PixlBit

Had a half-day to play. My wacky weekend is Tues/Wed this week. 

Infernax: This is very inspired by Castlevania. I think it's done very well too. I like the music and the pixelated graphical effects like rain on one level. It even has some cheap damage moments like the old side-scrollers. I noticed that this harkens back to even before true scrolling. I mean, it scrolls for a little while but then it ends and you have to walk off the screen to get to the next area. At times, this can cause you to take some damage. 

You can buy equipment and give yourself new abilities with the XP you collect from killing enemies. You can pick up side missions too along the way if you talk to NPCs.

I enjoyed it but didn't stick with it. On the easiest mode, you respawn close to your death spot but it was beginning to remind me of Ghouls 'N Ghosts in the way it became difficult to avoid taking damage, especially with this one miniboss I came across in a barn. What's a necromancer doing in a barn anyway?

Aerial Knight's Never Yield: I think this is kind of an endless runner game that scrolls left-to-right. You just hit the d-pad in a direction when an obstacle appears in your way. It's basically a parkour game. You're leaping over fences and cars and such. I really didn't take to it at all and stopped pretty quickly. It was a Games with Gold freebie. 

Slime Rancher: Revisited this because of Island Saver. Island Saver is so similar to Slime Rancher, I don't know how they got away with it. But, that's a good thing because I loved Island Saver. However, in Slime Rancher, after corralling various slime and harvesting them of their valuable poop, I got a little bit tired of it. The world is pretty big and I found myself dashing all over the place trying to find the right materials to satisfy the mission machine. Farming is a chore, even if it is with cute slime. 

Kentucky Route Zero-TV Edition: A Game Pass game. New this month. It's reminiscent of Zork in that you get lines of text and have to make choices to proceed. It has a good amount of graphics though and you do move a character around and drive a truck albeit, in a very simple, but also stylish, designed world. Characters look close to stick figures most of the time. Overall it does look very interesting though. 

The story, and this is mostly about the story, is delivered in a very cryptic and indirect way. You have a task to do but everyone you meet is misdirecting you, or distracting you with their own problems. Their stories are interesting but I began to wonder where it was all going. I couldn't tell if my character was dreaming, or alive and surrounded by ghosts, or insane, or in a play or what. I guess that was the point but it got a bit frustrating after a while. Like binge watching Twin Peaks, I guess (I never actually watched that show, just heard about it). 

Eventually I got into this bar and couldn't move, just looked around and read text of other people talking. I read so much banal dialog between other characters, and text describing a play that maybe I was a part of, that I got really frustrated with the game. I was doing nothing but reading. I wasn't sure how to move on and so I stopped playing. Sometimes a game can deliver its point too obliquely, or take way too much time doing it. It was like an art film that takes hours and at the end you are still unsure what the point of it was. 

Well, I still enjoyed it to an extent. 

Gems of War: Very briefly did I play this but with 4X speed on I crushed through six battles in about 15 minutes. I think my strategy is going to be creating skulls on screen for massive damage. It's a lot of explosions and I have, occasionally, completely wiped out the other player in one move. Still fun, this game is.