Recent reviews by SkyBlueFox

A little history to kick off this review: I have history with Youtube Poop. I spent all of my high school years and a small chunk of my college years watching, enjoying, or being involved with YTP in some capacity. It wasn't a perfect community, but I still hold those memories near and dear to my heart, and it wouldn't surprise me if I know/knew a lot of folks listed in the credits. (And if any of those old acquaintances end up reading this, I hope you're all living your best lives! :U )

But when I say "Arzette is good", I mean that even beyond my own bias. Because while Arzette is a wonderful tribute to its interactive animated inspirations, it's also just a really good, solid, fun-to-play game in general. You can tell right from the start that this is a labor of love, and I can't stress enough how strongly that shines through in the final product. It looks great, sounds great, plays great, and is just the right length to make replaying it feel completely natural, even if you aren't the type of person to do multiple back-to-back runs of a game.

First off: visually, the game is fantastic. The painterly maps and backgrounds all look distinct and full of little touches, but it's also balanced and drawn in a way that makes the platforming easy to parse. It's not very often that you go "wait, is this a platform or...?", and the few times it does happen, it's in safe areas that won't punish you for making sure. The spritework is also richly-detailed, and that does a lot to elevate the whole experience. Weird of a comparison as it is, it reminded me of playing Rayman, where characters and enemies alike are full of personality.

Next: there's a lot of stuff to do here. Much like its inspirations, Arzette's world is very "Metroid-vania"-like, with a lot of visiting and revisiting, finding new items or abilities as you go. If you want to blitz through the game lickety-split, then you can certainly do that (and there's even certain tricks to make doing so easier!). But if you want to take your time and just vibe in the world, there's a lot of goodies and things to hunt for. Some of them are pretty well-hidden, but most areas have some small environmental hint to clue you in - and the few areas that don't are usually easy enough to find via your own intuition. (Pro-Tip: make sure you put that duck-walk to good use!)

Lastly: all the animated sequences are, of course, wonderful. They're goofy, whimsical, sometimes bizarre, but it's all played in a straightforward, earnest manner - just like the game's inspirations. It's weird, but it's not riffing on itself, nor is it deliberately playing itself up. The weirdness is simply one small part of the charm. It's a fun little world with a fun little cast of characters, and it feels like an old Saturday morning cartoon come to life.

Arzette is just... fun. It's good, earnest, wholehearted fun. It doesn't overstay its welcome, but it's also got enough stuff on offer to keep you occupied and satisfied. It takes what Faces of Evil and Wand of Gamelon did, expands on what those games did right, and shores up the areas that those games faltered in. And, in fact, I think I might very well go right now and play it through again!

Delver is an interesting game. It's rather basic at the moment, being early access, but for eight dollars, the amount of content and effort that the game has is really impressive, and it feels very focused in its design. I can see the reason people compare it to Ultima Underworld, since much of the game's gameplay and style are clearly very inspired by it - the first one in particular, I mean. While the combat focus is very fun and the graphical style is really appealing, I actually consider the level design and generation to be the highlight here: I don't know whether it's due to working with a 3D space or whether it's simply the sheer amount of rooms and halls and things that the team have made, but in the handful of runs I've played so far, they've all felt similar, but all memorably unique thanks to how everything is built. It's a roguelike capable of creating really cool vistas, structures and views, while also making those distinct in gameplay terms as well (the dungeon is inhabited and has lots of humans and recent structures, the caves are very jagged with lots of nooks, the sewers are a mixture of open yet linear due to multiple heights, etc), and that's something to be applauded.