Recent reviews by Kalt

Strong recommend for this game, even if not keyed into Aether lore.

This game tells a tight, fun, and silly story in about a half-hour from start to finish (if you succeed on the first try). Even if you're not familiar with the characters involved, the writing gives a good sense of who they are, and it's very enjoyable to see them interact.

The microgames themselves are solid, intuitive, and fast (of course). The little details added to each of them show a ton of care, and spotting them kept me smiling throughout the experience. On the rare occasion that it's not immediately clear what a microgame wants, it became clear to me after that single attempt.

The music is full of nonstop bangers, and is pieced together *very* well. It all feels natural even when hopping in and out of microgames, and I found myself grooving along to it often.

This game adds a novel gameplay twist to the microgame-collection genre. When I first experienced it, I was simultaneously shocked and excited for it--and the design of the game made it work perfectly despite stretching my abilities to play the game. It carried the hype from that moment through the end of the game perfectly.

And if you're not satisfied at the end, there are some postgame challenges and fun achievements to go for; I personally have gotten a good 6 hours of fun in the game, and expect I'll go back to push my high scores higher down the line.

Overall, more than worth the $3 price tag. Strongly recommend.

Comfy game that feels like a fishbowl idler, but not an incremental game. Build up a town, shuffle buildings around, look at cute little adventurers hopping around your village.

It's got a mysterious feel, and so far I'm really enjoying it. It doesn't tell you *too* much about what to do or how to do it, but if you click around and look, and use visual cues, you'll figure it out as you go. And even if you don't, that's fine.

Post-completion edit:
This game sticks the landing; I've completed it and enjoyed the ending. There were some mechanics that I was still a little vague on, but didn't need to fully understand to succeed. The comfy vibe stays there through and through.

From all I'd heard about this game, I'd expected it'd be way worse, but honestly I had a blast playing through the main portion of the game. That being said, its core mechanic probably isn't for everybody. It's a heck of a fun time as a twitchy speed-jump-and-shoot though.

I don't recommend playing this if you don't have a controller, though.

Core mechanic: Shoot enemies 'til they're disrupted. Dash through them to neutralize them (or, with bosses, lock in the damage you've dealt so far).

Things I liked:
* Gameplay: The core mechanic worked very well for my tastes, and the power-up system synergized well with it.
* Speed: The gameplay can be very fast. Unlimited air dashes make traversing levels swift as long as you can tell where and when to shoot.
* Music: It wasn't quite as catchy as classic Mega Man tracks, but it served the game well.
* Some level design: One of the levels has a pretty innovative design, where you're running through a repeated set of rooms and chasing down a boss. Most of the levels felt fun to play through.
* Nice set of options: There are some neat choices for tailoring your gameplay; for example, if you want to turn off power-ups, you can, and you can change the default number of lives with which you enter a stage.

Things I liked, but I wouldn't say are good:
* Writing: The writing was cheesy as heck, and I wouldn't call it well-crafted, but it did evoke the same level of cheesiness as Mega Man X4-X7 with lower emotional stakes / character investment.
* Voice acting: Like the above, it was cheesy / hammy as heck. I'm pretty sure the actors are talented and skilled, but the performances / chosen takes are silly. Whether it's an intentional decision or odd voice direction, it was still fun and funny to me.
* Some of the boss powers have interesting secondary effects, but you have to dig into the tutorial information to learn about them. I liked the idea behind them, though, and feel that if they were demonstrated in smoother ways, it would have been a good implementation.

Things I didn't like:
* There's an entire autoscroller level, which kind of disrupts the flow of a speed game. A couple other autoscroller segments broke up the gameplay a bit.
* There's a single room where you have to crouch-dash to squeeze under a low-hanging circular insta-kill hazard with unclear borders. Other parts of the game teach you that you can squeeze into tight spaces by just dashing, without crouching. Having to crouch-dash in that one place sucked, and it was worsened by the unclear edges.
* There were a couple annoying bugs, including one where I fell out of the map by accident during a foreground -> background transition. There was no kill plane, so I had to exit and re-enter the level.
* I facerolled a couple bosses undeservedly, and wished I'd had to learn them a bit better to succeed. That said, overall the pace of the game felt fine.

In short, I can recommend this game if you have a controller, enjoy speeding through levels, are willing to tolerate a couple bugs, and like the idea of learning how many shots it takes before you can safely dash through enemies.

I would recommend skipping this game if you plan to play on keyboard, prefer the pace of original Mega Man games, or want to upgrade your character's abilities over time through secrets or level re-visits, like the X games.

I haven't yet dug into alternative play modes or achievement hunting, so if good postgame is a make-or-break for you, you'll have to look up a different review.

nice

This game is best experienced not knowing a thing about it going in. It immersed me very, very well, and I was incredibly satisfied with the overall experience.

If you're not certain you'll enjoy this game, here are some non-spoilery descriptors about the gameplay. Exploration, discovery, space, environmental puzzle-solving, archaeology.

While I'm cool with the visual style, the interface and user experience makes this painful for me to play. There's so much waiting between button presses, between actions, etc. that it feels cumbersome / sluggish to do anything, even just do standard battling.

If this had a fast-forward mode and a snappier interface, I'd be much more willing to give it a deeper shot. I'm sure the game itself is fine enough. and you might enjoy it if you're more patient than I am.

If you liked the other Supergiant games, you'll probably like this one, especially if art and music is a strong factor in your enjoyment of games.

Pyre has been described to me as "Oregon Trail meets NBA Jam," and that description isn't wrong. Less lethal than Oregon Trail, to be sure, but it takes a structure of "Journey, make decision, resolve event, repeat a couple times, then face an adversary in sports combat." The fact that it plays more as a sport than a life-or-death battle may make it feel less impactful at first, but once I was invested in the story, the stakes of each battle weighed more heavily on me than any RPG before.

There is lots of text - I'd consider it 40-60% visual novel - but though the pacing flagged at times in the middle of the game, I never felt like I wasted my time reading it. It gave me a stronger sense of connection to the characters I was traveling with, and the characters I faced in each Rite (the name for the sports-combat encounters). The story gripped me, and many of my decisions felt like they mattered, whether for future character development or the ultimate outcome of the game.

Pyre raises the stakes by not simply giving you a game over if you lose. Each victory or loss still moves the story forward, and the simple lack of a reason to reload from a previous save gave me greater and greater investment in each Rite. Because these Rites had story-driven stakes for everyone involved, I was tempted to throw certain Rites in the favor of my opponent (and did indeed throw one or two).

Also, I totally cried, and not always out of sadness.

The music is wonderful and complements the characters and situations well. I can only think of one case in which it was distracting, and for the particular character it accompanied, it still made sense. For the song used in the trailer, I felt like the lyrics were a little too on-the-nose, but when I listened again in the context of the game I warmed up to it.

The art is beautiful and evocative. It paints an almost whimsical world with a lot of character, appealing on the outside with an undercurrent of the hostility of the land of the Downside (where the game takes place). The characters themselves are all well-designed, and their paintings give good clues to the surface of their personalities.

The Rites themselves are interesting and fun, too, and do an important job in terms of both pacing and contextualizing the story; they complement the story quite well, but didn't fully click with me. I still had a lot of fun with them, but a few moments of frustration (but was still able to succeed when I felt I needed to, with some effort).


Conclusion:
I strongly recommend this game to anyone who's willing to put in the time to participate in a great story. I completed the game for the first time in ~19 hours. Faster readers could probably complete it more quickly. I'm tempted to play through again - the ending is significantly influenced by the choices you make and the Rites you win and lose, and I really want to see other potential outcomes for each of the characters I met along the way.

This is a fun pick-up-and-play Bomberman style of game with a focus on controls and multiplayer. It detected my Xbox One controller without any fiddling with the settings. I recommend it for folks looking for a fun game to play for 30-60 minutes at a time at parties, or for folks who want to enjoy a low-key competitive game for funsies. Each full match takes maybe like 10 minutes, depending on settings and player count.

The gameplay is good. It's standard for this genre, with good base movement speed, clear use of tiles, and nice motion tweaks that keep players from getting stuck on corners.

Multiplayer: Local and online are both supported - And lots of players can jump in at a time. Like, up to 32 total players per match. The leader can customize the matches with various game modes, including the standard deathmatch, as well as a "king of the hill" style match where a player tries to keep a power-up for the longest period of time, while the others try to blast them and steal it.

Quick Play: I easily got into a game without any fuss. The online play community is relatively small at the moment, but bots are available to fill in when there aren't any other players around. The bots themselves are pretty capable, and beat me more often than not (though I'm no expert at this game, by any means).

The controls are responsive and intuitive, and the character selection / lobby screen lets players get used to them briefly in an interesting "Walk your character through customization steps" approach. The customization itself isn't too expansive, just lets you select one of several base characters (6 at the time of this writing), then determine primary and secondary color schemes.

The UI is utilitarian, but clear.

There's a map editor too, but I haven't checked it out in too much detail. I was able to make a basic map and save it easy peasy, though, and I'm sure the more creative types will have fun with it.

I strongly recommend this game, again particularly for those who want some fun, quick competitive multiplayer to play with friends. The price tag is reasonable for the amount of fun the game can give.

Undertale is a beautiful game. I strongly recommend anyone let it into their heart and give it a shot.

The game wears its Earthbound influence on its sleeve, without feeling like just a copy. It departs from those roots where needed, and gives some funny and poignant commentary on the nature of certain types of gameplay. It's meta-aware without being overly so, and the characters have, well... character and personalities, rather than just being vehicles for jokes.

The music is a huge influence on my appreciation of this game. There's a good variety in style with a hearty base in chiptune. Toby Fox's mastery of leitmotif shines through a lot of the tracks - It took me two playthroughs to recognize that some of the themes I'd grown attached to had been present since the beginning, and though I hadn't recognized them at the end of my first playthrough, I absolutely felt them. If you have impaired hearing, though, please don't let this stop you. There's only one sound-based puzzle as far as I can remember, and it's optional. (You can look up the answer online, too, but beware of spoilers!)

As the features list says, killing is unnecessary. I strongly recommend taking that to heart. The combat system is a lot of fun even with that in mind; people tend to connect it to "Bullet Hell" style shooters but, while it certainly gets to be pretty challenging, there are often ways to lower the challenge level or shore yourself up if you're not as good at that kind of gameplay. It still won't be easy, but it's not punishingly difficult.

Please give this game a shot. There's a free demo that, I hear, will accurately let you know whether or not you'll enjoy the game.

EDIT: Review updated over a year later for the Steam award badge upgrade. Nothing really changed from my review; while I feel a little less strongly than I did, I still have great memories from when I played it.

Played a couple quick tournaments against bots. So far, I really like what I've seen. Took me less than a half hour to feel like I really had a command of the movement controls. Will take a little longer to get used to the characters' signature weapons, but it's fun to learn each one.

Some cool design decisions:
* Lots of recovery options, so you can almost always get where you want to go on the stage, but if you get hit, you get hit pretty hard.
* Each character has two weapons available, so you can switch your moveset mid-match (item spawns willing) to try to improve your match-up.

Matches tend to be pretty fast and fun.

It's free, give it a try! If you like it, play more and possibly give 'em moneys.