2D Platformers / Metroidvanias

Finished: Gestalt - Steam & Cinder

Short and easy steampunk kind-of-metroidvania that's heavier on pixel art and narrative than on substantial gameplay.

The pixel art is really good, it's certainly a pretty game, the soundtrack is pretty good too. There's too much story stuff for my liking, as there's a lot of dialogue, cutscenes and scripted scenes, and tbh I found it somewhat cliched and not very interesting.

Combat revolves around hitting with your flame sword, which fills up a mana bar of sorts which you can consume for special attacks or gunshots for the real damage, especially important against tougher enemies and bosses that take only chip damage from your sword. Evasion is done mostly through i-frame dodge-rolling forwards or backwards, but jumping is great too depending on situation. Healing is done via estus flasks.

There's an overwhelming amount of different attacks and combos you can unlock, but I found them mostly useless and forgot about most of them quickly because you don't ever need more than 2 or 3 basic attacks. All those attacks get their own animations, and it feels like they're not actually there for gameplay reasons, but because they wanted to make as many badass pixel animations for their character as possible.

The combat mechanics themselves are fine, but sadly it's let down by enemy design. They're really basic and repetitive, most notably 90% of ground enemies are safely disposed of with the strat "hit 2 times, roll through attack, repeat". Sometimes it tries to make things harder, but in haphazard ways--either some enemy spams projectiles all over the place like crazy, or you're suddenly bombarded with homing projectiles while trying to fight a basic one. It's just chaotic and doesn't feel well tuned by experienced players of challenging action games. And even if you get hit you can just heal through it, I think I died 2 or 3 times in the entire game, and only because I got impatient and careless.

Boss fights are pretty basic too and usually not much of a threat. Usually when an indie developer doesn't really know how to make a boss fight challenging or engaging, they typically just give it a million HP--and predictably, that's exactly what you get in Gestalt. But their attacks are mostly easy to evade and again, even if you get hit there's a lot of room for just healing through, so thankfully I believe I didn't have to retry any boss except the first one (when I didn't quite understand the combat and movement mechanics yet).

On the exploratory part, I said "kind-of-metroidvania" because it's all interconnected and you can return with newfound abilities (double jump, air dash...) to reach previously inaccessible places--however it's all optional, the main path through the game leads simply through one area after another, only to return to if you want to find all treasure and collectibles or want to complete all the optional fetch quests.

Credit where credit's due: you don't lose money or anything else when you die and so you don't have to pick anything up again where you lost it, I think that's a brilliant mechanic that more games should have.

Overall it's not a terrible game, but it is somewhat underwhelming. I wouldn't recommend it especially if you're looking for a challenge. If you are, from what I hear what you really want to check out is the also recently released Nine Sols.

6/10