Reviewing games for this website has been an absolute delight for the last three years. Got to talk about games I love, try out new titles, and broaden my horizons on what video games can do. It’s been great, but writing the reviews themselves can be a difficult process. I have to set a time for when I want to write these, because my schedule is busy and sometimes I’m just not in the mood. There are times when I know exactly what I want to say and how to present my personal thoughts, and there are times when my mind is just going blank and I don’t even know where to begin. Reviews are actually pretty hard to write kiddos. You need to know how to structure them, what section is dedicated to what, not lose focus, and convince your audience why you believe what you believe in. They don’t have to agree with you, but a critic should be able to persuade their audience into trying the game or film they recommend. That’s why you don’t often see me pumping reviews out each week, because not only would that be a tiring process but it would probably make me resent games more which is something I don’t want. That feeling of misery created by a hobby you once loved. I don’t review every game I play, but there are some I wish I could talk about because my thoughts on them are interesting. Well that’s what we’re here to do today. Talk to you about games I finished in 2022, but didn’t want to release full length reviews for. Most of them being short indie titles, but buckle up buckaroos! It’s time for a short rundown!
Carrion
Carrion is a game I’m really conflicted on, but don’t exactly know why. On one hand it has a lot of cool ideas that separate it from other metroidvanias, but on the other hand it’s not as great or memorable as other metroidvania titles I have played. The premise is that you are this weird eldritch horror tucked away miles beneath the earth’s surface within a secret laboratory. You break containment and start killing the scientists and soldiers around you. Feeding off their corpses and growing in size. You then start navigating the complex, obtaining new abilities, and try to figure out your origins. It’s a reverse horror story, where instead of playing a protagonist trying to out run and out smart the monster you instead play the monster. I like it. You get to see this eldritch being beyond your comprehension, adapt ,and tear through the strongest defenses mankind has to offer. Showing us we’re not capable of surviving such a thing. In fact, The Thing was the main influence of this game and soon we unlock the ability to possess and eventually transform into a human being. Sneaking up to the surface and walking into society. Possibly getting ready to find new prey to devour. It’s horrifying and it goes to show reverse horror is frightening even though we’re having mindless fun.
Which brings us onto the game itself which is fine. This is where my feelings on Carrion are really mixed. It’s a metroidvania so you explore a vast interconnected world, take on enemies and puzzles, unlock new powers to use, and figure out where to go next. To kill people you simply reach towards them, bite, smash them around like a rag doll, and devour. Fighting doesn’t exactly feel good. I played this on consoles and to reach and wave enemy bodies around you have to use the right joystick. At first enemies don’t put up much of a fight, but then you start encountering the heavily armed baddies. Now these guys can get really annoying. They can kill you within seconds if you are not careful and you are facing a guy with a flamethrower you are basically f*cked since fire lingers on you unless you find a body of water to dart towards. Then you have the mechs which you have to break open by smashing junk onto them until you break their windows open and reach for the man piloting them. Some of them are armed with heavy duty machines which much like the flamethrowers chip you health away easily.
I do like the powers, the mutagens, you obtain during your adventure. They all center around stretching and morphing your meaty body in such a way where you can fit through the spaces you need to go through. Sacrificing body mass to crawl through smaller passageways or stretching a thin tentacle far enough so you can pull a lever out of reach. It’s the metroidvania standards I know and love, but another reason why I don’t love Carrion is because of the world design and how the endgame works. Up until the end the game gives you a good idea of where to go. You should never get lost during your playthrough as the game gives you clear signals of when a door leading forward opens. However, one of the joys of a metroidvania is going back to areas you explored and seeing what you missed. Upgrades, unlockables, etc. Carrion doesn’t have any of this. Well it does have some upgrades, but none of them really do much or are needed to beat the game. This now leads me to the endgame, which is when Carrion stops giving directions on where to go and leaves you lost. Giving you no idea on what pathway is forward, what is the end, and how to roll credits. I spent a full hour figuring out what to do. Pursuing the optional upgrades and realizing they were absolutely useless as I had killed everything powerful by that point. Then I discovered the final container that needed to be broken and finished the game. Carrion isn't bad by any means nor does it overstay its welcome. It’s roughly around five hours long which is a great runtime for a chaotic massacre such as this. It’s just that the last hour falls apart and I don’t see that many reasons to go replay it. Carrion gets a 7.5/10 which is okay.
Deltarune
I’m gonna review both parts together, because they're not that long and it only took me two days to beat them. Deltarune is the next big adventure by Toby Fox who you may know for making the famously acclaimed indie title Undertale. Now, I don’t really love Undertale the way that other people worship it. It’s not that I think the game is bad, no. I respect the themes Undertale is trying to explore and how it evaluates the way we view video games. I just hate how people think it’s the first game to tackle morality. It handled it well, but it wasn’t the first. Dishonored and Spec Ops: The Line came out three years before Undertale and they handled morality in a really interesting way. Both games tricked you into thinking what you were doing was right, and when it came time to face the final boss it poured all that disheartening information onto you. Made you realize that you were the monster to this story all along. They too weren’t the first to tackle morality, but you see where I’m getting. Hell, Undertale isn’t the deepest game out there. Games have explored themes such as depression, the meaning of life, and learning to move on. I dislike how many people say Undertale is the deepest game ever when there’s several others that have existed and done much more than it.
I don’t have plans to play Undertale because half the internet spoiled the story, and it’s one of those games best experienced going in blind. I didn’t have any plans to go play Deltarune either, especially since Toby Fox is planning to do this game in parts. Release one chunk of the game one year and then three years later release the next chunk when it’s ready. Normally I don’t like episodic releases. I like having one complete game rather than waiting for the whole thing to be finished ten years down the line. However, I’m making an exception for Deltarune as it’s an indie game and another title Ultrakill has proven how great it can be despite not being done yet. Deltarune is also free which is great since the game isn’t complete yet. I didn’t have that many games to play earlier in the year and was waiting for Elden Ring, so I downloaded Deltarune expecting both good and bad. Would it live up to the mass amounts of hype and praise the internet was shoving into my face, or would I find it somewhat overrated like Undertale. The answer was that I didn’t hate Deltarune and in some ways I like it more than Undertale.
The premise is that monsters live on the surface world, but they are in truth kind hearted people. They live in their own little town and everyone knows each other since it’s a small community. You play as Kris, human daughter of one of the monsters, and you attend a school full of other monsters to show that humans and monsters can get along. As shown in Undertale. A dinosaur looking girl named Suzie tries to stir trouble with you, but during the chaos a school closet door transforms into a gateway which sends them to a place known as the Dark World. There they meet Ralsei who begs them to help him take on the evils who threaten the peace in the world. They team up and along the way they learn how to be kind hearted individuals and sh*t. So it’s quite literally Undertale but isekai. Why do I like it more then? I think one reason I like this game more is that you have a party and the combat system is more refined. In Undertale you were all by yourself and had to manage a group of enemies on your own. Here you have party members and they each have their own skills and trade offs. One could be focused on magic spells and the other can be focused on dealing heavy physical damage. When enemies attack you have to avoid the projectiles they send and successfully avoiding them fills up the TP meter. This meter is what allows you to perform special abilities, so it encourages you to get good dodging.
During combat you have the choice of sparing or killing enemies. Killing them will give you experience points to level up and sparing them allows you to obtain… nothing. However, sparing them can also serve as a way to end fights quickly and move on with the story which is nice. One big reason I like Delatrune more is probably because of the characters. They are closer to the age of the protagonist and this allows them to form a much stronger connection. An odd friendship between two unlikable companions. I like how Suzie is this violent person, but you get her to open up her heart and soon she starts accepting you as the first person to actually care about her. Chapter two of Deltarune introduces Berdly and Noelle. Berdly being this annoying nerd who is trying very hard to impress Noelle and act like a shining knight in armor, and Noelle being this soft girl who just wants to be alone. You get separated from Ralsei and Suzie for a bit, and spend a whole section with Noelle as a party member. Either teaching her how to be kind or letting your violent nature lead her down a dark path. To the point where one of the endings see Berdly not awakening in the real world. There’s also this love dynamic between Suzie and Noelle where they are afraid to admit their love to one another, and it’s really cute. Strong tough girl struggling to ask the soft girl out of her league on a date. Chapter two I also think it’s the best as it has the most diverse and wackiest scenarios between both parts. At one point it turns into Pucn-Out and it's the most insane the game gets. Overall I recommend Delatrune. The first part is more like a warm-up of what is to come, and I’m not gonna slap an excellent score on this as the game is not finished. Yet, Delatrune is great and I’m excited for where it goes. 8.5/10.
Fez
Fez is one of the more older indies out there. It came out during the Xbox Live Arcade era and for the time it was impressive for how it managed to mash 2D platforming, puzzle solving, and navigating around 3D models all together. It’s a classic to a lot of indie gamers, but personally I don’t think it’s as great as people say it is. It is technically impressive for the time, and numerous indie developers stuck to 2D and never moved onto 3D. Fez as a game, especially a puzzler, is really flawed. The premise is that you, Gomez, are chosen by your floating village to check up on the Polyhedron. This mystical cube that can change the way individuals perceive reality and controls the balance of the universe. Gomez gets to the Polyhedron and upon interacting with it the Polyhedron shatters. Scattering multiple miniature cubes around the world and breaking the fabrics of reality. Gomez awakens in his home like nothing happened, but when he exits he finds reality in a new perspective. A 3D perspective that allows him to change the angle his floating home is seen from. A fairy companion appears and states we have to locate the pieces of Polyhedron, put it back together, and prevent the world from falling apart.
From here we jump across a sprawling world. I won’t say Fez is a metroidvania game, because it doesn’t have that sense of interconnectivity nor does it give you power-ups that allow you to open up more of the world. It does have the scope of one though. Each island hides multiple little cubes to collect and when you collect eight fragments you get to form a piece to the Polyhedron. Areas that have been completely cleared and hide no more cubes or fragments are marked gold on the map. A nice indicator for how far you have gotten. You don’t even need all the cubes to beat the game. You can collect half of them and get the fragmented ending where reality is fixed but not fully. Fez is a delightful game to work towards completion, but I wouldn’t say it’s a great puzzler. The puzzles aren’t always well designed and the hints they give you on how to solve them aren’t the greatest either. Leading to a lot of obscure moments.
The game has this made up language and you actually have to understand it to solve some of the tougher puzzles the game has. You have these secret void rooms, and one of them is absolutely seizure-inducing to go through. One puzzle literally has you wait in real time, which seems cool but really dumb when put into practice. There are some rooms that you can’t even solve at all until you beat the game, because on new games they give you these goggles to float around the 3D rooms and see the codes you need to read to solve. This does give the player a reason to replay, but I don’t like how in order to complete the game 100% you have to wait until the new game plus stage. I loving being able to do everything in one playthrough for these types of games, and working towards that completion in Fez got boring after a while. This is one of the weaker puzzle indies I’ve played, but it’s not terrible. I respect what it does and a ton of people may enjoy it. Too bad the sequel got cancelled long ago. 7.5/10 for being okay.
Ape Out
Ladies and gentlemen I like to present to you a new genre I like to call “miamilikes.” Games that play like or are inspired by Hotline Miami, and are usually published by Devolver Digital who if you don’t know also publish Hotline Miami. I never played Hotline Miami itself, but I played a good handful of games inspired by it. These games are not only visceral, but find unique ways to tell their mind bending stories much like Hotline Miami. One of my favorite “miamilikes” ever made is Katana Zero, this stellar sidescrolling action adventure that centers around themes like addiction, PTSD, and losing yourself to violence. It's a masterclass and I’ve been wanting to play a game similar in vein. Now you are probably saying, “Just play Hotline Miami’ and I probably should. Sadly that’s not what my brain decided and instead we ended up playing what are basically its lesser known business bros. Bloodroots, My Friend Pedro, and this one.
Ape Out is another “miamilike” made by solo developer Gabe Cuzzilo where you control an ape trying to escape containment by rampaging through the men that are trying to recapture him. There are a total of four chapters and each of them follows a different scenario. Escape a zoo, a skyscraper, a warzone, and a ship. Each of them have their own stories to tell, and I like how they are presented. Ape Out uses the same method Hyper Light Drifter uses where instead of explaining the story they just let the player play the game and witness events for themselves. It doesn’t do it as well as occasionally words pop-up on screen to tell you what to do, but they are usually there to tell you to move forward because if you don’t you’ll die. Standing still Ape Out is a death wish and you’ll want to keep moving so you get to the next safe zone of the chapter. The core gameplay loop revolves around getting from Point A to Point B without getting hit. Get it once and you are dead, hence it being a “miamilike.” One aspect that makes Ape Out unique is that everytime you re-enter a room the layout of it changes. It uses procedural generation so that the same scenario doesn’t get repetitive. This does create weird difficulty curves as sometimes you’ll just be doing the scenario over and over until it generates one that is doable.
To kill enemies you simply pick them up and throw them into an object. Apparently the ape is strong enough so that when a human hits a wall it explodes like a water balloon. You don’t even have to throw humans mainly at walls. You can throw them into each other which creates this rhythmic action of who to pick up next. Some enemies have guns and this allows you to either get them to fire on allies or use an unarmed buddy as a meat shield. You’ll even encounter guys with flamethrowers whom when thrown or damaged will explode. Ape Out wants you to stay on your toes and that’s why the chaotic action is so addicting. That’s not the main reason I like this game though. The artstyle and music is what gets you through the repetition. Whenever you kill an enemy a bit of sound is added to the ongoing song, and if you keep up the masacre you get this really loud jazzy tune. Hearing that music out masks the blood being spilt on screen. Basically the player is creating the track. Determining what instruments go on at what time as if they were the instructor. This game is basically a jazz album, and the art style with minimalist shapes and colors looks like what you would encounter on a jazz album or a small coffee shop where you can find a small group playing. Ape Out is pretty fantastic. It’s no Katana Zero and the runtime is short, but it’s worthwhile. 8.5/10.
BPM: Bullets Per Minute
I was pretty excited to try out Bullets Per Minute. The team asked themselves, “What if Doom crossed over with Crypt of The Necrodancer?” and that’s how we ended up with a first person rhythm based roguelike shooter. That’s a mouthful to take in. It sounded pretty awesome in my mind. Kind of like NecroDancer or the previously mentioned Ape Out, your actions create the song. You get used to the rhythm, enter this zen-like state, and it’s satisfying. Unfortunately, playing Bullets Per Minute and trying to get used to the feel of the game is difficult itself. Little did I know in reality I suck at rhythm games and I was so bad at BPM that I had to turn on the auto rhythm setting just so my actions would register. Anyways, you pick your character and you are dumped into the first zone out of several. At the end of each zone there is a boss and you must defeat it to progress. Each room to a zone contains enemies, power-ups, character upgrades, and shops to purchase more upgrades from. It’s your standard roguelike. It’s pretty well made and for a while I was having fun. As soon I lost motivation to continue playing.
BPM is pretty frustrating. Your character can only take four hits and enemies are always rushing at you. Meaning if you screw just a couple times or aren’t aware of your surroundings you’ll die immediately. You can pick up health bottles to restore health and compare to NecroDancer health refills are more plentiful. However, the chance of health potions dropping are still low and oftentimes you’ll have to waste money at shops to get health. The rate dropped is also random as sometimes you’ll kill a small group of enemies and obtain four coins, or kill a large group and basically obtain nothing at all. What you purchase with coins though is really useful. Different guns for different playstyles, stat upgrades to categories such as movement speed or damage, spells to blast at enemies, armor to offer perks, and much more. You are working towards that state of power and I like this more than the game just handing it down to you like Risk of Rain. There are times when what gets you further into a run is pure luck and accidentally achieving an overpowered build. One time I picked up a power that changed my projectiles into explosives, I had an assault rifle, and most of the upgrade statues spawning were damage upgrades. So I got close to around the second to last zone and this was between my tenth to twentieth run.
That’s not the end of my complaints with Bullets Per Minute. The starting classes are f*cked. They aren’t terrible, but they handled well. The starting character is all rounded with four points of health, not points in any stat category, and the basic pistol. Everything about this character is great besides the pistol. It’s not terrible, but you’ll want to swap it out with another weapon quickly as it becomes unviable after a few zones. Weapons in BPM can be pretty pricey and sometimes you’ll want to save coins up for other upgrades. There are other characters to unlock and they spawn in with different weapons and stat boosts. However, characters after the starting one are awfully weak. One guy starts with a shotgun, but dies in three hits. One guy has more movement and often jumps, but dies in two hits. So basically you are sacrificing how long your character will survive for different loadouts, which is something you shouldn’t do. My other complaint is that the game has this weird glaring filter and almost all the environments are a different shade of red, yellow, or brown. It becomes an eyesore to look at and it explains why they had an option to tone down the resolution. BPM: Bullets Per Minute is an ambitious mess. I think it’s fun for a while and I did love the soundtrack, but I didn’t want to play this as much as other roguelikes I’ve played. 7.5/10.
A Short Hike
A Short Hike is one of the most relaxing, good vibe games I’ve played this year. You're on a vacation with your aunt, but are awaiting a phone call. Sadly the lodge you are staying at has no internet connection and the only place that possibly has it is a mountain nearby. Journeying up the mountain is difficult so you have to collect enough feathers, otherwise endurance, to climb the mountain and reach the top. A Short Hike isn’t a very complex game and it’s not long either. It took me under two hours to beat it and that’s the shortest amount of time it’s taken me to beat a game. It clicked with me though and I found a lot of reasons to love it. The core gameplay is really well designed as it revolves around platforming around the miniature open world. There’s secrets to uncover, NPCs to interact with, and exploration is always rewarding. The controls are tight allowing precise movement around the sharpest obstacles. You can perform several jumps or climb to get to a higher location you need to reach. The catch being that it uses feathers, and once you run out of feathers you run out of energy. This then gets you to find more feathers in the world which then gets you to explore and mess around. Interact with NPCs who are all quirky and wonderful, and understand the cute little world you are in. The story isn’t much, but the ending is really wholesome and hits me right in the feels. The art direction and graphics are reminiscent of the older Animal Crossing games and it’s all just really charming. I strongly recommend A Short Hike. It’s pretty cheap and a nice experience to play when you are feeling stressed out. So I’m gonna give A Short Hike a 9/10 for excellence at best. Highest score so far.
Superhot
Superhot is another one of the more popular indie games on this list and it’s pretty well renowned. It has a really cool gimmick and the story was interestingly presented. That story follows you, a random player, receiving a cracked copy of superhot.exe from your friend and being told to play it using your headset. Upon playing the game you notice that it glitches out often and whenever you clear a room full of baddies words appear on screen. Eventually those words start forming sentences almost as if the game is trying to talk to you. It’s one of those metanarrative games where both the video game plot and real world plot are connected and work with each other. You the player then descend down this rabbit hole over who is in control and this leads to you soon transcending reality. The core gameplay loop of Superhot is great. Your goal is to kill all of the red glassed enemies around you using whatever tools are colored black. The gimmick is that time moves only when you move, so it allows you to evade attacks that would be unavoidable in other games. You die in one hit, but this makes sense from a design perspective as you have time slow powers. You can get crazily creative in this game. You can fire off your pistol until it runs out of ammo, chuck it at a guy, and then grab the weapon they are holding. Pick up a bottle, throw it, then pick up a katana on the side and slice an enemy in half. Karate chop a guy and blast them with a shotgun their dead friend dropped. Superhot wants to make you feel like a badass.
It’s fun and contains an innovative idea, but why don’t I love it? Combat functions more like a puzzle where you have to carefully decide each move, and the story breaks the fourth wall in interesting ways. Why don’t I love it as much as a majority of players? One reason could be that the game is short. It took less than two hours for me to beat and that’s with a handful of deaths. The game doesn’t have that much replay value either as levels are progressed through a linear order, and despite the game having numerous tools and options to dink around with I wouldn’t say it has a ton. I think what makes this even worse is that Superhot is usually sold for around $25. That’s how much Hades and Spiritfarer costs, but those two are justified for how much content they have. Not saying Superhot doesn’t have any love or dedication put into it, but other indie shooters as of recently like Dusk and Neon White have more to offer. I also want to say Superhot feels like one of those games made for VR. When this thing hit the VR it blew up. Tons of people were saying it was the hot app for any VR owner. On consoles, which is what I played it on, it feels a little underwhelming because the motion of doing actions isn't as spectacular. Superhot is still worthy checking out though. 8/10 for pretty good.
Inside
Well, well, look who’s inside again. Without a- wait wrong Inside. This is the second game by Playdead who you may also recognize for making Limbo. Inside is literally just Limbo but on modern hardware. Instead of 2D animation there’s 3D models, and there’s more diverse sounds and backgrounds. I remember Inside gaining tons of praise when it came out originally. Perfect scores across the board gushing about its presentation and story. Receiving quite a few end of the year awards and being considered one of the best indies ever made. Does Inside deserve all of these acclaim after all this time? The answer is yes. I don’t think Inside is perfect and it’s not one of the best indie games ever made, but I can understand why it’s so well loved. You play as a boy sneaking into a facility and trying to outrun the guards trying to capture him. It uses the same method of storytelling Hyper Light Drifter uses where instead of speaking a word every action is done through character and their expressions. There’s a heavy usage of sound throughout the game and this is what Inside does best. It has scary monsters and scenes, but what’ll scare you the most is its audio. How it’s able to transform a dog chasing you into a devastating scene. The way you can get killed in this game is brutal. You can fall to death, get crushed, drown, shot, and you are just a little boy. I love the art direction and how everything has both a detailed and simple look to it. Enough where you understand what it is but not completely. The journey of the boy is engaging. Seeing him tackle all these problems and work towards this grand mystery. Where the last few minutes unleash full mayhem onto the player and we go through one of the most questionable moments I’ve seen in a video game. Inside is great. I don’t think it’s a 10/10 video game as the story didn’t move me in such a way where I felt inspired, and its puzzle and game design isn’t the best. However, it’s memorable and I’ll always honor a game that manages to stick in my head hours after playing. 9/10.
Braid
Braid is probably the oldest indie game featured on this list. Released back in 2008 and was made by Jonathan Blow who would eventually go on to make The Witness. Jonathan has been well praised for his puzzle games and the design of them, and this is his first masterpiece. Almost one and half decades later, Braid is still brilliant and remains to be an indie classic. It’s timeless and feels like a product that could have been made today. You play as Tim, and from what some of the scriptures laid about tells us it looks like we’re in pursuit of a princess who got captured. You venture across six worlds to find this princess, and along the way you stomp on the heads of baddies and collect puzzle pieces. It’s a colorful platformer in the same vein as Super Mario, but Braid has a twist up its sleeve. You have the power to reverse time, and using this power you can undo any mistakes you made and manipulate certain objects. Through this power you solve cleverly designed puzzles. Some of them require real thinking.
Each of the six chapters throws a new idea to play with and from there the creativity runs wild. One chapter introduces objects that aren’t affected by the undoing of time. Another chapter may spawn in a shadow of the player’s previous actions if they undo what they just did, and one chapter has time moving forward only when Tim moves right. Despite some of the puzzles proving to be difficult I never found any of them unfair. They just required me to stare at them for a little bit, mess around, and eventually I’d get the solutions within a few minutes. That “ahah” feeling I love to get from these types of games. I also really love how the story is told. It’s not a great story and it doesn’t have me balling my eyes out, but it’s interestingly told. At first we believe it's about a man trying to save a princess, but with time we figure out there’s more to it. COuld it be about a man trying to mend a distant/broken relationship? Could it be about how he developed this obsessed mindset which eventually drove away the person he wanted to ask out? Then there’s the fan theory that it’s about the invention of the atomic bomb and how Tim didn’t make it in time. Explaining why we spawn into a city set on fire, falling apart into debris, and appears to be melting.
Oh yeah, the art style is fantastic and looks like one of those classical paintings you would encounter in the olds days. Soundtrack is great too as it’s that classic symphony found in that old era as well. I really loved Briad. It’s not perfect as when you jump into a wall Tim apparently bounces off and this leads him falling into pits he could have avoided if he just normally slid down, and to gain full completion you need to collect the stars. Some of them are really well hidden and one particular one has you waiting for a cloud for a full hour. Braid is still a fantastic game though and I strongly recommend it. I give Braid a 9/10 for excellence at best.
Battleblock Theater
Battleblock Theater is the funniest game I’ve ever played. It was developed by The Behemoth who also made Castle Crashers, Pit People, and a classic flash game known as Alien Hominid. The story follows you, one of several friends of Hatty Hattington, on another grand adventure across the seas. A huge storm brews which send you, Hatty, and the S.S Friendship crashing on an island inhabiting a weird theater. Hatty gets abducted and the guards of the theater who are all cats slap a hat on his head that corrupts his mind. You are locked behind bars and Hatty is made the new theater owner. Throwing you into torturous trials designged to be theater acts to entertain the audience. You must survive, get to Hatty, and make your way off the island. Battleblock is a pretty simple game. It’s a side scroller where you navigate across small levels, avoid obstacles, and collect gems along the way to purchase captured friends. All the levels are bite sized and shouldn’t take too long to finish as checkpoints are plentiful and you shouldn't spawn too far from where you died. Your performance is graded on whether you got all the gems in a level, beat it within a specific time, and found the yarn ball. You don’t need full completion to beat the game, but it’s fun to work towards it as no collectible is hidden too obscurely and the speedrun time is forgiving.
If you were to ask me if Battleblock Theater is the best platformer I’ve played I would say no. It’s simplistic, but simplistic to a point where it lacks depth. Your character doesn’t have any signature moves like Shovel Knight or Celeste, level mechanics evolve up until a point, and while there’s combat it doesn’t feel good and doesn't utilize all that well. Why name your game “Battleblock Theater” when the combat really sucks and isn’t top priority? Battleblock should be a fine game, but what elevates it for me is the comedy. My god, this is the best comedy in a video game as it’s self aware of how stupid it all is but the writers aren’t so self indulgent with it. It has that Newgrounds energy of being immature, but knowing what jokes to pull and when. Which is convenient. I brought that up as the animations were made using flash and both The Behemoth and voice of the narrator, Tim Stamper, worked on Newgrounds at some point. I was excited to see funny animations at the end of each chapter because it was so well written and acted. Now not everyone is going to like the humor, but this is the stuff I grew up on. Battleblock Theater is great and even if you don’t play it at least look up the shorts. There’s a lot to appreciate with them and what they do. 8.5/10.
Buddy Simulator 1984
This is the most recent game on this list as it came out earlier last year. Buddy Simulator 1984 is a game about a friendship falling apart and in the most devastating way possible. You obtain a disk labeled Buddy Sim 1984 and upon installing it into your computer you are greeted by an AI who wants to be your friend. At first you guys play simple text based games, but eventually he starts creating new games for you to play. A full world to explore with NPCs to interact with and quests to partake in. Buddy is excited to form memories with you, but amongst the fun things start going wrong. Glitches, weird messages, and text that indicates the true nature of Buddy. Shall you continue to play the game? Shall you admit Buddy is freaking you out or lie because he is trying very hard to be your best friend and keep you around longer? This is a game that relies heavily on metanarrative similar to OneShot and Inscription, but thankfully much like these other two games Buddy Simulator 1984 uses metanarrative right!
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They actually get the player to form a connection to Buddy and explore the parts of friendships no one wants to talk about. The determination to please the other person, ridiculing them of what they should and should not do, and eventually toxicity starts to form as the friendship goes down. There’s a bit of horror to Buddy Simulator 1984 and there were a couple times this game made me feel unnerved. I don’t get scared by games like Resident Evil or Dead Space, but there’s something about retro games and their aesthetic. Due to the pixel graphics they don’t always give the best details of what you are looking at and when you finally see what it is it’s the most incomprehensible and horrifying thing to look at. The music also feels unnerving as it can be happy pappy one second and then change to loud glitching noises as the world around you then falls apart. There’s a couple of jumpscares and scripted moments dotted about which are cheap ways to generate horror, but nothing too bad and they don’t overly utilize them like a lot of modern indie horror games. There’s three endings you can obtain and they depend on how well your relationship with Buddy is. Whether you treat him really well, moderately, or awfully. You may also uncover some hidden documents hinting towards a real world story, which is why this game is metanarrative. I didn’t pursue these documents, but the story found within it is great and heartbreaking when you finally figure it out. Buddy Simulator 1984 is a little gem I’m happy to have played. I wouldn’t have heard about it if it weren’t for my Maddy, so thanks for suggesting it to me. So I’m gonna give Buddy Simulator 1984 an 8.5/10 for being pretty good.
Outro
Is it over? Oh thank god it’s over. That was really tiring to get through and I can imagine how much more tiring it would have been if I wrote full reviews for all these games individually. There were some great games and some okay ones, but overall I think these games are good and that more people should hear about them. I plan to continue reviewing games until the end of the year, specifically review some titles that came out this year. Lots of stuff to get excited for and it looks like more great games will be covered soon. Thanks for reading lads and I’ll see you later!
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