Recent reviews by pantra

Haven't laughed this hard in a while! McPixel plays with your expectations and makes it hardly ever possible to anticipate how an interaction will turn out: Will your character pick a thing up if you click it? Will he break it? Will he just kick it until it explodes? - Who knows, let's try! And while this may sound random and frustrating it's totally fine since the game expects you to fail and fail often. Your time is never wasted, transitions can be skipped at will, so it's always tempting and motivating to give it just one more try - and probably laugh your ass off. Highly recommended.

Back to Bed has pleasing art but lacks substance.

The game starts out simple and stays that way for the most part. There's very little challenge involved. Most puzzles are too simple and unsatisfying to solve. The first well thought out levels start appearing in the second set, which is after the first 15. But even then it's more tedium than fun. There's little fun in picking up and aggregating all the apples and fish distributed around a level before you can place them, just busywork to arrange a solution that's usually obvious.

Also the logic as to what constitutes a failstate feels unfair and inconsistent: You can let Bob walk off edges all you want, he'll just respawn and you can continue with your puzzle progress. That's fine and motivating. But should he walk into an enemy or just a hole on a tile, then all your level progress gets reset and you have to retry from the beginning. In some stages like 2-12, where you can arrange multiple bridges, this gets annoying fast.

There's some occasional nice challenge later in nightmare mode, like in level 3-8, but that's just too little too late.

Or if you're interested, hear me out:

To be fair, I've enjoyed parts of Akane: There's some descent music and solid sound effects that make hitting enemies feel right. And sometime the game shows that it wants to be fair and reasonable: There's three Kimonos to find and collect in each Level, but you don't have to find them all in one take, you can just get them one at a time and then finish the level after having found the last one, which is pretty generous. Also your invincibility phase after getting hit is long enough to get out of trouble, which is pleasant too.

But still, as it stands, I can't recommend the game. Here's why:

My first impression after firing this up was that the game looked generic and the sprites lacked animation or expression. The following "achievement" - a thank you for watching the intro till the end - didn't exactly make the game seem confident about itself. Sure enough you'll encounter all four enemy types in the very first level already. So variety is also a slight issue here.

But more profoundly: Everything you do in Akane the Kunoichi has a delay to it, be it jumping, shooting or just plain walking. Once you do start moving, you'll find that it's way slow and sluggish, which doesn't make you feel like an agile Kunoichi at all. You also can't shoot many times in quick succession or walk while shooting. This will likely lead to enemies walking into you while you mash the shoot-button only to realize that you can't fire fast enough to kill them in time.

When it comes to jumping you have very little control over the height of your jump, which complicates making precise shots. Your walljump is even more problematic, since you have to push toward the wall and wait until your character sticks to it. When jumping off the wall there's again a lack of control, especially with the distance of your jump which for example makes the platforming in the beginning of 4-2 way harder than it needs to be.

The game does get challenging in parts, but mostly for the wrong reasons, the controls being number one. Some levels demand precision that the controls don't provide, like the last three stages with collectables placed between spikes.

But also contributing is the unfair leveldesign in general. Enemies will spawn right in front or almost on top of you, sometimes even four or six at once. In Level 3-2 for example there's a spot where, when you reach it for the first time, two spawning ninjas will likely push you right back into a bottomless pit. Some other levelparts that I wouldn't consider unfair are at least more annoying than they would have needed to be, like a climb-section in 3-2, where the moving platforms block all of your projectiles but not those of your hat-throwing enemies. Blind falls are also pretty common, sometimes into a bottomless pit like in 3-1, sometimes into spikes like in 5-2.

Most of the boss battles are uninspired, though they get the job done and provide a fair challenge. But the final battle is very anticlimactic for it's easily the least interesting of all: Just your nemesis lady standing on a plateau and spawning the usual four enemies one at a time.

It was first and foremost the amazing music that kept me hooked till the end and helped amplify the surreal and dreamlike mood of the game and it's unpredictability.

beautiful, charming and fun breakout variation!