shit ain’t nothing to me, man. i sipped the Devil’s own crude though a milkshake straw
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Game mostly looks good or great but holy shit that name
Edit: Why are indie games so committed to bits? Like, I get that “Cv2 but better” was how the dev got people’s attention but like… woof
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Yeah out of principle I’m not sure if I should steer clear and my god damn user name is a CV2 thing.
What’s up with the do rag
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got a kick out of the fact that one of the Cool Bosses 
in that trailer is literally just Spore Spawn lol
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the mine cart has the wheels from the blaster master jeep
I was gonna say I appreciate how committed they are to it actually looking like real 8 bit pixel art but then I saw a screen warp effect that was clearly post-processed at a higher resolution. my disappointment is immeasurable etc
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u can pet the dog… giant enemy crab… epic…
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yeah this was my feeling. meme’d out the f’ing wazoo
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I am hearing these criticisms and have determined that I will ignore them entirely when I release Samantha Arantes Abolishes the Metropolitan Android Police on Steam in 20X6.
Thank you for your understanding.
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There’s some nice parallax scrolling in there, that is what I choose to focus on.
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OK, Dave Halverson.
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Momodora: Moonlit Farewell justifies the fact that its moon doesn’t have parallax scrolling by claiming it’s actually an illusion projected by a deceitful catgod
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So I finally bought Ritual of the Night, chose to start with Hard Mode, hoping for something like Ecclesia’s first forest level, and am finding the first boss to be the wrong kind of frustrating. I know the jet stream attack–the one the boss shoots from the right side of the screen–is technically avoidable, but it might as well not be, given that there doesn’t seem to be any indication of what I did or where I was standing the handful of times I actually managed to avoid it. I’m not above looking for videos to see how to do it, but I feel I shouldn’t have to, and I also don’t know how this has to do with it being not being a pixel-based game. It all just feels imprecise.
On another note, I also got 9 Years of Shadows. It’s fine, I guess. The artwork is nice. The bosses are easily the best thing–although I kinda find that’s often true of mediocre metroidvanias. I wish there were a dash button or a slide. I like the various movement options, but wish more were done with them. What I really took from the game though, is that it’s a good example-via-counterexample of how more is often more when it comes to the genre. It really made me appreciate all the beasties in Dracula’s castles, and all the weapons there are with which to kill them. Not that all Castlevanias know how to use them to their best advantage, but at least they’re there.
ETA: Gave up and watched a video which showed that the jellyfish enemies block the jet stream, meaning you have hit that sweet spot between keeping those alive but not having them themselves be able to attack or overwhelm you. Rather clever, although I’d be more impressed if it weren’t something one would almost certainly learn by complete luck.
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Yeah hard adds some unfair new attacks to the first boss that aren’t in normal and it’s way too RNG-based. It’s the hardest boss in the game.
RotN is better on hard everywhere else though if you just push through it (I ended up grinding some levels before the boss room)
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As foretold, the Bloodstained bosses after the first one have been considerably fairer than the first one, but none more than the bosses of the clock tower level, where sudden chaotic energy caused me to clip through the floor, allowing me to go back up and attack the enemy from behind with impunity. Heck yeah, glitches–time you worked for me, for once.
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Hi it’s me, 5 years late to the party.
I finally picked up my old Bloodstained save last week after having gotten stuck somewhere around the towers and went on to finish the game (I was hard stuck because I hadn’t found the key to access the train and refused to look up anything).
I ended up enjoying it with some minimal outside help once I got in the groove. I would agree about the bosses in general feeling pretty reasonable compared to SotN (except 8 Bit Nightmare guy being a ridiculous health sponge, that was kind of unnecessary). In general, I felt that consuming a couple of health items while learning the patterns seemed to be the sweet spot for most bosses and I think that’s the way these games should be.
I also thought it had a pretty well-planned economy. It’s not exceedingly hard to harvest specific souls if you have the right loadout. They really encourage you to pour a lot of the junk you find into the various crafting systems, so I never felt like picking stuff up was a waste because I could always process it into other new things. I’m really not into crafting systems in any game, so I think that’s a high compliment.
I think they pulled it together, but yeah you can really feel this game’s development troubles under the surface a lot of the time. The art is nice in instances, and it’s all well animated too, but feels alternatingly sterile or incoherent as a whole. Setting your game up for direct comparison to the legacy of the 2D Castlevania sprite art doesn’t help matters when you have to make Legally Distinct Flea Man and Legally Distinct Alucard. The game is just a little ugly, I guess, in the sense that the key art/concept art didn’t make the jump to the 3D engine and there’s no fix for that after the fact.
Are they really making a sequel? I would buy it! The Curse of the Moon games are great.
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All this time playing the game and I never knew this LOL
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The crafting economy for me was just enough of a carrot on a stick system for me. It was a nice way to have alternate methods to get new equipment when you didn’t want to farm for them but more often than not I was always lacking 1 item and took forever to search the bestiary to find drop rates but then sometimes I wouldn’t have that history if it was an item I found on the map instead of a monster drop. It sometimes felt like busy work going to the shop and back to the alchemist just to stock up on the big potions. I don’t bemoan its existence but I think the numbers between drop chances and ingredient requirements could’ve use another pass or two. It helps alot of weapons had input skills to give them a little bit of an x-factor to keep them over obviously stronger weapons but I did wish there was a little less filler weapons in the crafting list.
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The second part of the Alfred boss fight in Ritual of the Night is really just “fuck being able to see anything”. In hard mode, anyway–don’t know if it’s the same in regular difficulty. I can sort of see it working in a sprite-based game, but here? Absolutely not.
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