Recent reviews by Yal

The force-trigger system letting you set up combos where one super specific condition triggers another and causes an infinite loop of items triggering other items is genious. Part Vampire Survivors-style dopamine activator, part inventory management puzzle.

This might be the best collectathon platformer ever created. You end up in a permanent flow state of see thing ⇒ get thing ⇒ see other thing along the way ⇒ get that and suddenly 4 hours have passed without you noticing. Movement is super smooth, all your abilities have uses for both puzzles, combat and just moving around, and levels are somehow laid out super well with zero wasted space despite being larger than in the original.

As someone that got burned out by the high tempo of Armored Core 6, I think I generally prefer this game. Super intricate exploration where having high enough mobility lets you reach secret areas or skip entire sections, more weapons and mech parts than in AC6, and interesting area gimmicks like infinitely spawning spider robots that can be removed if you destroy a spawner that hides somewhere in the area (it's invisible until you get close but you can figure out where it is if you keep track of where the spiders come from).

There's some really cool ideas in here:
- You're pretty much guaranteed to take a few shots in any given fight due to the sheer volume of bullets, but you have a regenerating shield (which can be further upgraded) to eat that damage as long as you get into cover before you run out.
- Enemies make very obvious "I'm overheating now" sounds when they reload so you can tell it's safe to approach.
- Enemies overall have a lot of mobility and can flank you, take very circuitous routes to chase you down from unexpected angles, and duck into cover... but at the same time they can hit other enemies, which is very useful when you're fighting an enemy with explosive weapons.
- The "souls" dropped by enemies are physical objects so you risk losing out on rewards if you snipe enemies from a distance instead of taking them on head-on (encouraging you to play in a more fun way).
- Energy and ballistic weapons behave differently and there's clear niches for both (energy weapons are better at armor piercing but their slow projectiles makes it hard to hit at longer ranges).
- Auto-aim makes pretty much every shot hit if you can maintain a lockon but you can manually aim to hit enemies from beyond your lockon range, letting you focus on movement when you need to but letting you take out priority targets with your gamer skills when playing safe just isn't enough.
- The static repair cost on death discourages playing dangerously, but when you're carrying around a LOT of souls you never need to worry about losing it all to one mistake.

The grubs are dogs now. Fast travel is a dog. Team Cherry has improved on perfection.

One of the best treatises of the nature of free will ever written. Also includes a complimentary bullet hell minigame collection.

The jolly cooperation experience adapted for the tiktok generation. It's regular elden ring, but 10 times faster and with random loot forcing you to make fast build decisions. Even the returning bosses like Tree Sentinel has new movesets so if you can stomach the basically-forced multiplayer and insane tempo there's a lot of fun to be had.

Thought this was another farming game? It's basically Etrian Odyssey with the Dark Souls stamina system. Thanks to the stamina system (which both you and enemies are subject to) every battle is a tug-of-war between your greed and your sense of self-preservation. Is it worth attacking here to finish this enemy off if it means you WILL need to spend a turn letting your stamina recover next turn? Does the boss have enough stamina for its big area attack? Those are questions you will ask yourself over and over.

Potions don't exist, you get a full health refill after every battle and you gotta make that one dose of health last though the entire next battle (unless you brought a healer). Magic and ranged weapons are precious commodities due to low MP caps and high stamina costs respectively, so foregoing them entirely is viable if you're OK with only being able to hit the frontmost enemy (or perhaps you will give your wizard a halberd, which is an option - any class can use any equipment! Though skills still have stat restrictions, such as evasive actions and MP-increasing passives requiring light armor).

The dungeon itself starts of incredibly strong, with verticality-based puzzles spanning multiple floors, spatial reasoning, bonus loot hidden in decorative furniture, optional bosses... all in the first stratum. It's definitely going to be interesting seeing how this ramps up.

Negatives: The art style is a bit bland at times and the map especially is borderline unreadable thanks to all the unnecessary detail, music tracks don't loop seamlessly which is very noticeable in longer battles.

Really blown away by the presentation of this game after having gotten through the first real area! Tons of variety thanks to the space travel theme, and both enemy patterns, abilities and platforming mechanics feel very alien and unconventional as well (there's things like the pattern-movement bugs from Galaga, blocks you can switch places with as long as there's line of sight, and your emergency healing ability being a squirrel-operated slot machine).

Both the visual style, mechanics, and overall slower floatier pace makes it feel like the sequel to Cave Story we never got, or perhaps a lost 1990s PC game thanks to the lowpoly prerendered cutscenes for important events like discovering a new planet. The soundtrack is MASSIVE and really catchy (and the main reason I got interested in the game after seeing it on Youtube) so make sure to pick it up as well.

I really wish I could give this game a positive rating, because it's got a lot of things going for it (the level design and enemy design is on par with FROM's) but there's fundamental issues with both the gameplay and interface that completely ruins the game feel and makes it hard to enjoy the good bits. If you thought DS1 was janky, turns out the rabbit hole can go even deeper.

- Most importantly, lack of hit feedback. If something hits your shield, the animation simply plays out without particle effects, pushback, any sense of physicality. You can never tell if you blocked an attack or it whiffed while you coincidentally had your guard up, and this makes it almost impossible to learn timings and hitboxes. And importantly, this also means you can't tell if a block/whiff cost you any stamina, because...
- the health/stamina/mana bars fading off into transparancy makes it hard to tell how much you have! And on top of this baffling design decision, they're also pretty small which excurberates the problem.
- And just to top it all off, hit feedback is just as bad when you get hit when NOT blocking, and several times I died from being stunlocked by an enemy combo without even realizing I was taking damage before it was too late. (Not that realizing it would've helped, since there's no way out of a stunlock - being able to dodge while mid-stun as long as you had stamina left would fix a lot of unfair-feeling deaths)
- Many other UI elements also have inconsistent sizes, often with a combination of too large visual graphics (e.g. equipment icons) matched with too small text that additionally is hard to read thanks to the stylish font. I think this could work for the Spellcrafting menu but the lack of consistency really hurts basic menu navigation.
- Speaking of spellcrafting, the UX here is an utter pain because of the formatting of the ingredient list making it unclear which quantity is your held vs the required quantity, and I really wish things you are missing would be red so you can tell at a glance whether making a spell is possible.
- It took me way too long to realize I had a bunch of consumables, because the inventory menu was so annoying to navigate (thanks, absolutely tiny text!) I just stopped checking new items assuming everything I found was a spelllcrafting ingredient. Having little icons or text color differences to differentiate ingredients from equipment and consumables would've been nice considering the sheer amount of random junk you stumble over each time you turn a corner.
- Speaking of missing information, tooltips that tells you what the spells you choose during character creation DOES would be nice because even with the explanation for the magical schools, I'd still want to know if there's any quirks differentiating "arcane AOE" vs "electric AOE" instead of just going on what's my favorite icons.
- The spellbook menu also has some issues: the hitbox for selecting a spell slot should be the entire scroll icon, not just the text below it. Locked slots should be grayed out so it's more clear which ones you can actually assign spells to. Clicking the tiny spell names is also a pain with a gamepad.
- Speaking of spells, I held down spellcasting buttons to charge spells out of habit for a while before realizing it's not an option. It would be cool if it was, because standing still is super dangerous in this game and the long casting animations makes it hard to time ranged attacks properly, so being able to delay a bit to let enemies catch up and being rewarded with a little bit of extra damage would add a little more depth to the combat.
- And an actual gripe again, there's a hotkey to cast your 4 first spells with the face buttons, but it doesn't show you WHICH spells are assigned to those buttons, only the button icons. How did this slip through...?
- Blood and Water mushrooms dotted around the world to reduce your estus usage is nice in theory, but even at Lv.1 they restore such a pitiful amount it felt pointless to even bother picking them up (especially since the fading gauges issue made it hard to tell if I was full and would just waste them). You could probably triple the healing from these things with no effect on game balance, since anything that kills the player tends to take them out from full health in a couple seconds anyway.
- Speaking of death, there being no easy way to return to the library and spending your hard-earned souls once you enter the first open world section really got on my nerves. At the start you'd merely have the hassle of going through a loading screen to get to the end of the village and then waiting for the elevator, but if you press on you'll die in a boss room and have your bloodstain stuck in there until you give up or beat the boss... and then right after that boss there's a point of no return drop (so if you drop down there thinking you'll at least get a bonfire, congratulations, now you're locked into the next major area until you mess up or clear THAT). Every checkpoint I found before giving up was just a Memory Font, or basically a Stake of Marika, and not having a single "real" checkpoint after getting four areas deep into the game felt downright excessive. And considering how easy it is to die without even realizing you're in danger, this turns the game incredibly frustrating with most of my time spent on runbacks trying to save that pile of 7 levels' worth of souls.
- Enemy projectiles don't emit sound when they whizz by you, only when they impact the terrain, which draws your attention in the exact opposite direction of the threat...
etc etc

I could keep listing more issues I've got with the game, but these are the big ones. For every cool idea or surprisingly high-production-value setpiece there's a kineasthetics or menu flaw that actively makes the game harder to enjoy. And believe me, I really tried to enjoy it.

Amazing presentation and I especially like all the accessibility settings (I've never seen a tile-based puzzle game with a run button before!), the game takes a bit longer than necessary to really get going but once you reach world 2 and start seeing more complicated mechanics, the difficulty picks up to a more reasonable level.

I was a bit worried that the core mechanic of never touching the same tile twice would get old. but since it's often unclear where you're supposed to end up at the end, it's not just a manner of pathing backwards from there but often requires some thought and attempts to figure things out.

Excellent to play in small bursts on your commute, I would've played for longer but my brain caught on fire from thinking too hard so I need a break.