I played through all of the 2D castlevanias last year and in retrospect harmony is easily the best portable castlevania game. it rips so hard… it has so much style and personality. it’s so fun to just pick up and play.
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As someone that gets super frustrated with this genre: Timespinner. I wish I could say more about it other than it did everything right for me.
Though whenever I start to deconstruct this genre I think Cave Story did everything right.
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Cave Story almost feels like the polar opposite ideal: distinctly ungenerous in a way that games rarely dare nowadays, even the ones whose brand is that they’re punishing.
The first room in the game is a small platform in a sea of spikes when you have no health to absorb hits yet. You can miss out permanently on the best equipment if you take the wrong path. And the core combat loop reminds me of Gradius in that the moment you make a mistake, your weapons level down massively and it’s an agonizing grind to get back into a smooth flow.
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yeah… this is why kero blaster is a better game in my opinion. the design is so focused and tight in comparison.
kero blaster is just so fucken smooth, even the “brutal” bonus stages are a joy to play
edit to add that Cave Story on modern hardware looks terrible because it’s so low res, but it can’t just change the screen resolution like it did in the XP era so all the text is smooth and high res and the juxtaposition with the otherwise charming pixel art is really jarring to me
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I want to play in a search action with reversed structure. You start with all the bells and whistles, but as you play you need to give up your powers to progress, until the final area where you can’t go back any more. You gave up your double jump before plunging off a cliff that can only be surmounted with a double jump. You only have your weakest weapon, and you must, in the manner of earthsea, confront your shadow, stripped bare of power.
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the superbrothers sword and sorcery mobile game from however many years back took a stripped down approach to this where every time you clear a chapter your max health goes down by one
also in case you missed this a few posts up:
still would love to see something take that approach from the ground up with a fully featured action game.
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i talked about this with someone who working on something like this based on a book he read. unsure what the book was called. its a veey interesting idea id also like to see explored proper for sure, curious how it could work. im guessing there would be bosses that youd face and theyd take away your powers one by one, but how would you make them all accessible without making it… uh, i guess, like, boring, like theyre all able to be reached with youre least amount of powers. the clear answer is to say they arent, and much like how these games have a percentage amount at the end to show how much youve cleared this game would need you to make the perfect route in order to reach all the bosses, or something. anti-thesis and perfect thesis of search action games tending to be like “go where ever you want but also there are a lot of bottlenecks”
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And when you cross that threshold of no return into the final unknown, the automap fails
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Extremely heavy handed metaphors like the lack of upgrades turning your hair grey, bosses being named Four Legs, Two Legs, Three Legs in that order, your longsword being downgraded to a walking frame, etc
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Oh is Jason Rohrer making this game now
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Damn I swear I almost included « you can get a wife who gives you 2x points but sometimes blocks your path »
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the last boss is the problems clown
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