Coming for that 4th medal!
01. Game & Wario (2013, Wii U) ★★★☆☆
In a series known for a deluge of micro-games, clocking in at just 16 mini-games feels initially disappointing, especially when some of them barely exceed tech demo levels. Bowling feels like a remixed version of Wii Sports, Ashley's mini-game is okay but feels like a 2012 mobile game, and both the Ski and Arrow mini-games are very similar to more fleshed out ones found in 2012's Nintendo Land. The multiplayer initially feels anemic too, with just 4 modes, including a much slower take on Monkey Target and an amusing, but unoriginal version of Pictionary.
It is telling how the game dramatically increases in quality when you play hectic modes like Gamer, a mini WarioWare mode which inadvertently highlights the general slower pace in this entire package. I also feel like the Charles Martinet soundboard was curiously underutilized, leaving the game weirdly quiet. This got addressed in the sequel (WarioWare Gold).
Luckily most modes are extremely simple to teach others, and the single player portion does offer some depth by having at least 3-5 levels of increasing difficulty for every mini-game. There's a bunch of weirdly hidden micro-games to unlock too, and it's interesting to see how the hectic Taxi mini-game feels like a blueprint for 2016's Star Fox Zero.
02. Untitled Goose Game (2019, Switch) ★★★☆☆
Short comedic stealth game in which you (a terrible goose) inconvenience and/or bully the citizens of a sleepy English town. The lack of a real fail-state means you're free to hatch endless mischievous schemes, and torment your subjects with ceaseless honking, without running the risk of being turned into foie gras.
Interactions do feel shallow: you quickly catch on to how the individual gears turn to keep the clockwork levels turning. Luckily there are some ways in which characters from one level can impact another, however limited. The basic distract-first-then-run tactic remains viable throughout, but the game knows not to overstay its welcome, and ends on a high note.
03. Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (2013/2019, Switch) ★★★☆☆
Essentially a co-op game with yourself, in which you guide 2 brothers through a series of perils in search of a cure for their ill father. You control both characters separately with a joystick each, leading to puzzles in which you alternate or coordinate their movement to progress. Unfortunately there's a solid hour of frontloaded uninteresting puzzles for solo players, which in co-op multiplayer would likely feel exasperatingly trivial.
Luckily the fantasy setting has a little more tooth than it initially lets on, and the game blindsided me with a quite harrowing scene of an NPC attempting to commit suicide. In these moments, as well as the very end, the story transcends its by the numbers setup. I was never truly invested, since characterisation is slim and neither brother feels very distinct. Saddling itself with a con-lang which requires overly dramatic pantomime did not help either. But it ends on an impressive sequence, successfully blending controls and story events, which I wish lasted just a tad longer.
04. Sine Mora EX (2017, Switch) ★☆☆☆☆
Feel really bad for disliking this shoot 'em up, given its humble XBLA roots and tiny development team. It punches well above its weight class in presentation: high fidelity polygonal models and backgrounds seamlessly merging into cut-scenes between missions and bosses. Those bosses are introduced with slick, slow-mo title cards, and have a unified style of gargantuan, interlocking machines.
Unfortunately the polished graphics directly clash with visual legibility: tiny rockets and missiles blend into the background, and incoming shots have glowing tails which obfuscate their exact hurtbox. The fact it enables screen-shake by default is another indicator it values presentation over gameplay in a precision-demanding genre. (Thankfully it can be disabled.)
Sine Mora EX takes some risks with the standard shoot 'em up template, most notably by replacing its health bar with a timer. Get hit and lose 5 seconds; kill foes and reach checkpoints to increase your remaining time. Not a bad idea in theory, since it forces an aggressive approach, which subsequently pushes you into dangerous situations. However, the game's auto-scrolling nature leaves you little control over the pacing: shooting foes down immediately or flying far to the right does not advance the levels any quicker. This means risky plays are not rewarded, while you wait for the level's scroll speed to catch up with your progress. Reaching bosses resets your timer, whether you had 1 or 100 seconds banked. The system does not work in the player's favour, only against them (unless you care about points I guess). Decoupling your slow-mo meter from banked seconds feels odd too, since it introduces both another (rarely dropped) collectible into the mix, and effectively introduces two separate, yet overlapping methods of time measurement.
Other risks it takes include attempting to merge bullet hell patterns with traditional upgrade collectibles. Few games do this, and Sine Mora reveals why: you will routinely lose 5+ levels of firepower to a single hit like in Gradius, but enemies continue to fire DoDonPachi style spreads at you while you're stuck with a peashooter. Bullet hell often games avoid de-powering you upon hits/death to reduce the time it takes to get back on your feet. Upgrade tokens aren't a bad idea prima facie, were it not for the laughably short invincibility frames. You can (and will) be hit twice by a single volley sometimes, and then again while scrambling for your upgrades, punishing you multiple times for a single positioning mistake.
For some, the presentation and story may save this game, but I found the overwritten #edgy dialogue and attempted hardboiled WW2-inspired plot a detriment too. It's functionally a revenge story: a gritty anthropomorphic pilot initially presents a Kill Bill list of targets, but never notes when he crosses off another target. All kinds of heavy topics are broached: from genocide and concentration camps to atom bombs, and one of the protagonists proudly gloats how he's blackmailed a rape survivor into doing his bidding against her will. This echo of her past abuse is meant to serve as her character motivation (since being part of a persecuted minority wasn't enough), reducing her agency to a result of victimhood.
Luckily the Arcade Mode cuts out the story (leaving only the sub-par gameplay), but it feels like the developers are most passionate about their fictional world. I truly hate to dunk on ambitious projects like this, which take risks with unusual mechanics, and invest heavily in story and graphics to draw in new audiences this genre desperately needs. But you have to wonder why this had to be a shoot 'em up, or even a game at all, instead of a comic book or animated short.
05. Judgement Silversword: Rebirth Edition (2001-2004/2022, Switch) ★★★★☆
An original cartridge of this game on WonderSwan Color is something of a holy grail for retro collectors, commanding a $1500+ pricetag. It's a perfect storm of a high quality, low quantity, very late release in a genre collectors love, onto a floundering Japan-only console. Platform holder Bandai made increasingly risky moves to keep their handheld relevant, which included the release of commercially available devkits (called WonderWitch). Essentially a homebrew project retrofitted onto an official cart by way of a competition, Judgement Silversword is one of very few shoot 'em ups on the system, and unlike many 'holy grails', happens to be the real deal, too.
Being a wave-based shooter which gradually evolves from Space Invaders into bullet hell is already impressive on the infamously underpowered CPU, but it cleverly turns limitations into mechanics, too. Shots come in fast, but if you hammer both fire types at once, your outgoing fire will cause slowdown, allowing you more response time. (Unfortunately this comes at the minor cost of risking a Repetitive Strain Injury.) It doesn't feel entirely balanced, with the Twin Shield boss in particular presenting a huge difficulty spike, but there's a robust scoring system which rewards risky plays and grazing shots.
Most of the WonderSwan games I've tried feel anemic at best, but Judgement Silversword earns its reputation and comes easily recommended at its digital price point.
06. Cardinal Sins (2004/2022, Switch) ★★★☆☆
Sequel to Judgement Silversword, released as freeware to WonderWitch owners. Remixes mostly unchanged assets and gameplay into a more thematic cohesive package, with levels themed around different deadly sins, and set to different solar system planet backdrops. Giving every level a unique goal is entertaining in a mini-game sort of way, but upon repeat runs heavily biases towards optimisation over personal expression. Some are just plain more interesting, particularly level 2 in which you save fellow pilots or get punished for shooting them down. Others however boil down to "kill the enemies quickly". Overall the game is still an achievement on the hardware, with less slowdown than its predecessor despite more variables and graphical backgrounds. But it never reaches the same adrenaline-fueled high as Judgement Silversword.
07. Eschatos (2011/2022, Switch) ★★★★☆
Spiritual sequel to its WonderSwan predecessors, with similar shot types and shield mechanics. However, this time its graphics look a whole lot better. There's still a cold and sterile feel to it all, and the paper-thin alien invasion plot is as generic as they come, but it leverages dynamic camera positions to establish a style of its own. The seamless switching between vertical and almost rail-shooter style angles works surprisingly well, turning dull flying saucers into gigantic, fearsome boss battles. Like Judgement Silversword it really ratchets up tension by compressing levels down into 20+ bite-sized chunks, and thus inherits the irritation of forcing you through 26 (short) levels if you lose to the final boss. Also a minor bummer they axed the way a floating 1UP would save you from a Game Over, that was a neat touch in JSS.
08. Pyre (2017, PC) ★★★☆☆
This arcade fantasy sports game within the framework of a visual novel feels like a real labour of love. You functionally perform the role of a 3v3 basketball coach in a centuries old underworld, reading the stars to discover where the next NBA Finals will be held. The twist: winning key matches results in the winning team sacrificing/promoting one player back to the surface world. On your path you cross other teams of mythological creatures (wyrm knights, ents, harpies, hellhounds) who you'll want to either keep below you in the rankings, or purposefully let win to share in opportunities for class mobility.
Having fallen backwards into the Supergiant Games catalogue, it feels unfair to measure Pyre up against Hades. Yes, a lot of overlap is obvious: extensive dialogue branching to accommodate player choices, themes of escaping an underworld, and a healthy dose of melodrama are found in both titles.
However, unlike Hades, Pyre feels less safe and mainstream. Without the familiarity of Greek myths, you're asked to accept lots of Proper Nouns, and buy into centuries of interpersonal relationships between archetypical characters. Pyre is also decidedly revolutionary. This sharply contrasts to Hades, which frames Zagreus' (re-)absorption into the in-crowd of the elite as a solution to conflict, rather than a co-option of rebellion. Meanwhile Pyre draws a similar character arc for The Voice, but condemns him for kicking away the ladder in a fuck-you-got-mine to those left behind. Your (Black coded) leader is not content with maintaining the socially stratified status quo, which banishes people for literacy, and dissolves prison sentences by way of sports competition. The different focal POV allows Pyre to speak on inherited class privileges, and argue for an upheaval of them by way of revolution.
The path to said revolution, however, is too long and winding. I feel it's only natural to harbour a certain suspicion of anyone claiming to have The Plan to a more equal society, which they are furthering through unseen messengers and helpers. Yet Pyre is curiously low on betrayals. If you win most Rites, the story also wraps up a little too neatly, with happy endings abound. There's a slight mismatch between its message of lifting up individuals as a community, but then needing just 6 leaders to change the minds of an entire society. Some interviews with Supergiant developers emphasised the non-violent nature of the sport. I commend them for trying their hand at non-combative conflict design, but there's some friction with its underlying revolutionary elements -- many elites do not relinquish their power over peaceful protests. Rather, they crush and co-opt opposition to consolidate their position in power.
Other tenets of the game design also runs counter to its message: there are strong, unpunished incentives to crush every opposing team, letting only your in-group partners ascend, rather than sharing the opportunity. In-universe it could be argued the rankings, the winner-takes-all outcomes, and the fact opposing teams aren't in on The Plan are the result of how the status quo was built to pit the downtrodden against each other. But these barriers disincentivise players to share the rare opportunities at freedom to anyone unaffiliated.
On a non-thematic level, the gameplay interactions never quite delivered for me. The sports matches are tense, but sometimes plodding due to a lack of basic options, like letting multiple players move at once. The visual novel segments break up the action nicely, but the length of the game results in some repeated story beats towards the end, and the writing is a bit too pre-occupied with its own mythology at times. I would much rather see a stronger ending, even if it means cutting a third of the campaign's length. The emphasis on branching choices would probably be served by shorter replays, too. Complaints aside however, I do admire Pyre 's ambitions - it feels decidedly unique, and wholly-formed. Recommended to a generous and patient audience.
09. Giga Wing (1999/2021, Switch) ★★★☆☆
When Toaplan fell apart, several shoot 'em up studios rose from its ashes, such as Raizing, Gazelle, Cave, and Takumi. The latter two produced arcade shooters for Capcom around the turn of the century, with Takumi heading up the Giga Wing series as well as Mars Matrix. This first Giga Wing instalment introduces a Bullet Reflect, letting you reflect big swathes of bullets back at enemies. It needs to recharge after use so cannot be spammed, challenging you to find the optimal route along which to detonate your devastating mirror blasts. I feared it would feel gimmicky, but the mechanic is deftly interwoven with score, and easily wasted if you misjudge.
Unfortunately it's also the game's chief strength, since its levels aren't terribly original. The art style has that typical late nineties futuristic military anime look, and the music is outright annoying. It all plays well, so still comes recommended - if nothing else because this is the first re-release since its DreamCast port 21 years ago.
10. Progear (2001/2021, Switch) ★★★★☆
Finally re-released in the Capcom Arcade Stadium compilation, Progear is Cave's first horizontal shoot 'em up. The eye-catching steampunk artwork is an immediate draw, and enemy designs have that Metal Slug quality of compact, intricate machinery to them. Controls are precise enough to squeeze between tiny gaps in the screen-filling bullet patterns. It's often cited as one of the easier Cave shooters, and it does have a more gradual difficulty curve, but I still died a lot before getting the hang of how to cancel enemy bullets.
I have some complaints: first, this predates Cave's habit of indicating your hitbox with a glowing dot, which makes dodging more precarious than it needs to be. Second, I'm not a fan of needing power-ups in bullet hell, regardless how generous the pick-ups are here. Third, putting 2 upwardly scrolling stages back-to-back in a landscape screen layout feels a little cheap, since you get less reaction time to dodge, and can't rotate your main fire vertically. Lastly, the music is not very interesting - like a series of Pokémon Gym Leader themes in a row.
11. Z-Warp (2022, Switch) ★★★☆☆
Perfectly fine little shoot 'em up. Crunchy pixel art depicts various intestines and organs you fly through, and it has a catchy soundtrack to boot. The chief gameplay quirk revolves around bomb management: their supply is endless, but it takes time to deploy them. Saving them for precise moments will make or break your runs. Biggest downside: it uses a single button for 2 modes of fire (tapping = wide spreadshot, holding = slower beam). I don't understand why this couldn't be spread across 2 buttons. I'm never not firing in shoot 'em ups, so constantly tapping for spread fire is a recipe for a Repetitive Strain Injury. The game's apparently only on Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch, so it doesn't seem like a hold-over from a Mobile port either.
12. Klonoa: Empire of Dreams (2001, Wii U - GBA VC) ★☆☆☆☆
The fourth Klonoa game is another puzzle-platformer, and iterates on the earlier WonderSwan release Klonoa: Moonlight Museum. New in this one are full colour visuals, hoverboarding, and some (very basic) boss fights. Most levels are slow paced, but loop in on themselves in satisfying ways. Less satisfying loops are found in the music: every world has just a single track looping endlessly, which gets annoying fast. Another annoying aspect is how you can lock yourself into inescapable situations quite easily by messing up a puzzle, which the game inelegantly solves by letting you freely reset every room in the game. With a deeply uninteresting Saturday morning cartoon story, this is one of those games which already feels forgettable while you're playing it.
13. Barrage Fantasia (2021, Switch) ★★★★★
Delightful little vertical shoot 'em up. Chunky pixels depict a fantasy setting where a magician and their animal familiar blast their way through dense bullet patterns. Levels are slightly longer than you'd expect, feature multiple bosses, and are broken into distinct (branching!) sections. The various familiars offer different play styles, there are some creative bosses (love the ghost train with piggies poking their noses out to throw bombs at you), a graze mechanic, and it has a robust training mode too. Wild how fully featured this is, despite its modest scope. It may not be very innovative, but it executes on its ambitions almost flawlessly.
14. Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water a.k.a. Project Zero: Maiden of Black Water (2015, Wii U) ★★★☆☆
A deeply flawed game plagued by bloat and excess, but which impressed me in spots nonetheless. Please note the below will reference suicide and suicidal ideation throughout, and the game does too.
Set near an off-brand Mt. Fuji, various characters are haunted by past traumas and present depressions. This leaves them vulnerable to being spirited away into the Aokigahara-inspired forest and to various occult shrines. Their only defence against the ghosts and spirits is a supernatural camera, iterating on the superstition that cameras can steal (pieces of) one's soul.
The result is an at times deeply oppressive atmosphere: you rescue characters from cliff sides in one mission, only for them to immediately get drawn to another popular suicide site. When these scenes work, they help establish a pervasive sense of of helplessness and inevitability. It's futile to pluck someone off the mountain and expecting them to be okay, without helping them establish a support system. There's a degree of comforting resilience found in these depressed people trying to function as supports for each other, but it's clear the center will not hold without addressing root causes.
In its best moments, Fatal Frame 5 takes cues from horror films and restricts your camera control. Some reveals come agonisingly slow, others are sprung upon you. Two levels feel like a take on Paranormal Activity, where you cycle through a dozen surveillance cameras, hoping to catch apparitions in time. Grainy VHS filtered cut-scenes are abundant, with a related mechanic which lets you Glance the final moments in life of ghosts you banish. The first person camera-as-weapon mechanic further ensures you only have limited visibility. Since ghosts can move through walls or appear behind you, you can be left flailing in the dark (especially when using motion controls), getting stuck against walls or objects while trying to train the camera at your assailant.
A cue it unfortunately does not take from film, is brevity. Clocking in around 18-20 hours is just way beyond what the scope of the game supports. There's maybe 6 areas tops which are interesting enough to pass through once, but backtracking occurs extensively, and almost every level is twice as long as it needs to be. Thematically I think they just about get away with having these characters retracing steps and going in spirals, but when the player is sprinting from encounter to encounter to decrease travel time between familiar sites, it indicates tension is lost. Some levels match the running time of TV episodes or in a few cases even outright feature films, but since the premise s already established they're effectively stretching a 2nd Act far beyond its breaking point.
Another aspect I don't love is how it flubs the theme of sexualisation. On the one hand, a pivotal character moment for Miu revolves around her being forced to pose in ways she's uncomfortable with to become a model, which is an effective and unsettling scene. But simultaneously, the game seems a little too enthusiastic about engineering scenarios to get its young female lead characters into pouring rain or half-flooded shrines, seemingly partially motivated so their white blouses become clingy and a bit see-through. It feels exploitative in the exact same way the game criticises, and this isn't even mentioning the bikini costumes removed in localisation.
There's other, lesser, complaints to be found too (particularly its imprecise movement controls), and yes, too many underdeveloped ancillary characters don't do its cohesion any favours. But if you can mount some empathy for worn out people, trying their best while flattened by the weight of depression, I think this game might resonate despite its many, obvious flaws.
15. Disco Elysium - The Final Cut (2021, Switch) ★★★★★
Might be coming in a bit high with that score since there are absolutely things about it which didn't entirely work for me. However, Disco Elysium is such an impressive execution on a cohesive vision, I can already feel minor frustrations being forgotten, while its strong initial impact remains. Using the premise of a drunk detective story allows the game to weave all sorts of shorter narratives around its all-too-familiar scaffolding. In a town where almost everyone could be a suspect, the writing is free to run the gamut from comedic to tragic, sometimes within the same interaction.
The world-building and sheer volume of writing are dense, but presented with a light touch of whimsy to not feel overbearing. Coupled with strong voice acting performances across the board allows for seemingly effortless characterisation to occur. Put another way to illustrate the quality: this is one of the rare games where I remember names and personalities of perhaps 2 dozen NPCs.
As a newcomer to C-RPGs, some things felt unintentionally vague though. Chief amongst them the Thoughts system, which lets your detective get various thoughts ranging from funny ("broadening your mind" zooms out the map by 20%), to useful ("expecting to fail at everything" heals you when failing skill checks), to outright useless (some seemingly have no effect without certain Skills). While learning the Thought, you usually incur some sort of penalty for X amount of in-game time. However, it was initially unclear to me those penalties were temporary; nor did I realise how completing a Thought would grant permanent results of some kind.
Since Thoughts and Skill both use a Skill point, the risk-averse player will probably prioritise Skills - especially since forgetting a Thought you dislike also uses a Skill point. Thematically this all makes sense, and it has to be this way: if your dude internalizes racist beliefs for instance, it would feel cheap to unlearn them without paying a price in literal life experiece. But I imagine folks who aren't interested in building a character will largely forego the Thought Cabinet entirely, even though its outcomes are worth seeing.
Another aspect I take mild umbrage at is how on the one hand the game seems to really respect the choices you make: it has contingencies for all sorts of outcomes, and decisions are often zero-sum where you commit hard to actions and roll with them. On the other hand however, the romance angle of the story is really difficult to not interact with, even if you have no interest in it at all. For a murder mystery game in which you can (BIG SPOILERS!) theoretically solve the case without ever investigating the body, this felt curiously restrictive. Not a deal-breaker by any means, but it's one of the few areas where the game didn't accommodate me pushing against it.
Overall though, this is a fantastic game. The writing cuts close to home at times, and called me on my bullshit at other times. It's not a game interested in easy answers, or even correct ones, but it will reward thoughtful interaction in spades. Now that the Switch version loads much faster, this has become an even easier recommendation. There's still a few bugs I ran into, including a hard crash at a particularly fraught moment, but if you play this game and focus on technical issues, it probably never connected with you anyway.
16. Streets of Rage (1991, Genesis) ★★★★☆
The neon-urban art style pairs very well with its Roland drum computer-esque club soundtrack to present one of the Genesis' most stylistically attractive games (that I've seen). Punch your way through 8 stages of fools in a fairly mindless but highly entertaining brawler. Enemy variety is on the low side, and it quickly starts recycling its (already annoying) bosses too. The pre-Covid surge of synthwave aesthetics helps this feel less dated though, in a roundabout way.
17. Robocop Versus The Terminator (1993, Genesis) ★★★☆☆
Gleefully violent 2D action game where Robocop has to stop Skynet or whatever. With a lot of varied weapons, a decently grimy art style, a booming 90s techno soundtrack, and absurdly loud sound effects, this makes a great initial impression. Blowing apart enemies and Terminators feels great, especially with nonsensical weapons like the shells which hover around you until you direct them (which feels like a bug turned into a feature). Unfortunately the game gets quite long in the tooth: the back half is very difficult and the bullet-sponge bosses don't help at all. Luckily this has a funny cheat code to give you extra lives (and the programmer's photograph). Very 90s.
18. Vectorman (1995, Genesis) ★★★☆☆
Late Genesis action-platformer which is often seen as Sega's answer to Donkey Kong Country with its pre-rendered sprites. For the hardware it looks very flashy (seriously, epilepsy warning in full effect here). The game has a similar attitude to DKC with regards to exploring nooks and crannies to find secrets, but plays closer to something like Mega Man. The whole thing feels very... weird and unpredictable, however. Pacing is all over the place, with levels usually ranging from 3-6 minutes, but a few of them just outright forget to have boss fights. Then there's a few 30 second levels where Vectorman tears up the dance floor of Saturday Night Fever, or moves across circular logs like Frogger.
It sees zero issue with stacking 2 water levels and an ice level back to back, but simultaneously does put in the effort to break up the street levels. Then there's that mid-nineties obsession with tornadoes, which derails another 2 levels. Even in terms of theming a lot of stuff doesn't make sense: we're in this Wall-E type story where humans have mostly abandoned Earth, but there's fruit crates everywhere, and even an operational bamboo factory (which I guess robots use???).
The unpredictability also extends to gameplay: there's power-ups all over the place with short, unpredictable results. Most enemies stay gone when defeated, but the annoying bugs do respawn, and given the size of the levels you're often left guessing where you need to go. All of this amounts to a very incoherent experience, which regularly seems to rewrite its own established rules. Luckily it's a breezy playthrough, and the constant changes juuuust manage to keep it interesting.
19. Mr. Driller 2 (2000, Wii U - GBA vc) ★★☆☆☆
Fine Mr. Driller entry, if a tad anaemic. The formula remains unchanged: drill down a Tetris-esque well of blocks & hope none of them crush you on the way down. With just 4 levels, 2 near-identical characters, a rehashed story, and a time trials mode there's not a whole lot here to do if you don't want to grind out collectibles. Sadly the levels are very interchangeable and don't leverage the India/Egypt/Nordic/USA themes at all. The last level is really difficult too. The voice acting surprised me for a GBA game though - it's surprisingly audible.
20. Mr. Driller: Drill Land (2002/2020, Switch) ★★★☆☆
The 5th Mr. Driller game, originally a Japan-only GameCube release, has the same problem all Mr. Driller games have where moving fast seems encouraged, but a slow approach is usually the safer route. However, it marks a significant jump in production values for the series. This time it has animated cut-scenes, a menu made to look like a 3D hub world, and multiple game modes iterating on the formula. Most of these modes aren't (pardon the pun) exactly earth-shattering, but the Tower of Druaga crossover feels like a very early glimpse at something akin to SteamWorld Dig. By no means an essential release, but it was a popular import at the time, remains eminently playable to this day, and cleans up nicely in HD.
21. Brave Tank Hero (2015, Wii U) ★☆☆☆☆
Slightly expanded port of the 3DS game, but the addition of 6 new levels might as well be considered a detriment. You ride around in one of three tanks in short bite-sized levels, blowing up enemy tanks and structures. Its cartoony visuals gesture at a semblance of personality, and the game attempts a single joke about a suspiciously often repeating mission objective, but there's not enough here to stave off blandness. Additionally, the game lacks basic options like rotating the camera, and can only muster a single, sedate music track to loop over and over again. As a result, excitement is entirely absent, leaving only monotony and boredom.
22. Mario Power Tennis (2004, GC) ★★☆☆☆
Fine but unspectacular arcade tennis game. There's a decent amount of gimmicks around, but not quite enough - you'll see the same stage hazards and super moves over and over again. Power Tennis mostly coasts on its presentation, with Camelot's best intro cinematic to date, and elements from contemporary games like Luigi's Mansion and Mario Sunshine prominently featured. But it's a bit too easy to find a good angle against opponents and exploit it over and over again, which reduces match variety despite its sizable roster. Last weird nitpick: why can't you pause during gameplay? I understand it's disruptive in multiplayer, but why not have the option in single player?
23. Super Mario Strikers a.k.a. Mario Smash Football (2005, GC) ★★★☆☆
The last of the four Mario Sports titles to hit GameCube feels less of a part with its golf, tennis, and baseball brethren. Strikers tries to push its style hard: from its angular key art to the novelty of kitting the familiar characters in sports attire, while elsewhere Mario still played third baseman in his overalls. Unfortunately a muted colour palette and generic soundtrack prevent the game from truly popping off the screen.
Then-up-and-coming studio Next Level Games used their NHL Hitz Pro experience to craft Mario's first outing on the pitch, and delivered a fast, chaotic, and uncharacteristically violent affair. It's not just the violence that's amped up here though: there's a weird, off-putting undercurrent of horniness to how it presents Princesses Daisy and Peach (not to mention Waluigi's infamous crotch chop). It's admirable how they inject more personality into the characters, but those two, along with the terrible new robot character feel like costly own goals.
Past its unique presentation you'll find a robust, if slightly anaemic game. There's a real dearth of modes here, and even the on-pitch chaos is lacking in variety (Bowser and some Mario Kart items are the only things keeping this from straight-up becoming FIFA Street). Luckily the core gameplay is solid and balanced enough, which, when coupled with gleefully pushing opponents into electrified fencing, remains entertaining throughout.
24. Yurukill: The Calumniation Games (2022, Switch) ★★☆☆☆
This is what happens when your preferred genre (in this case, bullet hell shooters) becomes endangered in the mid- and high-budget space -- you get suckered into buying odd genre mash ups in hopes of finding a mere morsel of shmuppery. In this case the kernels of space shooting are found buried beneath 8 hours of tropey "death game anime" visual novel sections (think Danganronpa), and simplistic escape room puzzles.
Do the genres blend? Only barely, if you squint. You move through a Yu-Gi-Oh! Season Zero style theme park where wrongly accused prisoners must re-enact their supposed crimes to the victims, who in turn may decide to pardon or kill the prisoner. These crucial decisions are decided upon in a virtual reality world portrayed as a space shooter (obviously).
The episodic nature and easy puzzles are something of an inadvertent boon here; none of the characters or stories are interesting enough to spend a lot of time with, so cycling through them at a rapid, predictable clip works in the game's favour. You'll still need to suffer through some unfunny comedic relief however, not to mention multiple skeevy implied relationships. There's an obsessed, stereotypical otaku fawning over his J-pop idol (who is meant to be 29 but dresses like a teen girl), and some implied, possibly romantic interest between a 31 year old and a 17 year old.
More broadly, Yurukill never really delivers on the menace of its premise, which I suppose is a fine summary for the whole game. That said, it is entertaining, albeit in a shallow, sloppy chum bucket kind of way. Sometimes you just want empty calories.
25. Strania: The Stella Machina (2009/2011, X360) ★★☆☆☆
Mecha themed vertical shooter from G.Rev, who (guess what), also worked on Yurukill. Closest modern analogue to this might be Astebreed. It's not quite style over substance as that one, but it gets close at times, with swooping cameras and big explosions obscuring your position. It's got a similar weapon system to Einhänder, where you dual-wield weapons and can mix and match. Bosses and levels become much easier with certain combinations. I like this in theory, but in some tight spaces it's too easy to accidentally lose your upgraded missiles for a useless third sword.
For a game heavy on memorisation they pull some nasty tricks: not all static pick-ups always contain the same weapons, and some attack animations of the final boss are so long they can trap you into 2 or even 3 hits. He's already a real bastard (who can kill you in what looks like a final cut-scene!), and while the game gradually doles out more continues, what you really need is a few more hitpoints. In the end I just brute forced him with dual rockets for maximum damage output rather than skillful dodging, which felt more like unearned relief than accomplishment.
26. Pocky & Rocky with Becky (2001, Wii U - GBA vc) ★☆☆☆☆
Very tedious top-down action game. Seven stages of recycled enemies, with the last two stages even dropping the minor maze elements in favour of straight corridors. Enemies respawn endlessly, so there's no point in playing skillfully when rushing and avoiding is actively rewarded. You have two moves and a special, but determining which move damages which enemy is left to trial and error. When it comes to bosses your choice is easier: only your shot is of much use against them. Melee doesn't swat away projectiles from bosses, and your special is disabled outright against them (so there's really no reward in saving it through a difficult stage).
The whole thing is mostly set to curiously low-energy music trying to evoke a traditional Japanese vibe, but sounding closer to 90s edutainment tunes. Even the dodgy translations aren't quite dodgy enough to earn a laugh. At least it's short.
27. Pocky & Rocky Reshrined (2022, Switch) ★★★★☆
Starts out as a remake of the SNES game, but soon deviates substantially. Reshrined is a lovingly crafted action game, with dense and detailed pixel art sprite work. If games never invented polygons this would be considered a graphical showcase. It plays excellently, with little slowdown even when the screen fills with bullets, and the expressive animations make new enemies a joy to encounter. It's not all great though: the storyline takes itself curiously seriously, with (too) long cut-scenes, and multiple(!) deus ex machina moments to undercut the slivers of tension it tries to invoke. There's also a rare miss with the level 6 boss fight, where the perspective makes attacks difficult to avoid. Lastly, it seems odd to lock the co-op mode behind a clear of the game on Normal. Not a big issue, but it means one co-op player will be more experienced than the other.
28. Tanuki Justice (2020, Switch) ★★☆☆☆
This isn't a bad game; in fact, I'd argue it achieves most of the goals it set out for itself, and shines in its level design. But as a big mark for retro run & guns with a mild PC-Engine vibe I came away disappointed. If this was a 1990 game, with its lack of auto-fire, memorisation-heavy stage design, and very slightly too short i-frames... I'd play it on the TG-16 Mini, crank up the turbo switch, and save state/rewind my way through the more annoying encounters.
However, as a retro throwback lacking in such luxuries you're left repeating encounters until you've either got them down, or have developed carpal tunnel syndrome. At least you can still pause the game, but daring to do so results in the game refusing to record your scores. This feels borderline contemptuous - I'm only pausing to give my thumbs a rest because there's no auto-fire, and the timer prevents me from idling in place. If the idea is to prevent people constantly pausing to see what's ahead... 1.) puzzle games solved that 30 years ago by blacking out the screen or hiding sprites when paused, and 2.) who cares when your game is already all about memorisation anyway?
This is a game you play on its terms, and those terms are strict to the point of it almost approaching rhythm game territory. You can't do things like blow up other enemies in the blast radius of explosions, or drop down ledges, or even progress sometimes without killing everyone - no pacifist runs allowed. A last nitpicky request, this game has decently tight controls, but what I really want is a way to combine locking my shot direction with a handbrake of sorts to stop movement dead when pressed. These sorts of annoyances wouldn't be deal-breakers by themselves, but they compound to make my primary memory of this game to be irritation, and it's extra frustrating since the solutions seem doable to implement (which I realise is easy to say as an outsider about a 1-man developed game).
29. Guwange (1999/2010, X360) ★★★★★
Slightly off-beat release from the shoot-'em-up darlings over at Cave. Set in Muromachi era Japan, you walk around rather than fly, meaning traditional level design rears its head, instead of the carve-your-own-path approach usually found in bullet hell. Additionally, you control both a character and can call upon a shikigami to cancel or slow incoming fire down. Keeping track of two sprites amidst the chaos, both of whom are controlled with the same d-pad, proved challenging at first. However, after a few runs everything clicked. This might be a weird retroactive comparison, but I'm playing Astral Chain concurrently, and the two are similar in this regard. Guwange's not the prettiest game by a long shot, and the music felt initially understated, but I've really come around on this one. It's quietly a masterpiece amongst Cave's already impressive roster.
30. ESP Ra.De. Ψ (1998/2019, Switch) ★★★★★
Stylish, Cave-produced bullet hell published in arcades by Atlus, which borrows heavily from contemporary anime with a character similar to Akira, vat-grown clones like in Evangelion, and even a nod at the cloaked tank from Ghost In The Shell. Here some teens with extra-sensory powers (hence the ESP) fly over a gritty city blasting people with psychic lasers. Said blasting is rather violent, due to the constant presence of showing the human cost of your destruction. Wailing enemies fall to their deaths from planes you shoot down, you blow up civilians in a mall, mow down crying clones of yourself by the truckload, and the human bosses perish screeching in agony amidst showers of blood.
An interesting approach is how picking different characters will result in a different level order, which means the developers had to balance the difficulty of the first three stages to work in any order. ESP Ra.De. also features a nuanced scoring system, with your secondary attack requiring more precision in exchange for way more points, and ways to prolong boss fights to milk more points from them. There's a lot of opaque subtleties to it, which, when coupled with things like hidden 1-Ups, imbues the game with a sense of mystery and reward for digging deeper. Very glad this finally got such a stellar modern port by the ever-excellent M2 STG, who went above and beyond for this one.
31. Espgaluda II -Be Ascension. The Third Bright Stone of Birth- (2005/2021, Switch) ★★★★☆
Yes, that's the actual title. Seeing Griffin play this last year left me curious, and yeah, they were right. It's a smooth, competent, and thrilling shoot 'em up, with a few too many opaque systems to be welcoming to new players. The Kakusei/Awakening state (a slowdown + bullet cancel) has multiple subtly different forms depending on the length of your button press, and changes slightly in every different version of Espgaluda II included in this package. I don't love assigning button press lengths to different effects in such a hectic game, and the entire mechanic feels weirdly divorced from your Guard Barrier (basically an auto-bomb). Combining both could make a more streamlined system, and introduce further risk-reward wagers. Fundamentally I'm not as interested in this fantasy aesthetic either. I'm not sure what happened in Espgaluda 1 to bridge Esp Ra.De.'s urban fantasy to this high fantasy/steampunk setting, but it costs the series its visual identity.
32. DoDonPachi Resurrection a.k.a. DoDonPachi DaiFukkatsu (2011/2021, Switch) ★★★★☆
Very complete compilation of all the DDP DFK versions. It's a military style bullet hell shooter, with aircrafts piloted by robots who look like anime girls (of course). Nothing too sleazy luckily. This game's skill floor definitely starts well above my pay-grade, I'm nowhere close to a full clear run without Continues. Luckily amateurs like myself are catered to in the Novice modes, and can even credit-feed our way to Secret Boss Hibachi (who I'm convinced is impossible) in the V1.51 version. Great game, but what a cruel 5th stage.
33. Cotton: Fantastic Night Dreams (1991/2021, Switch) ★★☆☆☆
The first Cotton game is a somewhat generic horizontal shoot-'em-up starring a little witch battling her way through 7 stages of fantasy creatures (evil trees, dragons, etc.) in search of… candy. For its time it does some occasionally impressive graphical work. I've never even seen a Sharp X68000, so I have a hard time contextualising it relative to the platform's overall output, but the slightly dark, cartoony look goes a long way. Unfortunately, much of the game is an unremarkable obstacle course buoyed mostly by visual charm.
34. Märchen Adventure: Cotton 100% (1994/2021, Switch) ★★★☆☆
Cotton's second outing is a partial retread of her first adventure. The lava stage in particular feels like a clone at times, but there are some cool bosses here like the possessed doll, a very anime final boss, and a mirror match with Cotton herself. The mirror stage feels like some technical wizardry on Super Famicom, faking real-time reflections, and foreshadowing its arc. The visuals are brighter here and veer further into Halloween decorations territory, but it works, and isn't encumbered by as much slowdown as other SNES shoot-'em-ups.
35. Panorama Cotton (1994/2021, Switch) ★★☆☆☆
A slight departure from the formula reinvents Cotton as a Space Harrier-style rail shooter on Genesis. The overall result is mixed: it's easily among the most impressive 16-bit rail shooters, featuring gorgeous graphics, only moderate slow down, lots of colours, occasionally slick scene progressions, and even voice acting.
The big, expressive sprites come at a cost though: Cotton herself simply gets in the way of where you want to aim, and can manufacture blind corners if you position her wrong. Depth perception is difficult to read at times, too. Another disappointment: the art style departs some of its Halloween decoration trappings in favour of exoticised depictions of several cultures. This includes a dubious depiction of a stereotypical Middle-Eastern mini-boss, and one stage end boss is simply a racist caricature of a Black man.
36. Cotton 2: Magical Night Dreams (1997/2021, Switch) ★★☆☆☆
City Connection's Saturn Tribute collection brought a functional Saturn emulator to modern systems, and Cotton 2 was first to get ported. Upon launch it apparently suffered significant input lag, but it feels fine post-patch. Both the Saturn and Arcade versions look great, with polygonal elements sprinkled between solid 2D spritework. Cotton herself moves slower than I'd like, and combined with the not readily visible hitbox, some bullet spreads become tricky to dodge between.
This means playing it like a traditional shoot 'em up is impractical: the game wants you to learn its fighting game style button inputs (double tap for speed boosts, hadouken inputs for stronger fireballs, etc.), as well as its grab mechanic which lets you catch enemies and throw them back out to achieve chain combos. Frankly, this is all a little more complex than I'd like. Yes, it sharply elevates the skill ceiling, and makes score chasing much more involved. But barring the last two stages, neither the levels nor the inconsequential (untranslated) story are interesting enough to make me want to commit to learning all the ins and outs hidden under the hood.
37. Cotton Boomerang: Magical Night Dreams (1998/2021, Switch) ★★★☆☆
Leaner, meaner iteration on Cotton 2. The fighting game style inputs are now doable with a single button press, the story has been reduced to a single screen next to stage-end scoring, and levels are overhauled to allow for more bullets. By stripping back the eccentricities Boomerang becomes perhaps more predictable, but also more focused. I would have preferred to play runs as a single character, rather than sets of 3, and the last stage has some bullet visibility issues. But by and large this was the best Cotton game of the classic era.
38. Cotton Reboot! (2021, Switch) ★★★★☆
Remake of the first game from 1991, which takes the opportunity to inject some welcome changes. Cotton's hitbox is now visible at all times, reducing confusion about when you're about to be hit, while also allowing them to up the bullet count since you can snake through shots easier. Gems are still present, but now refract your beams, introducing a risk-reward wager to leaving gems uncollected as long as possible to increase your firepower. The all-new Hyper ability slots in neatly along this design paradigm, showering the screen in huge multipliers and bonuses which partially obscure incoming fire – further upping the risk-reward nature. Some enemies do lose a bit of menace in this cuter art style, and it's still shackled to the original level design and story, but overall this is a clever remake, reviving the series with modern sensibilities in mind.
39. Cotton Fantasy: Superlative Night Dreams a.k.a. Cotton Rock 'N' Roll (2021/2022, Switch) ★★☆☆☆
What is meant as a series celebration, incorporating elements of all 8 previous games, winds up as a slightly forced office surprise party. Sure, it ticks all the boxes, but the entire affair has a disappointing hollowness to it.
Prime example are the rail shooter stages, an obvious homage to Panorama Cotton and Rainbow Cotton, which feature here as glorified bonus stages without a single foe to shoot down. Why even bother at that point? It's obvious these only exist to serve as past references. Similarly, the game goes to great effort to include characters and stages from Cotton 2 and Boomerang, but their presence mostly highlights the lackluster new bosses and somewhat generic new level themes.
A new addition is the cross-overs with other franchises. After guest-starring in Umihara Kawase BaZooka, Cotton gets to play host to the sushi chef this time, whose capture mechanic fits like a glove as iteration on Cotton 2. A less obvious addition comes in the form of Psyvariar Delta's ship, the bullet graze mechanics of which translate surprisingly well into Cotton's measured moments of bullet hell. These guest appearances are fun, but Psyvariar's accompanying stages mesh poorly with Cotton's already patchworky aesthetics.
Likewise, the presence of 6 characters with subtly different play styles is great, but there's only a single story to go around. Understandable in terms of not ballooning the production values, but this means the game cannot account for a storyline in which the villain fights herself in a series of mirror matches. Truthfully the game would be best served by excising the story entirely, as it's easily the series' worst yet, something the way too long (but thankfully skippable) cut-scenes and chirpy voice acting only further emphasize.
The biggest disappointment is how the gameplay ignores some progress made in last year's Cotton Reboot!. Where that game was always crystal-clear about indicating your hitbox, here some character sprites can partially obscure it, and the game curiously defaults to a confusingly labeled setting where it's not always displayed. Cotton Fantasy also eschews Reboot!''s chief innovation of gems refracting your shots. This was a great feature, because it made you choose between collecting gems, or leaving them uncollected to increase your damage output. In Fantasy, gems once again block outgoing fire, meaning you need to either collect or avoid them. With some stages basically demanding you use the homing lasers to cover incoming foes from behind, this results in the age-old shmup sin of counter-intuitively needing to avoid power-ups.
None of these complaints are deal breakers, and the game is perfectly competent (albeit very forgettable) in isolation. In context of the series however, it's frustrating to conclude last year's success isn't iterated upon. There's a real quantity over quality approach to this one, which partially smothers the series' recent progress, and reduces Cotton to an annoying guest star in her own game.
40. RayForce a.k.a. Layer Section a.k.a. Galactic Attack a.k.a. Gunlock (1995/2022, Switch) ★★★★☆
Port of the Saturn version of this shoot 'em up with many names. The main focus here is the TwinBee-esque dual-plane aspect, where your regular shot hits foes on the top layer, whilst your missiles can reach enemies on the ground. You paint over targets like in Panzer Dragoon. The more locked targets at once, the higher the score when you unleash your barrage. In some regards this game feels quite prescient, sitting closer to bullet hell than many of its peers, and distributing enemies to entice precise chaining of targets upon replays. Outside of some visual flourishes it's a little lacking in personality, but a few cinematic moments and a wailing synth soundtrack pick up the slack.
41. RayStorm HD a.k.a. Layer Section II (1996/2010, X360) ★★★☆☆
Sequel in which you, a representative of the repressive Earth Federation, must stop an attack from freedom fighters trying to gain independence. Priorities seem out of whack there, but okay. It's very standard genre fare, iterating on the multiple planes approach of RayForce. You still can't move the missile reticule separately, which once again serves to enforce proximity (and subsequently up the risk-reward factor). It's still satisfying to methodically carve the multi-segmented bosses apart, but RayStorm borders on the generic at times, despite being a competent execution of the formula.
42. King of Fighters: Sky Stage (2010, X360) ★★★☆☆
When they were still known as SNK-Playmore, SNK greenlit 2 shoot 'em ups based on their franchises. Both were developed by MOSS (the Raiden folks) and released in 2010 on PSP and X360 respectively. I haven't played Neo Geo Heroes: Ultimate Shooting, but this King of Fighters spin-off is a perfectly serviceable bullet hell. Several familiar faces from K.o.F. fly over fairly crude arenas, shoot down generic robots, and exchange quips before and after boss battles. There's very little to write home about here, but it's nice how dialogue and even bosses change a little per character, and all characters demand a slightly different approach. MOSS know their craft, even when working with very minimal resources.
43. Trizeal Remix (2005/2015, X360) ★★★★☆
Simple, well-executed vertical shoot 'em up, with some cute nods to classics like Space Invaders. You control a ship and cycle through 3 weapon types which can be leveled up individually. Key is to bring the right weapons to the right situations. In bullet hell adjacent games I usually don't love the R-Type thing of losing all your power-ups upon death, but here it results in hectically scrambling to reassemble a viable build if shot down amidst a boss battle.
The scoring system, which revolves around chaining enemies to grab medals of increasing points values, ensures a high skill ceiling and incentivises careful routing. The visuals (generic robots and drab environments) border on the ugly side, but the catchy tunes and addictive one-more-try nature of the game makes it easy to look past them.
44. Hazelnut Hex (2022, Switch) ★★★☆☆
Charming, pastel-coloured horizontal shooter in which you control the spoon riding witch Nat on her quest to restore breakfast to the land. The main draw here really is the presentation: the visual style pops, voice acting is good, the story is cute, and it has a really solid, upbeat soundtrack to boot. It may look cute, but there's some surprisingly dense bullet patterns, and the game rarely relaxes its pace (frankly, I wish it did). Make sure to toggle the hitbox on in the options, use plenty of charge shots to clear incoming fire, and don't be precious about saving up bullet cancels. One thing I didn't see in the options is a way to turn off boss dialogue on repeat runs, but that's a minor complaint.
45. Milk Inside A Bag Of Milk Inside A Bag Of Milk (2020/2022, Switch) ★★☆☆☆
Short, 20-minute psychological horror visual novel. Graphically quite sparse, with crunchy, low resolution JPEG-rotten still images which remind me of WonderSwan Color visual novels. The at times deliberately confusing writing leans through the 4th wall, which makes me think this could be a hit with people who are into Undertale or more general creepypasta stuff. It doesn't really grab me, but the way the short script touches on trauma (and how you can't magically heal it by being nice to someone) rings sincere.
46. Milk Outside A Bag Of Milk Outside A Bag Of Milk (2021/2022, Switch) ★★☆☆☆
Sequel with slightly bigger production values - gone are the still images, we get some animated scenes now. They're well done, but in a way I preferred the original where you didn't see the protagonist. The anime-adjacent character design leaves more room for separation, leaving this entry feeling less personal. The increased visual clarity makes it harder for the game to operate from a place of ambiguity, which necessitates a blunter approach. Rather than repeating the visual novel aspects of the first game, interactions in this one lean on adventure games instead. This makes it easier to reach different endings, which again costs the title some mystery. As with the first one, this isn't for me, but it's easy to see this appealing quite broadly.
47. Neo Turf Masters a.k.a. Big Tournament Golf (1996/2017, Switch) ★★★☆☆
Chipper golf game, re-released as part of the Arcade Archives Neo Geo series by Hamster. Excellent tunes, bright graphics, and simple, intuitive gameplay. Unfortunately all the courses feel almost entirely interchangeable, despite being set in Australia, Japan, the Grand Canyon, and Europe. I suppose a very generous read could interpret this as sly commentary on how the terraforming of distinct locales to fit the golf course aesthetic robs environments of their unique flora, but I highly doubt that was the intent.
48. Andro Dunos II (2022, Switch) ★★★☆☆
An unexpected sequel to Visco's horizontal Neo Geo shoot 'em up released 30 years later by Picorinne Soft. It retains the cycling through 4 weapon types of the original, but makes you strategise in which order to upgrade them to maintain a viable build throughout the run. It's easy to get baited into upgrading a single weapon type to max and point-blanking your way through the earlier stages, but this will bite you when enemies start surrounding you.
Andro Dunos II is an impressive facsimile of a somewhat generic, forgotten 90s shooter. The robotic designs aren't very memorable, but luckily an at times stellar soundtrack with several undeniable bangers injects some much-needed personality to the whole affair.
49. Missile Dancer (2021, Switch) ★★☆☆☆
Military themed vertical shooter from Terrarin's tiny team over at MoonGlass. You can't shoot enemies down directly, only their missiles. Taking out the choppers requires you to lock missiles onto them, RayForce style. It's not a bad gimmick, and the enemy patterns force you to, well, dance around their missiles. Unfortunately some projectiles are a little hard to see due to their white outline, especially in the first stage when they may appear over white clouds. Similar visual confusion stems from the brief black & white flash some enemies emit when shot down, which is easy to mistake for your own red & white flash when dying. This game also has a weirdly inverted difficulty curve: I can sail through the last 3 stages unharmed since my first try, but stage 3 keeps giving me grief. It has a strong finale, but it's clear the game kind of runs out of ideas before then.
50. Raging Blasters (2022, Switch) ★★★★☆
Big glow-up for Terrarin & MoonGlass! This is a fully-fledged TurboGrafx/PC-Engine calibre shoot 'em up, not unlike Blazing Lazers or an Aleste game, albeit with a simpler power-up system. The inclusion of a speed toggle seems a bit frivolous given the frenetic pace of the game, which rarely lets up. Power-ups don't have individual power levels, so you're often dodging power-ups to not replace the shot type you prefer. I have similar gripes with games from the era it's imitating, but although Raging Blasters doesn't reinvent the wheel, it's not a perfunctory tribute act either. Recommended!
51. Moon Dancer (2022, Switch) ★★☆☆☆
This Terrarin game (no longer credited as MoonGlass despite identical staff?) revisits the lock-on gameplay of Missile Dancer, but ditches its spartan presentation for one similar to the faster-paced and more colourful style of Raging Blasters. A good idea on paper, but lacking in execution thanks to a single mayor annoyance: a checkpoint system. Every death sets you back, de-powered, to a predetermined spot, rather than respawning in place. This was already annoying in the original R-Type, since it makes it less worth your while to take risks and score points to earn extra lives. As a result, this game becomes much easier if you avoid most enemies, which can't have been the point.
52. Citizen Sleeper (2022, Switch) ★★★★★
Easily the most pressingly relevant game I've played since Umurangi Generation, albeit not as (overtly) furious. Citizen Sleeper mixes elements of a sci-fi thriller with slice-of-life storytelling, which results in it being able to stack scenes of melancholy, light comedy, drama, and outright tension back-to-back with seemingly little effort. Your character is a Sleeper, a corporate-owned robot body operated by some poor, off-world soul's brain in a cryo tank. You've escaped company custody and are stranded on The Eye, a derelict space station held together by duct tape since another intergalactic megacorp went bankrupt. Your company's repo men want their property back, while you struggle to find food, and reliable sources of medicine to keep your mechanical body operational past its rapidly-approaching date of planned obsolescence. It's not difficult to read this as commentary on the realities of managing a chronic illness in a place where the equivalent of insulin is kept artificially expensive.
Gamifying poverty is a dicey proposition, since a game has to give you things before you can lose them, but said attrition needs to be maintained and drawn out before desperation can set in. After all: players die abruptly all the time in games, which ends the tension. I'm reminded of an example Austin Walker recounted in this short Salon interview. Basically a student game project was developed to simulate the balance sheet of a family in poverty. However, rather than furthering empathy, players instead walked away convinced they could "win" the game by balancing the books. Personally I think this might be due to entrenched beliefs about poverty being a result of laziness or bad individual choices, rather than systemic processes.
Citizen Sleeper manages to simulate such processes for a while, by making you manage Energy (i.e.: eating food, which costs money) and Condition (which deteriorates every cycle regardless). Starving means your Condition drops twice as fast, and a declining Condition results in fewer dice rolls you can make during a cycle. When you're spending money to stave off starvation instead of repairing your robot body, and spending your dwindling dice rolls on gig-economy jobs to earn slightly-less-than-dinner, rather than escaping your debt collectors... the downward spiral does begin to feel hopeless.
However, once you start making connections and forging deeper relationship, resources will quickly become a non-issue. I never died, and rarely faced real danger. Initially I felt like the game was letting me min-max my way out of poverty, which runs counter to the seemingly structural conception of poverty it otherwise espouses. On further thought however, this pivot feel authored: a central theme running through Citizen Sleeper is how people in communities will help each other, whereas trying to make it on your own is a pointless doomsday prepper esque fantasy, detached from the realities of quick onset and crushing loneliness.
The writing is easily strong enough to support this pivot away from lone survival towards fostering relationships and communities. The storylines are almost universally compelling, and often touching. Particularly great is how your choices or bad luck may permanently end relationships, and how helping people doesn't necessarily lead to desirable results down the road. There were absolutely people I regret helping, but also know it would run counter my character to leave their fates to chance.
It's not all entirely balanced, you can play the field of alliances more than makes sense. It's entirely possible to become embedded in the Yatagan gang and sell them corporate espionage on Havenage corp, but then run right around to sell intercepted Yatagan comms to said corporation, with neither party ever punishing you for it. In general, much of the game is surprisingly optimistic given its setting.
Citizen Sleeper is an incredible sophomore effort, and feels like a giant leap after the already excellent In Other Waters of two years ago. Sure, it's not very subtle, but keeping that Gundam meme in mind about fans missing the point if a setting is too aesthetically compelling, maybe it's not the worst idea to elevate subtext to just plain text.
53. Citizen Sleeper: Flux (2022, Switch) ★★★★☆
Citizen Sleeper's first (free) DLC expansion injects a much needed mid- to late-game challenge by finally centering the refugee flotilla bobbing along the edges of The Eye. Their (perceived) needs are many, time is short, and there are political forces which do not want to see refugees receiving aid. Perhaps I came in over-prepared or was just lucky, but I would have welcomed a little more pushback. The game has clearly set up a series of potential cascading failures, but if you get some lucky rolls it's pretty easy going if you give the storyline your full attention. A mild downside of the episodic structure is how this chapter feels like a lot of set-up, with only partial pay-offs. There are enticing mysteries, a few difficult to read characters, and if all goes well a thrilling finale, but it's mostly in service of delivering cliffhangers.
54. Citizen Sleeper: Refuge (2022, Switch) ★★★★★
Citizen Sleeper's second DLC expansion (again, free) really runs with the premise of Flux. Now you get to talk to the actual refugees, and the game wastes no time deconstructing the "refugees as a monolith" myth. There are wildly varying interests at play here, and the game sharply contrasts the fate of the Sleeper to those truly deserted in the periphery of yet another periphery. This expansion contains Citizen Sleeper's strongest writing yet, an irresistible mix of harrowing heartbreak, mysteries on top of mysteries, and tense situations with unpredictable outcomes.
Total: 54
01. Game & Wario (2013, Wii U) ★★★☆☆
In a series known for a deluge of micro-games, clocking in at just 16 mini-games feels initially disappointing, especially when some of them barely exceed tech demo levels. Bowling feels like a remixed version of Wii Sports, Ashley's mini-game is okay but feels like a 2012 mobile game, and both the Ski and Arrow mini-games are very similar to more fleshed out ones found in 2012's Nintendo Land. The multiplayer initially feels anemic too, with just 4 modes, including a much slower take on Monkey Target and an amusing, but unoriginal version of Pictionary.
It is telling how the game dramatically increases in quality when you play hectic modes like Gamer, a mini WarioWare mode which inadvertently highlights the general slower pace in this entire package. I also feel like the Charles Martinet soundboard was curiously underutilized, leaving the game weirdly quiet. This got addressed in the sequel (WarioWare Gold).
Luckily most modes are extremely simple to teach others, and the single player portion does offer some depth by having at least 3-5 levels of increasing difficulty for every mini-game. There's a bunch of weirdly hidden micro-games to unlock too, and it's interesting to see how the hectic Taxi mini-game feels like a blueprint for 2016's Star Fox Zero.
02. Untitled Goose Game (2019, Switch) ★★★☆☆
Short comedic stealth game in which you (a terrible goose) inconvenience and/or bully the citizens of a sleepy English town. The lack of a real fail-state means you're free to hatch endless mischievous schemes, and torment your subjects with ceaseless honking, without running the risk of being turned into foie gras.
Interactions do feel shallow: you quickly catch on to how the individual gears turn to keep the clockwork levels turning. Luckily there are some ways in which characters from one level can impact another, however limited. The basic distract-first-then-run tactic remains viable throughout, but the game knows not to overstay its welcome, and ends on a high note.
03. Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (2013/2019, Switch) ★★★☆☆
Essentially a co-op game with yourself, in which you guide 2 brothers through a series of perils in search of a cure for their ill father. You control both characters separately with a joystick each, leading to puzzles in which you alternate or coordinate their movement to progress. Unfortunately there's a solid hour of frontloaded uninteresting puzzles for solo players, which in co-op multiplayer would likely feel exasperatingly trivial.
Luckily the fantasy setting has a little more tooth than it initially lets on, and the game blindsided me with a quite harrowing scene of an NPC attempting to commit suicide. In these moments, as well as the very end, the story transcends its by the numbers setup. I was never truly invested, since characterisation is slim and neither brother feels very distinct. Saddling itself with a con-lang which requires overly dramatic pantomime did not help either. But it ends on an impressive sequence, successfully blending controls and story events, which I wish lasted just a tad longer.
04. Sine Mora EX (2017, Switch) ★☆☆☆☆
Feel really bad for disliking this shoot 'em up, given its humble XBLA roots and tiny development team. It punches well above its weight class in presentation: high fidelity polygonal models and backgrounds seamlessly merging into cut-scenes between missions and bosses. Those bosses are introduced with slick, slow-mo title cards, and have a unified style of gargantuan, interlocking machines.
Unfortunately the polished graphics directly clash with visual legibility: tiny rockets and missiles blend into the background, and incoming shots have glowing tails which obfuscate their exact hurtbox. The fact it enables screen-shake by default is another indicator it values presentation over gameplay in a precision-demanding genre. (Thankfully it can be disabled.)
Sine Mora EX takes some risks with the standard shoot 'em up template, most notably by replacing its health bar with a timer. Get hit and lose 5 seconds; kill foes and reach checkpoints to increase your remaining time. Not a bad idea in theory, since it forces an aggressive approach, which subsequently pushes you into dangerous situations. However, the game's auto-scrolling nature leaves you little control over the pacing: shooting foes down immediately or flying far to the right does not advance the levels any quicker. This means risky plays are not rewarded, while you wait for the level's scroll speed to catch up with your progress. Reaching bosses resets your timer, whether you had 1 or 100 seconds banked. The system does not work in the player's favour, only against them (unless you care about points I guess). Decoupling your slow-mo meter from banked seconds feels odd too, since it introduces both another (rarely dropped) collectible into the mix, and effectively introduces two separate, yet overlapping methods of time measurement.
Other risks it takes include attempting to merge bullet hell patterns with traditional upgrade collectibles. Few games do this, and Sine Mora reveals why: you will routinely lose 5+ levels of firepower to a single hit like in Gradius, but enemies continue to fire DoDonPachi style spreads at you while you're stuck with a peashooter. Bullet hell often games avoid de-powering you upon hits/death to reduce the time it takes to get back on your feet. Upgrade tokens aren't a bad idea prima facie, were it not for the laughably short invincibility frames. You can (and will) be hit twice by a single volley sometimes, and then again while scrambling for your upgrades, punishing you multiple times for a single positioning mistake.
For some, the presentation and story may save this game, but I found the overwritten #edgy dialogue and attempted hardboiled WW2-inspired plot a detriment too. It's functionally a revenge story: a gritty anthropomorphic pilot initially presents a Kill Bill list of targets, but never notes when he crosses off another target. All kinds of heavy topics are broached: from genocide and concentration camps to atom bombs, and one of the protagonists proudly gloats how he's blackmailed a rape survivor into doing his bidding against her will. This echo of her past abuse is meant to serve as her character motivation (since being part of a persecuted minority wasn't enough), reducing her agency to a result of victimhood.
Luckily the Arcade Mode cuts out the story (leaving only the sub-par gameplay), but it feels like the developers are most passionate about their fictional world. I truly hate to dunk on ambitious projects like this, which take risks with unusual mechanics, and invest heavily in story and graphics to draw in new audiences this genre desperately needs. But you have to wonder why this had to be a shoot 'em up, or even a game at all, instead of a comic book or animated short.
05. Judgement Silversword: Rebirth Edition (2001-2004/2022, Switch) ★★★★☆
An original cartridge of this game on WonderSwan Color is something of a holy grail for retro collectors, commanding a $1500+ pricetag. It's a perfect storm of a high quality, low quantity, very late release in a genre collectors love, onto a floundering Japan-only console. Platform holder Bandai made increasingly risky moves to keep their handheld relevant, which included the release of commercially available devkits (called WonderWitch). Essentially a homebrew project retrofitted onto an official cart by way of a competition, Judgement Silversword is one of very few shoot 'em ups on the system, and unlike many 'holy grails', happens to be the real deal, too.
Being a wave-based shooter which gradually evolves from Space Invaders into bullet hell is already impressive on the infamously underpowered CPU, but it cleverly turns limitations into mechanics, too. Shots come in fast, but if you hammer both fire types at once, your outgoing fire will cause slowdown, allowing you more response time. (Unfortunately this comes at the minor cost of risking a Repetitive Strain Injury.) It doesn't feel entirely balanced, with the Twin Shield boss in particular presenting a huge difficulty spike, but there's a robust scoring system which rewards risky plays and grazing shots.
Most of the WonderSwan games I've tried feel anemic at best, but Judgement Silversword earns its reputation and comes easily recommended at its digital price point.
06. Cardinal Sins (2004/2022, Switch) ★★★☆☆
Sequel to Judgement Silversword, released as freeware to WonderWitch owners. Remixes mostly unchanged assets and gameplay into a more thematic cohesive package, with levels themed around different deadly sins, and set to different solar system planet backdrops. Giving every level a unique goal is entertaining in a mini-game sort of way, but upon repeat runs heavily biases towards optimisation over personal expression. Some are just plain more interesting, particularly level 2 in which you save fellow pilots or get punished for shooting them down. Others however boil down to "kill the enemies quickly". Overall the game is still an achievement on the hardware, with less slowdown than its predecessor despite more variables and graphical backgrounds. But it never reaches the same adrenaline-fueled high as Judgement Silversword.
07. Eschatos (2011/2022, Switch) ★★★★☆
Spiritual sequel to its WonderSwan predecessors, with similar shot types and shield mechanics. However, this time its graphics look a whole lot better. There's still a cold and sterile feel to it all, and the paper-thin alien invasion plot is as generic as they come, but it leverages dynamic camera positions to establish a style of its own. The seamless switching between vertical and almost rail-shooter style angles works surprisingly well, turning dull flying saucers into gigantic, fearsome boss battles. Like Judgement Silversword it really ratchets up tension by compressing levels down into 20+ bite-sized chunks, and thus inherits the irritation of forcing you through 26 (short) levels if you lose to the final boss. Also a minor bummer they axed the way a floating 1UP would save you from a Game Over, that was a neat touch in JSS.
08. Pyre (2017, PC) ★★★☆☆
This arcade fantasy sports game within the framework of a visual novel feels like a real labour of love. You functionally perform the role of a 3v3 basketball coach in a centuries old underworld, reading the stars to discover where the next NBA Finals will be held. The twist: winning key matches results in the winning team sacrificing/promoting one player back to the surface world. On your path you cross other teams of mythological creatures (wyrm knights, ents, harpies, hellhounds) who you'll want to either keep below you in the rankings, or purposefully let win to share in opportunities for class mobility.
Having fallen backwards into the Supergiant Games catalogue, it feels unfair to measure Pyre up against Hades. Yes, a lot of overlap is obvious: extensive dialogue branching to accommodate player choices, themes of escaping an underworld, and a healthy dose of melodrama are found in both titles.
However, unlike Hades, Pyre feels less safe and mainstream. Without the familiarity of Greek myths, you're asked to accept lots of Proper Nouns, and buy into centuries of interpersonal relationships between archetypical characters. Pyre is also decidedly revolutionary. This sharply contrasts to Hades, which frames Zagreus' (re-)absorption into the in-crowd of the elite as a solution to conflict, rather than a co-option of rebellion. Meanwhile Pyre draws a similar character arc for The Voice, but condemns him for kicking away the ladder in a fuck-you-got-mine to those left behind. Your (Black coded) leader is not content with maintaining the socially stratified status quo, which banishes people for literacy, and dissolves prison sentences by way of sports competition. The different focal POV allows Pyre to speak on inherited class privileges, and argue for an upheaval of them by way of revolution.
The path to said revolution, however, is too long and winding. I feel it's only natural to harbour a certain suspicion of anyone claiming to have The Plan to a more equal society, which they are furthering through unseen messengers and helpers. Yet Pyre is curiously low on betrayals. If you win most Rites, the story also wraps up a little too neatly, with happy endings abound. There's a slight mismatch between its message of lifting up individuals as a community, but then needing just 6 leaders to change the minds of an entire society. Some interviews with Supergiant developers emphasised the non-violent nature of the sport. I commend them for trying their hand at non-combative conflict design, but there's some friction with its underlying revolutionary elements -- many elites do not relinquish their power over peaceful protests. Rather, they crush and co-opt opposition to consolidate their position in power.
Other tenets of the game design also runs counter to its message: there are strong, unpunished incentives to crush every opposing team, letting only your in-group partners ascend, rather than sharing the opportunity. In-universe it could be argued the rankings, the winner-takes-all outcomes, and the fact opposing teams aren't in on The Plan are the result of how the status quo was built to pit the downtrodden against each other. But these barriers disincentivise players to share the rare opportunities at freedom to anyone unaffiliated.
On a non-thematic level, the gameplay interactions never quite delivered for me. The sports matches are tense, but sometimes plodding due to a lack of basic options, like letting multiple players move at once. The visual novel segments break up the action nicely, but the length of the game results in some repeated story beats towards the end, and the writing is a bit too pre-occupied with its own mythology at times. I would much rather see a stronger ending, even if it means cutting a third of the campaign's length. The emphasis on branching choices would probably be served by shorter replays, too. Complaints aside however, I do admire Pyre 's ambitions - it feels decidedly unique, and wholly-formed. Recommended to a generous and patient audience.
09. Giga Wing (1999/2021, Switch) ★★★☆☆
When Toaplan fell apart, several shoot 'em up studios rose from its ashes, such as Raizing, Gazelle, Cave, and Takumi. The latter two produced arcade shooters for Capcom around the turn of the century, with Takumi heading up the Giga Wing series as well as Mars Matrix. This first Giga Wing instalment introduces a Bullet Reflect, letting you reflect big swathes of bullets back at enemies. It needs to recharge after use so cannot be spammed, challenging you to find the optimal route along which to detonate your devastating mirror blasts. I feared it would feel gimmicky, but the mechanic is deftly interwoven with score, and easily wasted if you misjudge.
Unfortunately it's also the game's chief strength, since its levels aren't terribly original. The art style has that typical late nineties futuristic military anime look, and the music is outright annoying. It all plays well, so still comes recommended - if nothing else because this is the first re-release since its DreamCast port 21 years ago.
10. Progear (2001/2021, Switch) ★★★★☆
Finally re-released in the Capcom Arcade Stadium compilation, Progear is Cave's first horizontal shoot 'em up. The eye-catching steampunk artwork is an immediate draw, and enemy designs have that Metal Slug quality of compact, intricate machinery to them. Controls are precise enough to squeeze between tiny gaps in the screen-filling bullet patterns. It's often cited as one of the easier Cave shooters, and it does have a more gradual difficulty curve, but I still died a lot before getting the hang of how to cancel enemy bullets.
I have some complaints: first, this predates Cave's habit of indicating your hitbox with a glowing dot, which makes dodging more precarious than it needs to be. Second, I'm not a fan of needing power-ups in bullet hell, regardless how generous the pick-ups are here. Third, putting 2 upwardly scrolling stages back-to-back in a landscape screen layout feels a little cheap, since you get less reaction time to dodge, and can't rotate your main fire vertically. Lastly, the music is not very interesting - like a series of Pokémon Gym Leader themes in a row.
11. Z-Warp (2022, Switch) ★★★☆☆
Perfectly fine little shoot 'em up. Crunchy pixel art depicts various intestines and organs you fly through, and it has a catchy soundtrack to boot. The chief gameplay quirk revolves around bomb management: their supply is endless, but it takes time to deploy them. Saving them for precise moments will make or break your runs. Biggest downside: it uses a single button for 2 modes of fire (tapping = wide spreadshot, holding = slower beam). I don't understand why this couldn't be spread across 2 buttons. I'm never not firing in shoot 'em ups, so constantly tapping for spread fire is a recipe for a Repetitive Strain Injury. The game's apparently only on Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch, so it doesn't seem like a hold-over from a Mobile port either.
12. Klonoa: Empire of Dreams (2001, Wii U - GBA VC) ★☆☆☆☆
The fourth Klonoa game is another puzzle-platformer, and iterates on the earlier WonderSwan release Klonoa: Moonlight Museum. New in this one are full colour visuals, hoverboarding, and some (very basic) boss fights. Most levels are slow paced, but loop in on themselves in satisfying ways. Less satisfying loops are found in the music: every world has just a single track looping endlessly, which gets annoying fast. Another annoying aspect is how you can lock yourself into inescapable situations quite easily by messing up a puzzle, which the game inelegantly solves by letting you freely reset every room in the game. With a deeply uninteresting Saturday morning cartoon story, this is one of those games which already feels forgettable while you're playing it.
13. Barrage Fantasia (2021, Switch) ★★★★★
Delightful little vertical shoot 'em up. Chunky pixels depict a fantasy setting where a magician and their animal familiar blast their way through dense bullet patterns. Levels are slightly longer than you'd expect, feature multiple bosses, and are broken into distinct (branching!) sections. The various familiars offer different play styles, there are some creative bosses (love the ghost train with piggies poking their noses out to throw bombs at you), a graze mechanic, and it has a robust training mode too. Wild how fully featured this is, despite its modest scope. It may not be very innovative, but it executes on its ambitions almost flawlessly.
14. Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water a.k.a. Project Zero: Maiden of Black Water (2015, Wii U) ★★★☆☆
A deeply flawed game plagued by bloat and excess, but which impressed me in spots nonetheless. Please note the below will reference suicide and suicidal ideation throughout, and the game does too.
Set near an off-brand Mt. Fuji, various characters are haunted by past traumas and present depressions. This leaves them vulnerable to being spirited away into the Aokigahara-inspired forest and to various occult shrines. Their only defence against the ghosts and spirits is a supernatural camera, iterating on the superstition that cameras can steal (pieces of) one's soul.
The result is an at times deeply oppressive atmosphere: you rescue characters from cliff sides in one mission, only for them to immediately get drawn to another popular suicide site. When these scenes work, they help establish a pervasive sense of of helplessness and inevitability. It's futile to pluck someone off the mountain and expecting them to be okay, without helping them establish a support system. There's a degree of comforting resilience found in these depressed people trying to function as supports for each other, but it's clear the center will not hold without addressing root causes.
In its best moments, Fatal Frame 5 takes cues from horror films and restricts your camera control. Some reveals come agonisingly slow, others are sprung upon you. Two levels feel like a take on Paranormal Activity, where you cycle through a dozen surveillance cameras, hoping to catch apparitions in time. Grainy VHS filtered cut-scenes are abundant, with a related mechanic which lets you Glance the final moments in life of ghosts you banish. The first person camera-as-weapon mechanic further ensures you only have limited visibility. Since ghosts can move through walls or appear behind you, you can be left flailing in the dark (especially when using motion controls), getting stuck against walls or objects while trying to train the camera at your assailant.
A cue it unfortunately does not take from film, is brevity. Clocking in around 18-20 hours is just way beyond what the scope of the game supports. There's maybe 6 areas tops which are interesting enough to pass through once, but backtracking occurs extensively, and almost every level is twice as long as it needs to be. Thematically I think they just about get away with having these characters retracing steps and going in spirals, but when the player is sprinting from encounter to encounter to decrease travel time between familiar sites, it indicates tension is lost. Some levels match the running time of TV episodes or in a few cases even outright feature films, but since the premise s already established they're effectively stretching a 2nd Act far beyond its breaking point.
Another aspect I don't love is how it flubs the theme of sexualisation. On the one hand, a pivotal character moment for Miu revolves around her being forced to pose in ways she's uncomfortable with to become a model, which is an effective and unsettling scene. But simultaneously, the game seems a little too enthusiastic about engineering scenarios to get its young female lead characters into pouring rain or half-flooded shrines, seemingly partially motivated so their white blouses become clingy and a bit see-through. It feels exploitative in the exact same way the game criticises, and this isn't even mentioning the bikini costumes removed in localisation.
There's other, lesser, complaints to be found too (particularly its imprecise movement controls), and yes, too many underdeveloped ancillary characters don't do its cohesion any favours. But if you can mount some empathy for worn out people, trying their best while flattened by the weight of depression, I think this game might resonate despite its many, obvious flaws.
15. Disco Elysium - The Final Cut (2021, Switch) ★★★★★
Might be coming in a bit high with that score since there are absolutely things about it which didn't entirely work for me. However, Disco Elysium is such an impressive execution on a cohesive vision, I can already feel minor frustrations being forgotten, while its strong initial impact remains. Using the premise of a drunk detective story allows the game to weave all sorts of shorter narratives around its all-too-familiar scaffolding. In a town where almost everyone could be a suspect, the writing is free to run the gamut from comedic to tragic, sometimes within the same interaction.
The world-building and sheer volume of writing are dense, but presented with a light touch of whimsy to not feel overbearing. Coupled with strong voice acting performances across the board allows for seemingly effortless characterisation to occur. Put another way to illustrate the quality: this is one of the rare games where I remember names and personalities of perhaps 2 dozen NPCs.
As a newcomer to C-RPGs, some things felt unintentionally vague though. Chief amongst them the Thoughts system, which lets your detective get various thoughts ranging from funny ("broadening your mind" zooms out the map by 20%), to useful ("expecting to fail at everything" heals you when failing skill checks), to outright useless (some seemingly have no effect without certain Skills). While learning the Thought, you usually incur some sort of penalty for X amount of in-game time. However, it was initially unclear to me those penalties were temporary; nor did I realise how completing a Thought would grant permanent results of some kind.
Since Thoughts and Skill both use a Skill point, the risk-averse player will probably prioritise Skills - especially since forgetting a Thought you dislike also uses a Skill point. Thematically this all makes sense, and it has to be this way: if your dude internalizes racist beliefs for instance, it would feel cheap to unlearn them without paying a price in literal life experiece. But I imagine folks who aren't interested in building a character will largely forego the Thought Cabinet entirely, even though its outcomes are worth seeing.
Another aspect I take mild umbrage at is how on the one hand the game seems to really respect the choices you make: it has contingencies for all sorts of outcomes, and decisions are often zero-sum where you commit hard to actions and roll with them. On the other hand however, the romance angle of the story is really difficult to not interact with, even if you have no interest in it at all. For a murder mystery game in which you can (BIG SPOILERS!) theoretically solve the case without ever investigating the body, this felt curiously restrictive. Not a deal-breaker by any means, but it's one of the few areas where the game didn't accommodate me pushing against it.
Overall though, this is a fantastic game. The writing cuts close to home at times, and called me on my bullshit at other times. It's not a game interested in easy answers, or even correct ones, but it will reward thoughtful interaction in spades. Now that the Switch version loads much faster, this has become an even easier recommendation. There's still a few bugs I ran into, including a hard crash at a particularly fraught moment, but if you play this game and focus on technical issues, it probably never connected with you anyway.
16. Streets of Rage (1991, Genesis) ★★★★☆
The neon-urban art style pairs very well with its Roland drum computer-esque club soundtrack to present one of the Genesis' most stylistically attractive games (that I've seen). Punch your way through 8 stages of fools in a fairly mindless but highly entertaining brawler. Enemy variety is on the low side, and it quickly starts recycling its (already annoying) bosses too. The pre-Covid surge of synthwave aesthetics helps this feel less dated though, in a roundabout way.
17. Robocop Versus The Terminator (1993, Genesis) ★★★☆☆
Gleefully violent 2D action game where Robocop has to stop Skynet or whatever. With a lot of varied weapons, a decently grimy art style, a booming 90s techno soundtrack, and absurdly loud sound effects, this makes a great initial impression. Blowing apart enemies and Terminators feels great, especially with nonsensical weapons like the shells which hover around you until you direct them (which feels like a bug turned into a feature). Unfortunately the game gets quite long in the tooth: the back half is very difficult and the bullet-sponge bosses don't help at all. Luckily this has a funny cheat code to give you extra lives (and the programmer's photograph). Very 90s.
18. Vectorman (1995, Genesis) ★★★☆☆
Late Genesis action-platformer which is often seen as Sega's answer to Donkey Kong Country with its pre-rendered sprites. For the hardware it looks very flashy (seriously, epilepsy warning in full effect here). The game has a similar attitude to DKC with regards to exploring nooks and crannies to find secrets, but plays closer to something like Mega Man. The whole thing feels very... weird and unpredictable, however. Pacing is all over the place, with levels usually ranging from 3-6 minutes, but a few of them just outright forget to have boss fights. Then there's a few 30 second levels where Vectorman tears up the dance floor of Saturday Night Fever, or moves across circular logs like Frogger.
It sees zero issue with stacking 2 water levels and an ice level back to back, but simultaneously does put in the effort to break up the street levels. Then there's that mid-nineties obsession with tornadoes, which derails another 2 levels. Even in terms of theming a lot of stuff doesn't make sense: we're in this Wall-E type story where humans have mostly abandoned Earth, but there's fruit crates everywhere, and even an operational bamboo factory (which I guess robots use???).
The unpredictability also extends to gameplay: there's power-ups all over the place with short, unpredictable results. Most enemies stay gone when defeated, but the annoying bugs do respawn, and given the size of the levels you're often left guessing where you need to go. All of this amounts to a very incoherent experience, which regularly seems to rewrite its own established rules. Luckily it's a breezy playthrough, and the constant changes juuuust manage to keep it interesting.
19. Mr. Driller 2 (2000, Wii U - GBA vc) ★★☆☆☆
Fine Mr. Driller entry, if a tad anaemic. The formula remains unchanged: drill down a Tetris-esque well of blocks & hope none of them crush you on the way down. With just 4 levels, 2 near-identical characters, a rehashed story, and a time trials mode there's not a whole lot here to do if you don't want to grind out collectibles. Sadly the levels are very interchangeable and don't leverage the India/Egypt/Nordic/USA themes at all. The last level is really difficult too. The voice acting surprised me for a GBA game though - it's surprisingly audible.
20. Mr. Driller: Drill Land (2002/2020, Switch) ★★★☆☆
The 5th Mr. Driller game, originally a Japan-only GameCube release, has the same problem all Mr. Driller games have where moving fast seems encouraged, but a slow approach is usually the safer route. However, it marks a significant jump in production values for the series. This time it has animated cut-scenes, a menu made to look like a 3D hub world, and multiple game modes iterating on the formula. Most of these modes aren't (pardon the pun) exactly earth-shattering, but the Tower of Druaga crossover feels like a very early glimpse at something akin to SteamWorld Dig. By no means an essential release, but it was a popular import at the time, remains eminently playable to this day, and cleans up nicely in HD.
21. Brave Tank Hero (2015, Wii U) ★☆☆☆☆
Slightly expanded port of the 3DS game, but the addition of 6 new levels might as well be considered a detriment. You ride around in one of three tanks in short bite-sized levels, blowing up enemy tanks and structures. Its cartoony visuals gesture at a semblance of personality, and the game attempts a single joke about a suspiciously often repeating mission objective, but there's not enough here to stave off blandness. Additionally, the game lacks basic options like rotating the camera, and can only muster a single, sedate music track to loop over and over again. As a result, excitement is entirely absent, leaving only monotony and boredom.
22. Mario Power Tennis (2004, GC) ★★☆☆☆
Fine but unspectacular arcade tennis game. There's a decent amount of gimmicks around, but not quite enough - you'll see the same stage hazards and super moves over and over again. Power Tennis mostly coasts on its presentation, with Camelot's best intro cinematic to date, and elements from contemporary games like Luigi's Mansion and Mario Sunshine prominently featured. But it's a bit too easy to find a good angle against opponents and exploit it over and over again, which reduces match variety despite its sizable roster. Last weird nitpick: why can't you pause during gameplay? I understand it's disruptive in multiplayer, but why not have the option in single player?
23. Super Mario Strikers a.k.a. Mario Smash Football (2005, GC) ★★★☆☆
The last of the four Mario Sports titles to hit GameCube feels less of a part with its golf, tennis, and baseball brethren. Strikers tries to push its style hard: from its angular key art to the novelty of kitting the familiar characters in sports attire, while elsewhere Mario still played third baseman in his overalls. Unfortunately a muted colour palette and generic soundtrack prevent the game from truly popping off the screen.
Then-up-and-coming studio Next Level Games used their NHL Hitz Pro experience to craft Mario's first outing on the pitch, and delivered a fast, chaotic, and uncharacteristically violent affair. It's not just the violence that's amped up here though: there's a weird, off-putting undercurrent of horniness to how it presents Princesses Daisy and Peach (not to mention Waluigi's infamous crotch chop). It's admirable how they inject more personality into the characters, but those two, along with the terrible new robot character feel like costly own goals.
Past its unique presentation you'll find a robust, if slightly anaemic game. There's a real dearth of modes here, and even the on-pitch chaos is lacking in variety (Bowser and some Mario Kart items are the only things keeping this from straight-up becoming FIFA Street). Luckily the core gameplay is solid and balanced enough, which, when coupled with gleefully pushing opponents into electrified fencing, remains entertaining throughout.
24. Yurukill: The Calumniation Games (2022, Switch) ★★☆☆☆
This is what happens when your preferred genre (in this case, bullet hell shooters) becomes endangered in the mid- and high-budget space -- you get suckered into buying odd genre mash ups in hopes of finding a mere morsel of shmuppery. In this case the kernels of space shooting are found buried beneath 8 hours of tropey "death game anime" visual novel sections (think Danganronpa), and simplistic escape room puzzles.
Do the genres blend? Only barely, if you squint. You move through a Yu-Gi-Oh! Season Zero style theme park where wrongly accused prisoners must re-enact their supposed crimes to the victims, who in turn may decide to pardon or kill the prisoner. These crucial decisions are decided upon in a virtual reality world portrayed as a space shooter (obviously).
The episodic nature and easy puzzles are something of an inadvertent boon here; none of the characters or stories are interesting enough to spend a lot of time with, so cycling through them at a rapid, predictable clip works in the game's favour. You'll still need to suffer through some unfunny comedic relief however, not to mention multiple skeevy implied relationships. There's an obsessed, stereotypical otaku fawning over his J-pop idol (who is meant to be 29 but dresses like a teen girl), and some implied, possibly romantic interest between a 31 year old and a 17 year old.
More broadly, Yurukill never really delivers on the menace of its premise, which I suppose is a fine summary for the whole game. That said, it is entertaining, albeit in a shallow, sloppy chum bucket kind of way. Sometimes you just want empty calories.
25. Strania: The Stella Machina (2009/2011, X360) ★★☆☆☆
Mecha themed vertical shooter from G.Rev, who (guess what), also worked on Yurukill. Closest modern analogue to this might be Astebreed. It's not quite style over substance as that one, but it gets close at times, with swooping cameras and big explosions obscuring your position. It's got a similar weapon system to Einhänder, where you dual-wield weapons and can mix and match. Bosses and levels become much easier with certain combinations. I like this in theory, but in some tight spaces it's too easy to accidentally lose your upgraded missiles for a useless third sword.
For a game heavy on memorisation they pull some nasty tricks: not all static pick-ups always contain the same weapons, and some attack animations of the final boss are so long they can trap you into 2 or even 3 hits. He's already a real bastard (who can kill you in what looks like a final cut-scene!), and while the game gradually doles out more continues, what you really need is a few more hitpoints. In the end I just brute forced him with dual rockets for maximum damage output rather than skillful dodging, which felt more like unearned relief than accomplishment.
26. Pocky & Rocky with Becky (2001, Wii U - GBA vc) ★☆☆☆☆
Very tedious top-down action game. Seven stages of recycled enemies, with the last two stages even dropping the minor maze elements in favour of straight corridors. Enemies respawn endlessly, so there's no point in playing skillfully when rushing and avoiding is actively rewarded. You have two moves and a special, but determining which move damages which enemy is left to trial and error. When it comes to bosses your choice is easier: only your shot is of much use against them. Melee doesn't swat away projectiles from bosses, and your special is disabled outright against them (so there's really no reward in saving it through a difficult stage).
The whole thing is mostly set to curiously low-energy music trying to evoke a traditional Japanese vibe, but sounding closer to 90s edutainment tunes. Even the dodgy translations aren't quite dodgy enough to earn a laugh. At least it's short.
27. Pocky & Rocky Reshrined (2022, Switch) ★★★★☆
Starts out as a remake of the SNES game, but soon deviates substantially. Reshrined is a lovingly crafted action game, with dense and detailed pixel art sprite work. If games never invented polygons this would be considered a graphical showcase. It plays excellently, with little slowdown even when the screen fills with bullets, and the expressive animations make new enemies a joy to encounter. It's not all great though: the storyline takes itself curiously seriously, with (too) long cut-scenes, and multiple(!) deus ex machina moments to undercut the slivers of tension it tries to invoke. There's also a rare miss with the level 6 boss fight, where the perspective makes attacks difficult to avoid. Lastly, it seems odd to lock the co-op mode behind a clear of the game on Normal. Not a big issue, but it means one co-op player will be more experienced than the other.
28. Tanuki Justice (2020, Switch) ★★☆☆☆
This isn't a bad game; in fact, I'd argue it achieves most of the goals it set out for itself, and shines in its level design. But as a big mark for retro run & guns with a mild PC-Engine vibe I came away disappointed. If this was a 1990 game, with its lack of auto-fire, memorisation-heavy stage design, and very slightly too short i-frames... I'd play it on the TG-16 Mini, crank up the turbo switch, and save state/rewind my way through the more annoying encounters.
However, as a retro throwback lacking in such luxuries you're left repeating encounters until you've either got them down, or have developed carpal tunnel syndrome. At least you can still pause the game, but daring to do so results in the game refusing to record your scores. This feels borderline contemptuous - I'm only pausing to give my thumbs a rest because there's no auto-fire, and the timer prevents me from idling in place. If the idea is to prevent people constantly pausing to see what's ahead... 1.) puzzle games solved that 30 years ago by blacking out the screen or hiding sprites when paused, and 2.) who cares when your game is already all about memorisation anyway?
This is a game you play on its terms, and those terms are strict to the point of it almost approaching rhythm game territory. You can't do things like blow up other enemies in the blast radius of explosions, or drop down ledges, or even progress sometimes without killing everyone - no pacifist runs allowed. A last nitpicky request, this game has decently tight controls, but what I really want is a way to combine locking my shot direction with a handbrake of sorts to stop movement dead when pressed. These sorts of annoyances wouldn't be deal-breakers by themselves, but they compound to make my primary memory of this game to be irritation, and it's extra frustrating since the solutions seem doable to implement (which I realise is easy to say as an outsider about a 1-man developed game).
29. Guwange (1999/2010, X360) ★★★★★
Slightly off-beat release from the shoot-'em-up darlings over at Cave. Set in Muromachi era Japan, you walk around rather than fly, meaning traditional level design rears its head, instead of the carve-your-own-path approach usually found in bullet hell. Additionally, you control both a character and can call upon a shikigami to cancel or slow incoming fire down. Keeping track of two sprites amidst the chaos, both of whom are controlled with the same d-pad, proved challenging at first. However, after a few runs everything clicked. This might be a weird retroactive comparison, but I'm playing Astral Chain concurrently, and the two are similar in this regard. Guwange's not the prettiest game by a long shot, and the music felt initially understated, but I've really come around on this one. It's quietly a masterpiece amongst Cave's already impressive roster.
30. ESP Ra.De. Ψ (1998/2019, Switch) ★★★★★
Stylish, Cave-produced bullet hell published in arcades by Atlus, which borrows heavily from contemporary anime with a character similar to Akira, vat-grown clones like in Evangelion, and even a nod at the cloaked tank from Ghost In The Shell. Here some teens with extra-sensory powers (hence the ESP) fly over a gritty city blasting people with psychic lasers. Said blasting is rather violent, due to the constant presence of showing the human cost of your destruction. Wailing enemies fall to their deaths from planes you shoot down, you blow up civilians in a mall, mow down crying clones of yourself by the truckload, and the human bosses perish screeching in agony amidst showers of blood.
An interesting approach is how picking different characters will result in a different level order, which means the developers had to balance the difficulty of the first three stages to work in any order. ESP Ra.De. also features a nuanced scoring system, with your secondary attack requiring more precision in exchange for way more points, and ways to prolong boss fights to milk more points from them. There's a lot of opaque subtleties to it, which, when coupled with things like hidden 1-Ups, imbues the game with a sense of mystery and reward for digging deeper. Very glad this finally got such a stellar modern port by the ever-excellent M2 STG, who went above and beyond for this one.
31. Espgaluda II -Be Ascension. The Third Bright Stone of Birth- (2005/2021, Switch) ★★★★☆
Yes, that's the actual title. Seeing Griffin play this last year left me curious, and yeah, they were right. It's a smooth, competent, and thrilling shoot 'em up, with a few too many opaque systems to be welcoming to new players. The Kakusei/Awakening state (a slowdown + bullet cancel) has multiple subtly different forms depending on the length of your button press, and changes slightly in every different version of Espgaluda II included in this package. I don't love assigning button press lengths to different effects in such a hectic game, and the entire mechanic feels weirdly divorced from your Guard Barrier (basically an auto-bomb). Combining both could make a more streamlined system, and introduce further risk-reward wagers. Fundamentally I'm not as interested in this fantasy aesthetic either. I'm not sure what happened in Espgaluda 1 to bridge Esp Ra.De.'s urban fantasy to this high fantasy/steampunk setting, but it costs the series its visual identity.
32. DoDonPachi Resurrection a.k.a. DoDonPachi DaiFukkatsu (2011/2021, Switch) ★★★★☆
Very complete compilation of all the DDP DFK versions. It's a military style bullet hell shooter, with aircrafts piloted by robots who look like anime girls (of course). Nothing too sleazy luckily. This game's skill floor definitely starts well above my pay-grade, I'm nowhere close to a full clear run without Continues. Luckily amateurs like myself are catered to in the Novice modes, and can even credit-feed our way to Secret Boss Hibachi (who I'm convinced is impossible) in the V1.51 version. Great game, but what a cruel 5th stage.
33. Cotton: Fantastic Night Dreams (1991/2021, Switch) ★★☆☆☆
The first Cotton game is a somewhat generic horizontal shoot-'em-up starring a little witch battling her way through 7 stages of fantasy creatures (evil trees, dragons, etc.) in search of… candy. For its time it does some occasionally impressive graphical work. I've never even seen a Sharp X68000, so I have a hard time contextualising it relative to the platform's overall output, but the slightly dark, cartoony look goes a long way. Unfortunately, much of the game is an unremarkable obstacle course buoyed mostly by visual charm.
34. Märchen Adventure: Cotton 100% (1994/2021, Switch) ★★★☆☆
Cotton's second outing is a partial retread of her first adventure. The lava stage in particular feels like a clone at times, but there are some cool bosses here like the possessed doll, a very anime final boss, and a mirror match with Cotton herself. The mirror stage feels like some technical wizardry on Super Famicom, faking real-time reflections, and foreshadowing its arc. The visuals are brighter here and veer further into Halloween decorations territory, but it works, and isn't encumbered by as much slowdown as other SNES shoot-'em-ups.
35. Panorama Cotton (1994/2021, Switch) ★★☆☆☆
A slight departure from the formula reinvents Cotton as a Space Harrier-style rail shooter on Genesis. The overall result is mixed: it's easily among the most impressive 16-bit rail shooters, featuring gorgeous graphics, only moderate slow down, lots of colours, occasionally slick scene progressions, and even voice acting.
The big, expressive sprites come at a cost though: Cotton herself simply gets in the way of where you want to aim, and can manufacture blind corners if you position her wrong. Depth perception is difficult to read at times, too. Another disappointment: the art style departs some of its Halloween decoration trappings in favour of exoticised depictions of several cultures. This includes a dubious depiction of a stereotypical Middle-Eastern mini-boss, and one stage end boss is simply a racist caricature of a Black man.
36. Cotton 2: Magical Night Dreams (1997/2021, Switch) ★★☆☆☆
City Connection's Saturn Tribute collection brought a functional Saturn emulator to modern systems, and Cotton 2 was first to get ported. Upon launch it apparently suffered significant input lag, but it feels fine post-patch. Both the Saturn and Arcade versions look great, with polygonal elements sprinkled between solid 2D spritework. Cotton herself moves slower than I'd like, and combined with the not readily visible hitbox, some bullet spreads become tricky to dodge between.
This means playing it like a traditional shoot 'em up is impractical: the game wants you to learn its fighting game style button inputs (double tap for speed boosts, hadouken inputs for stronger fireballs, etc.), as well as its grab mechanic which lets you catch enemies and throw them back out to achieve chain combos. Frankly, this is all a little more complex than I'd like. Yes, it sharply elevates the skill ceiling, and makes score chasing much more involved. But barring the last two stages, neither the levels nor the inconsequential (untranslated) story are interesting enough to make me want to commit to learning all the ins and outs hidden under the hood.
37. Cotton Boomerang: Magical Night Dreams (1998/2021, Switch) ★★★☆☆
Leaner, meaner iteration on Cotton 2. The fighting game style inputs are now doable with a single button press, the story has been reduced to a single screen next to stage-end scoring, and levels are overhauled to allow for more bullets. By stripping back the eccentricities Boomerang becomes perhaps more predictable, but also more focused. I would have preferred to play runs as a single character, rather than sets of 3, and the last stage has some bullet visibility issues. But by and large this was the best Cotton game of the classic era.
38. Cotton Reboot! (2021, Switch) ★★★★☆
Remake of the first game from 1991, which takes the opportunity to inject some welcome changes. Cotton's hitbox is now visible at all times, reducing confusion about when you're about to be hit, while also allowing them to up the bullet count since you can snake through shots easier. Gems are still present, but now refract your beams, introducing a risk-reward wager to leaving gems uncollected as long as possible to increase your firepower. The all-new Hyper ability slots in neatly along this design paradigm, showering the screen in huge multipliers and bonuses which partially obscure incoming fire – further upping the risk-reward nature. Some enemies do lose a bit of menace in this cuter art style, and it's still shackled to the original level design and story, but overall this is a clever remake, reviving the series with modern sensibilities in mind.
39. Cotton Fantasy: Superlative Night Dreams a.k.a. Cotton Rock 'N' Roll (2021/2022, Switch) ★★☆☆☆
What is meant as a series celebration, incorporating elements of all 8 previous games, winds up as a slightly forced office surprise party. Sure, it ticks all the boxes, but the entire affair has a disappointing hollowness to it.
Prime example are the rail shooter stages, an obvious homage to Panorama Cotton and Rainbow Cotton, which feature here as glorified bonus stages without a single foe to shoot down. Why even bother at that point? It's obvious these only exist to serve as past references. Similarly, the game goes to great effort to include characters and stages from Cotton 2 and Boomerang, but their presence mostly highlights the lackluster new bosses and somewhat generic new level themes.
A new addition is the cross-overs with other franchises. After guest-starring in Umihara Kawase BaZooka, Cotton gets to play host to the sushi chef this time, whose capture mechanic fits like a glove as iteration on Cotton 2. A less obvious addition comes in the form of Psyvariar Delta's ship, the bullet graze mechanics of which translate surprisingly well into Cotton's measured moments of bullet hell. These guest appearances are fun, but Psyvariar's accompanying stages mesh poorly with Cotton's already patchworky aesthetics.
Likewise, the presence of 6 characters with subtly different play styles is great, but there's only a single story to go around. Understandable in terms of not ballooning the production values, but this means the game cannot account for a storyline in which the villain fights herself in a series of mirror matches. Truthfully the game would be best served by excising the story entirely, as it's easily the series' worst yet, something the way too long (but thankfully skippable) cut-scenes and chirpy voice acting only further emphasize.
The biggest disappointment is how the gameplay ignores some progress made in last year's Cotton Reboot!. Where that game was always crystal-clear about indicating your hitbox, here some character sprites can partially obscure it, and the game curiously defaults to a confusingly labeled setting where it's not always displayed. Cotton Fantasy also eschews Reboot!''s chief innovation of gems refracting your shots. This was a great feature, because it made you choose between collecting gems, or leaving them uncollected to increase your damage output. In Fantasy, gems once again block outgoing fire, meaning you need to either collect or avoid them. With some stages basically demanding you use the homing lasers to cover incoming foes from behind, this results in the age-old shmup sin of counter-intuitively needing to avoid power-ups.
None of these complaints are deal breakers, and the game is perfectly competent (albeit very forgettable) in isolation. In context of the series however, it's frustrating to conclude last year's success isn't iterated upon. There's a real quantity over quality approach to this one, which partially smothers the series' recent progress, and reduces Cotton to an annoying guest star in her own game.
40. RayForce a.k.a. Layer Section a.k.a. Galactic Attack a.k.a. Gunlock (1995/2022, Switch) ★★★★☆
Port of the Saturn version of this shoot 'em up with many names. The main focus here is the TwinBee-esque dual-plane aspect, where your regular shot hits foes on the top layer, whilst your missiles can reach enemies on the ground. You paint over targets like in Panzer Dragoon. The more locked targets at once, the higher the score when you unleash your barrage. In some regards this game feels quite prescient, sitting closer to bullet hell than many of its peers, and distributing enemies to entice precise chaining of targets upon replays. Outside of some visual flourishes it's a little lacking in personality, but a few cinematic moments and a wailing synth soundtrack pick up the slack.
41. RayStorm HD a.k.a. Layer Section II (1996/2010, X360) ★★★☆☆
Sequel in which you, a representative of the repressive Earth Federation, must stop an attack from freedom fighters trying to gain independence. Priorities seem out of whack there, but okay. It's very standard genre fare, iterating on the multiple planes approach of RayForce. You still can't move the missile reticule separately, which once again serves to enforce proximity (and subsequently up the risk-reward factor). It's still satisfying to methodically carve the multi-segmented bosses apart, but RayStorm borders on the generic at times, despite being a competent execution of the formula.
42. King of Fighters: Sky Stage (2010, X360) ★★★☆☆
When they were still known as SNK-Playmore, SNK greenlit 2 shoot 'em ups based on their franchises. Both were developed by MOSS (the Raiden folks) and released in 2010 on PSP and X360 respectively. I haven't played Neo Geo Heroes: Ultimate Shooting, but this King of Fighters spin-off is a perfectly serviceable bullet hell. Several familiar faces from K.o.F. fly over fairly crude arenas, shoot down generic robots, and exchange quips before and after boss battles. There's very little to write home about here, but it's nice how dialogue and even bosses change a little per character, and all characters demand a slightly different approach. MOSS know their craft, even when working with very minimal resources.
43. Trizeal Remix (2005/2015, X360) ★★★★☆
Simple, well-executed vertical shoot 'em up, with some cute nods to classics like Space Invaders. You control a ship and cycle through 3 weapon types which can be leveled up individually. Key is to bring the right weapons to the right situations. In bullet hell adjacent games I usually don't love the R-Type thing of losing all your power-ups upon death, but here it results in hectically scrambling to reassemble a viable build if shot down amidst a boss battle.
The scoring system, which revolves around chaining enemies to grab medals of increasing points values, ensures a high skill ceiling and incentivises careful routing. The visuals (generic robots and drab environments) border on the ugly side, but the catchy tunes and addictive one-more-try nature of the game makes it easy to look past them.
44. Hazelnut Hex (2022, Switch) ★★★☆☆
Charming, pastel-coloured horizontal shooter in which you control the spoon riding witch Nat on her quest to restore breakfast to the land. The main draw here really is the presentation: the visual style pops, voice acting is good, the story is cute, and it has a really solid, upbeat soundtrack to boot. It may look cute, but there's some surprisingly dense bullet patterns, and the game rarely relaxes its pace (frankly, I wish it did). Make sure to toggle the hitbox on in the options, use plenty of charge shots to clear incoming fire, and don't be precious about saving up bullet cancels. One thing I didn't see in the options is a way to turn off boss dialogue on repeat runs, but that's a minor complaint.
45. Milk Inside A Bag Of Milk Inside A Bag Of Milk (2020/2022, Switch) ★★☆☆☆
Short, 20-minute psychological horror visual novel. Graphically quite sparse, with crunchy, low resolution JPEG-rotten still images which remind me of WonderSwan Color visual novels. The at times deliberately confusing writing leans through the 4th wall, which makes me think this could be a hit with people who are into Undertale or more general creepypasta stuff. It doesn't really grab me, but the way the short script touches on trauma (and how you can't magically heal it by being nice to someone) rings sincere.
46. Milk Outside A Bag Of Milk Outside A Bag Of Milk (2021/2022, Switch) ★★☆☆☆
Sequel with slightly bigger production values - gone are the still images, we get some animated scenes now. They're well done, but in a way I preferred the original where you didn't see the protagonist. The anime-adjacent character design leaves more room for separation, leaving this entry feeling less personal. The increased visual clarity makes it harder for the game to operate from a place of ambiguity, which necessitates a blunter approach. Rather than repeating the visual novel aspects of the first game, interactions in this one lean on adventure games instead. This makes it easier to reach different endings, which again costs the title some mystery. As with the first one, this isn't for me, but it's easy to see this appealing quite broadly.
47. Neo Turf Masters a.k.a. Big Tournament Golf (1996/2017, Switch) ★★★☆☆
Chipper golf game, re-released as part of the Arcade Archives Neo Geo series by Hamster. Excellent tunes, bright graphics, and simple, intuitive gameplay. Unfortunately all the courses feel almost entirely interchangeable, despite being set in Australia, Japan, the Grand Canyon, and Europe. I suppose a very generous read could interpret this as sly commentary on how the terraforming of distinct locales to fit the golf course aesthetic robs environments of their unique flora, but I highly doubt that was the intent.
48. Andro Dunos II (2022, Switch) ★★★☆☆
An unexpected sequel to Visco's horizontal Neo Geo shoot 'em up released 30 years later by Picorinne Soft. It retains the cycling through 4 weapon types of the original, but makes you strategise in which order to upgrade them to maintain a viable build throughout the run. It's easy to get baited into upgrading a single weapon type to max and point-blanking your way through the earlier stages, but this will bite you when enemies start surrounding you.
Andro Dunos II is an impressive facsimile of a somewhat generic, forgotten 90s shooter. The robotic designs aren't very memorable, but luckily an at times stellar soundtrack with several undeniable bangers injects some much-needed personality to the whole affair.
49. Missile Dancer (2021, Switch) ★★☆☆☆
Military themed vertical shooter from Terrarin's tiny team over at MoonGlass. You can't shoot enemies down directly, only their missiles. Taking out the choppers requires you to lock missiles onto them, RayForce style. It's not a bad gimmick, and the enemy patterns force you to, well, dance around their missiles. Unfortunately some projectiles are a little hard to see due to their white outline, especially in the first stage when they may appear over white clouds. Similar visual confusion stems from the brief black & white flash some enemies emit when shot down, which is easy to mistake for your own red & white flash when dying. This game also has a weirdly inverted difficulty curve: I can sail through the last 3 stages unharmed since my first try, but stage 3 keeps giving me grief. It has a strong finale, but it's clear the game kind of runs out of ideas before then.
50. Raging Blasters (2022, Switch) ★★★★☆
Big glow-up for Terrarin & MoonGlass! This is a fully-fledged TurboGrafx/PC-Engine calibre shoot 'em up, not unlike Blazing Lazers or an Aleste game, albeit with a simpler power-up system. The inclusion of a speed toggle seems a bit frivolous given the frenetic pace of the game, which rarely lets up. Power-ups don't have individual power levels, so you're often dodging power-ups to not replace the shot type you prefer. I have similar gripes with games from the era it's imitating, but although Raging Blasters doesn't reinvent the wheel, it's not a perfunctory tribute act either. Recommended!
51. Moon Dancer (2022, Switch) ★★☆☆☆
This Terrarin game (no longer credited as MoonGlass despite identical staff?) revisits the lock-on gameplay of Missile Dancer, but ditches its spartan presentation for one similar to the faster-paced and more colourful style of Raging Blasters. A good idea on paper, but lacking in execution thanks to a single mayor annoyance: a checkpoint system. Every death sets you back, de-powered, to a predetermined spot, rather than respawning in place. This was already annoying in the original R-Type, since it makes it less worth your while to take risks and score points to earn extra lives. As a result, this game becomes much easier if you avoid most enemies, which can't have been the point.
52. Citizen Sleeper (2022, Switch) ★★★★★
Easily the most pressingly relevant game I've played since Umurangi Generation, albeit not as (overtly) furious. Citizen Sleeper mixes elements of a sci-fi thriller with slice-of-life storytelling, which results in it being able to stack scenes of melancholy, light comedy, drama, and outright tension back-to-back with seemingly little effort. Your character is a Sleeper, a corporate-owned robot body operated by some poor, off-world soul's brain in a cryo tank. You've escaped company custody and are stranded on The Eye, a derelict space station held together by duct tape since another intergalactic megacorp went bankrupt. Your company's repo men want their property back, while you struggle to find food, and reliable sources of medicine to keep your mechanical body operational past its rapidly-approaching date of planned obsolescence. It's not difficult to read this as commentary on the realities of managing a chronic illness in a place where the equivalent of insulin is kept artificially expensive.
Gamifying poverty is a dicey proposition, since a game has to give you things before you can lose them, but said attrition needs to be maintained and drawn out before desperation can set in. After all: players die abruptly all the time in games, which ends the tension. I'm reminded of an example Austin Walker recounted in this short Salon interview. Basically a student game project was developed to simulate the balance sheet of a family in poverty. However, rather than furthering empathy, players instead walked away convinced they could "win" the game by balancing the books. Personally I think this might be due to entrenched beliefs about poverty being a result of laziness or bad individual choices, rather than systemic processes.
Citizen Sleeper manages to simulate such processes for a while, by making you manage Energy (i.e.: eating food, which costs money) and Condition (which deteriorates every cycle regardless). Starving means your Condition drops twice as fast, and a declining Condition results in fewer dice rolls you can make during a cycle. When you're spending money to stave off starvation instead of repairing your robot body, and spending your dwindling dice rolls on gig-economy jobs to earn slightly-less-than-dinner, rather than escaping your debt collectors... the downward spiral does begin to feel hopeless.
However, once you start making connections and forging deeper relationship, resources will quickly become a non-issue. I never died, and rarely faced real danger. Initially I felt like the game was letting me min-max my way out of poverty, which runs counter to the seemingly structural conception of poverty it otherwise espouses. On further thought however, this pivot feel authored: a central theme running through Citizen Sleeper is how people in communities will help each other, whereas trying to make it on your own is a pointless doomsday prepper esque fantasy, detached from the realities of quick onset and crushing loneliness.
The writing is easily strong enough to support this pivot away from lone survival towards fostering relationships and communities. The storylines are almost universally compelling, and often touching. Particularly great is how your choices or bad luck may permanently end relationships, and how helping people doesn't necessarily lead to desirable results down the road. There were absolutely people I regret helping, but also know it would run counter my character to leave their fates to chance.
It's not all entirely balanced, you can play the field of alliances more than makes sense. It's entirely possible to become embedded in the Yatagan gang and sell them corporate espionage on Havenage corp, but then run right around to sell intercepted Yatagan comms to said corporation, with neither party ever punishing you for it. In general, much of the game is surprisingly optimistic given its setting.
Citizen Sleeper is an incredible sophomore effort, and feels like a giant leap after the already excellent In Other Waters of two years ago. Sure, it's not very subtle, but keeping that Gundam meme in mind about fans missing the point if a setting is too aesthetically compelling, maybe it's not the worst idea to elevate subtext to just plain text.
53. Citizen Sleeper: Flux (2022, Switch) ★★★★☆
Citizen Sleeper's first (free) DLC expansion injects a much needed mid- to late-game challenge by finally centering the refugee flotilla bobbing along the edges of The Eye. Their (perceived) needs are many, time is short, and there are political forces which do not want to see refugees receiving aid. Perhaps I came in over-prepared or was just lucky, but I would have welcomed a little more pushback. The game has clearly set up a series of potential cascading failures, but if you get some lucky rolls it's pretty easy going if you give the storyline your full attention. A mild downside of the episodic structure is how this chapter feels like a lot of set-up, with only partial pay-offs. There are enticing mysteries, a few difficult to read characters, and if all goes well a thrilling finale, but it's mostly in service of delivering cliffhangers.
54. Citizen Sleeper: Refuge (2022, Switch) ★★★★★
Citizen Sleeper's second DLC expansion (again, free) really runs with the premise of Flux. Now you get to talk to the actual refugees, and the game wastes no time deconstructing the "refugees as a monolith" myth. There are wildly varying interests at play here, and the game sharply contrasts the fate of the Sleeper to those truly deserted in the periphery of yet another periphery. This expansion contains Citizen Sleeper's strongest writing yet, an irresistible mix of harrowing heartbreak, mysteries on top of mysteries, and tense situations with unpredictable outcomes.
Total: 54
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