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« Last post by Evan_B on June 01, 2026, 07:55:49 AM »
I suppose I should also add some new content to my ranting.
I completed 9 Years of Shadows in short order. It’s a brisk, beautiful pixel art Metroidvania that seems to have pissed some online community off because of some of its design choices and odd performance quirks. I spawned into a dark room once and experienced a few sound issues but a soft reset and even returning to the main menu often fixed things. Anyway, I thought it had some cool ideas and movement options and didn’t have incredibly high expectations, and so wound up pleasantly surprised.
Continuing the theme, I’ve sunk a single playthrough into Marfusha, a indie tower defense roguelike about being an expendable foot soldier for a corrupt nationalist regime. You know, escapism. Anyway, it was fine, I seemed to get the mechanics rather quickly, in which the game balances currency accumulation with intensifying taxes to maintain a “skin of your teeth” mentality. Despite its predictable gameplay loop, part of the meta progression and challenge comes from deliberately handicapping yourself with lame-duck assists in order to learn about the larger cast of the game. It’s not a masterpiece, but it does what it sets out to do competently.
And lastly, Decline’s Drops is another game touting platform-fighter (i.e. Smash Bros.) style movement in a traditional platforming level design and progression. It delivers on that, though the enemies are hardly complex or challenging enough to warrant the attack moveset you possess. The game features hand drawn character art which is very lovingly animated, as well as a very chill soundtrack that does a lot of heavy lifting in evoking a Smash-style adventure mode.
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