The game is really good and it takes all of like a minute to remap the buttons.
Thanks guys. Good tip on the controls.
I discovered it’s also on PC game pass so I installed it there and changed the controls. Attack to X, jump to A and magic to B.
There were no separate volume controls for sound and music so I just turned the sound to zero.
It’s pretty good so far I like it!
I think I saw one air combo in there and then the rest was 2D Soulslike. Let us know if it’s any good, but I think I’m already tapped out for the year.
I’m in a classic metroidvania mood these days so I’m playing the Metroid Prime Trilogy on Dolphin with PrimeHack. It looks and plays magnificently compared to the old Wii versions. It’s basically Super Metroid in 3D. You know a game is good when you have to do so much tedious backtracking to progress, solve difficult puzzles and fight sometimes ball-bustlingly hard bosses and yet you STILL want to continue. I can’t believe I’ve never played these games before. I can understand why the metroidvania formula is so popular, even today, when you had games like the Metroid series that started it all.
Prime is, depending on my mood, my favorite game of that greatest of console generations. It’s so good.
I went back to Deedlit and wound up blowing through the whole game in a couple of sessions. Really enjoyable overall! I wouldn’t put it in the top tier of the genre, but a very solid 8/10-ish entry that will scratch the SotN itch in particular. The main new mechanic is a polarity-switching power that changes between wind and fire, letting you ignore attacks of that type and powering up your own attacks, and that gets used in some fun ways.
Check out the developer Team Ladybug’s other Metroidvania Touhou Luna Nights, also on Game Pass. That game uses a lot of time stop/slowing and has some shoot em mechanics where if you get close to an enemy or bullet without getting hit you heal, or if you do it while time is stopped you regain MP. I liked Deedlit more but it’s also a neat little game.
Yeah, I don’t know much about Touhou, but I loved Luna Nights, and it has a lot of shmup adjacent flavor. Like a lot of these indies, it’s a little on the short side compared to the mainline Metroid/Bloodstained games, but it has some really satisfying combat mechanics.
Finally played Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth. It’s pretty great. As noted, the main gimmick is flipping between 2 modes Ikaruga-style. Most enemy projectiles are one or the other, so managing these modes makes you mostly able to ignore projectile fire. There are a couple other gimmicks, like the ability to attack in any of 8 directions, and the ability to hover in place, but these arent really used much.
It also has absolutely gorgeous pixel art. It’s not retro, just beautiful detailed sprites. and has no problem doling out enormous sprites that fill the whole screen. It does this more than Luna Nights did, and it’s a great trick.
The down sides are that it’s fairly short and fairly linear, and depending on your POV, fairly easy.
Team Ladybug hits a perfect sweet spot of difficulty for me. They do archetypical 2d boss attack patterns, and I feel like they’re tuned so that they are telegraphed just enough and they’re just demanding enough that they seem impossible at first, but you can totally figure then out after a dozen or so attempts. Both Ladybug games have also had interesting defensive options that you can really learn to exploit, but aren’t overpowered (time stop or the color phases). I beat Deedlit without ever using a healing item, which isn’t something I can say about most Castlevanias, let alone something like Hollow Knight.
I wish there was a little more of it, but it’s a wonderful game.
Thanks to this dusty old post I picked up La-Mulana (the first) with my Microsoft points for this month. I have only barely begun, but thanks to advice I am reading the manual. They made this as an homage to poorly-translated manuals of the NES days, right? It’s a gag…right?
La Mulana 1 is thought. But yes, the game is about discovering what it’s about, so the manual is obscure.
But I think the game is a little too obscure for it’s own good. La Mulana 2 does a much better job of onboarding you towards what the game really wants you to do. Things spike too early in the first game imho.
As for homage, not even NES, the game is clearly an homage to Maze of Galious and other proto-Metroidvanias like Maze of Galius, and other MSX games in general, which are certainly even more obtuse than NES games of that era.
I was mainly thinking of the absolutely egregious engrish in the manual, but yeah you have I hope very appropriately calibrated my expectations to not have my hand held…at all.
I’d say LA MULANA is not a game I’d qualify as a Metroidvania.
But please try to stick with it for a while, although incredibly punitive it may seem at first. Even if you don’t finish it.
It’s a shame about the Engrish though. And I don’t think it is on purpose: the translations of some achievements of Steam lead me to believe the translation was handled… precariously.
I love it. If it’s not on purpose I love it ten times as much.
I played Ender Lilies, It’s an interesting game. Very much of its time (it has hints of Dark Souls / Hollow Knight influence, without actually being very similar to either).
It’s very pretty, the artwork having almost a Vanillaware style, but still plays very nicely. It is, for the most part, surprisingly user-friendly for a Metrovania. You get fast travel and double jump almost immediately, and there’s basically no death penalty other than warping back to your last save point, meaning that any items you retrieved or levers you pulled stay pulled even if you die immediately after. The map also tags rooms as being complete or incomplete, so it cuts a fair amount of backtrack/search. It could do a little more there (there are 3 kinds of locks, and it while it tells you there’s items in the room, it doesn’t flag which kinds of locks are in which room, which means when you get a new key, there’s potentially a lot of searching to figure out where to go), but overall, it feels quite user-friendly for a game with such an oppressive mood.
I also played Lost Ruins, which isn’t quite a metrovania. It has the standard 2d combat / platforming, progression and relics and things, but it calls itself a “survival action” game, and the gimmick is that there’s a bunch of different kinds of status effects and terrains that come into play, and you accumulate a lot of items to manage those. Mostly just healing / mana, but there’s also things like bleeding oily, on-fire, or wet, and each of those can interact, like ointment cures bleed, but makes you oily, which makes you more susceptible for fire damage. Overall, its a gimmick that doesn’t quite pay off (you don’t really need to engage with it that much), but its a neat little game apparently made by a single developer. It also does the very Castlevania thing where when you beat it, you get a boss character mode where you play as a combination of 3 bosses that you flip between.
Ultros, the psychedelic metroidvania, getting some good reviews.