role in the strategy). If you like it enough to play over and over, I can see how unlocking all the upgrades and then being able to stomp the early stages would be fun; but I was only interested in playing one round to try it out.
Dread X Collection 2 – Like it says, it’s a big collection of horror games, functionally a short horror game anthology. If you like first-person horror exploration/puzzle games, you get to enjoy both the “framing” area and also most of the games in the collection. I wasn’t super in the mood for a horror collection to begin with, and the framing game is kinda janky, so I only tried a couple of the games before deciding this wasn’t worth my time to be thorough with. I opted out of continuing on to the Dread X Collection 3.
Escape the Backrooms is “a co-op horror exploration game”, which means it’s like one of those 3D first-person horror games where you spend all your time trying not to die, except it’s co-op based so you don’t even have an interesting story to try to uncover while you’re doing it. And it’s still in Early Access, to boot. I skipped this one.
Overall: I paid $9 for this bundle because I was interested in the metroidvania games that turned out to be a bust. Five hours of RESTLESS SOUL made the bundle earn its keep. I could have soldiered on with the others, but I have enough games on my backlog that I can be more ruthless with my culling.
Clunky Hero – A metroidvania without all that XP and equipment junk, instead going with the large number of consumables that you need to navigate a non-pausing menu to use. It reminds me of the Shantae games to some degree, though it replaces the cheesecake with fart jokes. (And it’s mildly sexist from a completely different angle.) Another thing they have in common is that the bosses are giant piles of HP. But the thing that really irritated me with this one is that save points don’t recover your health—there’s one health-restore point in the middle of the first big dungeon area, and otherwise you’re limited to consumables. And if you save with low health? All respawns keep that low health but also respawn every enemy, meaning you can lock yourself in a nigh-unwinnable situation relatively easily. (This is another case where I might give it more time with an easy mode—I got further in this than Elderand--but I got sick of throwing myself at the first dungeon’s boss, which included a long and dangerous trip from the save point.)
RESTLESS SOUL – This ended up being the surprise hit of the bundle: Half rpg-style adventure game (including minigames and lots of collectables), half twin-stick shooter, this game features a recently-dead ghost in the Afterlife trying to find the Portal back to Life. It doesn’t take itself seriously and sometimes the goofiness works; but it also has a brisk pace, some interesting puzzles, and a generous respawn feature for when you aren’t actually great at the shooter or dodging sections. I played through the whole thing and was definitely entertained.
Orbital Bullet – The 360° Rogue-lite – This is a shooter/platformer where the gimmicks are twofold: One is that it’s a “die, upgrade and restart” roguelite where you try to collect as many upgrade points and materials in each run as you can so you can unlock skills and better weapons for the next run. The second is that it’s a side-scrolling platformer, but each stage wraps around a small hub so you are always running in circles (and either running around or shooting around to the other side often plays a role in the strategy). If you like it enough to play over and over, I can see how unlocking all the upgrades and then being able to stomp the early stages would be fun; but I was only interested in playing one round to try it out.
Dread X Collection 2 – Like it says, it’s a big collection of horror games, functionally a short horror game anthology. If you like first-person horror exploration/puzzle games, you get to enjoy both the “framing” area and also most of the games in the collection. I wasn’t super in the mood for a horror collection to begin with, and the framing game is kinda janky, so I only tried a couple of the games before deciding this wasn’t worth my time to be thorough with. I opted out of continuing on to the Dread X Collection 3.
Escape the Backrooms is “a co-op horror exploration game”, which means it’s like one of those 3D first-person horror games where you spend all your time trying not to die, except it’s co-op based so you don’t even have an interesting story to try to uncover while you’re doing it. And it’s still in Early Access, to boot. I skipped this one.
Overall: I paid $9 for this bundle because I was interested in the metroidvania games that turned out to be a bust. Five hours of RESTLESS SOUL made the bundle earn its keep. I could have soldiered on with the others, but I have enough games on my backlog that I can be more ruthless with my culling.
