The Big Catch: Tacklebox is a demo for an upcoming 3d platformer game, The Big Catch. Despite being only a demo, Tacklebox is closer to a prologue chapter, featuring a different protagonist and entirely distinct areas from the upcoming game! This free “demo” has so much content, that it’s practically an entire game in its own right.

In The Big Catch: Tacklebox, you are tasked with catching fish, who run around on tiny legs around ancient ruins scattered across a desert plateau. You can also collect coins/tokens, which unlock the final dungeon if you collect all 696 of them. Naturally, this is a bit like 3d platformer collectathons of the past, but part of what helps distinguish Tacklebox is that rather than scattering coins and fish around everywhere, they’re in deliberately chosen locations that are difficult to get to. While cleaning up some of the better hidden coins at the end of the game can be a bit of a pain, for the most part, the game focuses on only putting coins in locations that are a challenge to get to, so that they’re closer to optional challenges scattered across the game, rather than simply collectables for the sake of being collectible.

Continue reading →

Pseudoregalia is an indie 3d platformer metroidvania, a rare combination. And it has the best movement I’ve ever seen outside of a Mario game. It starts off a little slow, but quickly ramps up as you get the slide and wallkick powerups. The game is very short, I was able to beat it in only 5 hours.

Movement & Powerups

There are a number of optional collectibles throughout the game, augmenting your health, regeneration, or giving small buffs, but obviously the movement powerups are the only thing that really matters. Each of the movement powerups allows you to access new areas, but also just enhances the way you move through the game in general. Slide initially lets you slide under small gaps, but eventually gets upgraded into a slide jump that lets you jump across massive gaps, and even bunnyhop to maintain momentum.

Another powerup gives you 3 wall kicks, which push you away from walls if you kick into them directly, requiring you to use them carefully to scale walls. Eventually you get a ground pound, which lets you jump extra high by jumping as you hit the ground, like Mario in Odyssey, and if you jump at the start of the groundpound, you’ll do a backflip, which helps counter the momentum of a wall kick, raising you neatly onto a platform after kicking off of it. This is like the missing link in the movement that really helps it all fit together. Finally, there is a wall run, which is obtained last. It snaps onto walls reliably and generally feels pretty good to use.

Continue reading →

Note: I wrote this up 5 years ago and intended to publish it, but I guess it got lost on the cutting room floor. My bad!

In Witcher 2, you have 2 swords, steel and silver (for humans and monsters respectively), and 5 spells you can cast: Aard, Axii, Igni, Quen, and Yrden.

Aard and Igni are projectiles, dealing damage/stun on impact. Igni deals more damage and burns the target for damage over time. Aard knocks the target back, stunning them, knocking them down, or dizzying them, setting up for a 1-hit kill. Quen is a shield that will block 1 hit’s worth of damage. Axii will convert one enemy into an ally temporarily, but needs to be channeled over time and has a chance to fail. Yrden places a trap on the ground that will stun an enemy who steps on it, holding them in place until it wears off or they are hit out of it. There are upgrades to each of these, Aard and Igni gain range and area of effect, Quen can reflect damage back onto opponents, Axii buffs the opponents you control, and Yrden lets you place multiple traps.

Almost every enemy in the entire game follows a similar template, they run at you, do attacks straight ahead of them, will not rotate while performing attacks, sometimes block moves that hit them from the front, and you can get behind them to deal double damage to their back.

This means fighting enemies is generally a process of rolling around them to get to their backside and hitting them for as much as you can. This can be accomplished by baiting them into doing attacks and moving while they’re occupied. This method of play, rolling behind enemies to backstab them with Quen shields up, is how all the best players play the game, and encouraged by the game design on multiple levels.

Continue reading →

Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy (GOI for short) is the absolute limit of how far you can get with a single game mechanic. The only mechanic is moving around a hammer, attached to a man in a cauldron.
With this control scheme you can push and pull yourself along the ground, pull yourself up using holds, fling yourself, swing under holds, pogo to launch yourself, and so on.

This method of control is incredibly sensitive, and fiddly, but the game ramps up to requiring you to use it in extremely precise and demanding circumstances, at high risk of losing your progress.
GOI can be incredibly frustrating, because there are no permanent checkpoints, and many of the toughest challenges set you up to lose massive amounts of progress. Playing the game at all with it’s strange and difficult control scheme seems impossible, so redoing the incredibly precise tricks it has you perform can seem impossible.

Continue reading →

This is part of my 5×5 review series. I’m going to try to review every game in my 5×5, available on the About & Best Posts page. Photos courtesy of Dead End Thrills and gifs courtesy of CabalCrow from my discord.

Mirror’s Edge is one of my most-played games because I used to speedrun it. My best time was about 55 minutes, which isn’t that impressive, but in the process of learning to speedrun it, I learned a lot about what makes an interesting speedgame. I also had a massive amount of fun learning the various techniques involved in the game, from the easy to the hard, and refining my run.

On this blog, I define a game as a “contract” that the player agrees to play under, either a contract with themselves or other players, as in a multiplayer or co-op game. With this in mind, the game isn’t necessarily the software you play with, but rather how you choose to use it, and different players can play different games with the same software. Speedrunners are playing their own game with the software relative to everyone else. For that reason my blog doesn’t tend to focus on the “speedgame” for a piece of software, but rather the “canonical” game that represents more of the lowest-common-denominator idea of what the public thinks the game is, which is usually something closer to what the developers intended than anything else. What’s possible in the speedgame sometimes can influence the “casual” game (what speedrunners call the more default ruleset), but it’s very situational per-game. Continue reading →

Dead Cells bills itself as a Metroidvania Roguelike. It’s a 2d platformer, where you find randomized loot and fight through procedurally generated levels. You have 5 slots on your character for items: 2 weapons, 2 tools, and an accessory. Your basic options are to use your weapons or tools, jump, double jump, roll, chug a potion, ground pound, or generic use button.

Dead Cells’ big influence is from Metroidvanias, and I think the influence is definitely positive on the game, but I don’t think it’s really a metroidvania, and I don’t think making it more like a metroidvania would be good for it. Metroidvania is a design pattern across the entire map of a game’s world, where the map loops on itself, allowing areas from later in the game to fold back on areas from earlier in the game, where objectives are dispersed across this map to encourage unique routing. Despite technically not being a metroidvania, the level structure it chose for itself is still extremely effective in its goals.

Continue reading →