Book of Demons

More misconceptions, or excuses, if you prefer to see them this way. Whatever the reason, I have made more poor choices in selecting games. When adding Book of Demons to my to-play-list, I'm quite sure I thought it to be from the same series as Monster's Den: Book of Dread, which was a lovely flash game I played many years ago. Well, it wasn't. The description of the game was close, but sadly misleading.

Book of Demons claims to be a roguelike deckbuilder, or even a hack-and-slash. That's a lie. A roguelike, maybe, but in other regards, it's on the level of a mostly casual mobile game.
The game sets you on a track through many levels of dungeons filled with monsters, equipment, gold, and exp. There's promises of dozens of varied enemies, different elements, many game mechanics, multi-stage bossfights... I don't even dare list them for how disappointing they are, although not technically wrong.
For one, the game has no animations, just sprites bouncing about and essentially particle effects as attack animations. Secondly, there's no "real" combat. There's a slow automatic attack pace, but you actually have to click (and keep clicking) on enemies to hit them. The movement is basically fake too, as you're confined to linear paths, essentially giving you a choice of forward or back. This is extra annoying if you're trying to dodge archers or mages, who can shoot at your from outside your vision distance for some reason.
Among other ridiculous mechanics are that some enemies can just summon more enemies. Sometimes right behind you, blocking your path. If they do, you're screwed, since you can't outplay them - it's purely a numbers test, which you will lose. Your saving grace is that even as the melee class, you have a much larger attack range than any melee enemy, but this also creates a boring environment where waves of enemies crash against you, and you just have to click on them all to die.
Speaking of clicking, there's so many things to click on. Click to break shield. Click to pick up loot. Click to open chests. Click to shorten your poison duration. Who adds the mechanic that you have to pick up gold by hovering your mouse over it to a PC game?
And were you wondering about the deckbuilding promise? It's just that equipment and consumables visually look like cards. That's it. There's no deck to speak of, it's just a lie.

Honestly, I'm upset. Not just because this is a glorified phone clicker game, but because I felt it actually had potential. The production quality doesn't seem low at all, and I can tell effort's been put into it. It seems very deliberately made, yet it misses the mark completely. Obviously, I can't recommend this game. If this was an actual mobile game, this might be a different story, but it's not.

Thumper

Tried out Thumper today. I remember seeing it get praised on multiple game news sites, which might have been the reason I picked it up. As seems to be the trend here recently though, I'm not actually a fan of the base genre it's from - rhythm games. I'll try to give you my thoughts on it as unbiased as I can regardless.

So Thumper is a rhythm game where this beetle-like thing is speeding across a linear track, and you gotta press the right buttons at the right times. Turns, notes, barriers, jumps, or maybe they were something else. You see, Thumper's a bit abstract and has very confusing and overbearing visuals and music. The thematics have been turned up to eleven, but at its heart it's still just about pressing up-down-left-right-space at the right times - nothing complicated. There's, I think, 9 stages, with roughly 20 levels each, and a bossfight (which is just a non-fixed length track) at the end of each, and maybe in the middle or somewhere else too sometimes.

However, from its thematic arises my main issue with it. I can't actually see or hear the audio and/or visual cues for what I'm supposed to do at times. Usually, the visual cues shouldn't be as important, but Thumper doesn't always let you keep pressing buttons, with how large the spacing between actions sometimes is, making you lose the rhythm. This really strikes me as something a rhythm game shouldn't do. Sure, as far as the audiovisuals go, Thumper stands out, but I don't understand why people would let it sacrifice the gameplay for that purpose.

Overall, Thumper looks and feels quite unique, but that's just a facade. It has the same old simple rhythm gameplay underneath, and even that isn't executed all that well. I don't like Thumper and wouldn't recommend it, and I don't think that's even my distaste for rhythm games talking. It just wasn't that good.

Finding Paradise

I don't really play games for the story. I generally think there's no benefit to be had from splitting your attention between telling a good story and creating engaging gameplay. However, perhaps a good game can benefit from pieces of story here and there, to give meaning to whatever you're doing. Similarly, perhaps a good story can benefit from pieces of gameplay - reader interaction - to stop attention from waning, to create pauses for thought, and to maybe slightly deepen your attachment to the story.

I immensely enjoyed Finding Paradise's predecessor, To the Moon, and I thought there was no way they could replicate such a memorable story... but they did. Finding Paradise is every bit as good as To the Moon was, so if you loved that, you can stop reading here and go experience Finding Paradise. It's more of the same fantastic storytelling. However, for others, this review can serve for both games in the series.

The reason I approached this in such a roundabout way, is that I don't have much to say about the To the Moon series. As any good story, telling you any major plotpoints would ruin it, so you'll just have to take my word for it being good. Both stories follow two doctors, who work for a unique company that grants people's dying wishes by rewriting their memories, so they could live the lives they always wanted to, at least for a brief moment before their death. To accomplish that, they must traverse through the person's entire life, experiencing the most imporant pieces of it. The beauty of the To the Moon games is how they manage to show that something as ordinary as a regular person's life can be quite extraordinary.

Both games are about 4-6 hours, so they won't take a large chunk of your time, nor will they waste any of it with irrelevant bits or tangents. I wish they were longer, but honestly, they don't have to be. They say what they need to, don't say what they don't have to, and that's probably for the best. Both To the Moon and Finding Paradise are the best story-based games I've played, and I would recommend them to anyone, regardless of whether they like this genre. Myself, I'll be looking forward to the third installement that might be coming out in the nearest year.

Hell is Other Demons

Glad to see my old favorite Flash game site Kongregate is still supporting game development. Hell is Other Demons is one of their published games on Steam that I just tried out. Sadly, like with many other games they've published on Steam, it wasn't bad, but also didn't quite suit me.

Hell is Other Demons is a bullet hell game, but instead of flying in a spaceship/plane equivalent, you're platforming. I had initially thought this was like a more fleshed out roguelike, but most levels are still tied to roughly one screenful of room to move around in. There's some platforms, environmental hazards, and waves of spawning enemies per level. You get a double jump, an invincibility dash, a pistol (or more like a machine gun) that can only shoot sideways, and a "bomb" that can be charged up through kills. Definitely closer to the design of a bullet hell.
You can also buy some upgrades to your character like more health, faster bullets, etc. as well as new guns and bombs with different attack patterns. Additionally, each level has extra challenges like don't get hit or don't use your bomb, if you want that.

After playing, it became clear to me that this is yet another game oriented toward the perfectionist players who like challenging the same content over and over for slightly better scores. The lack of a map and exploration was kind of dissapointing, and that might've been enough to drop it. However, what really irked me about the combat was that I couldn't shoot up, and couldn't dodge with precision. Bullet hell games are supposed to be about using fine control and good planning to dodge all the enemies and their attacks. Here, I feel more like commanding an unyieldy ragdoll. I've a large hitbox, and the constant assault of gravity and environmental hazards.
Sure, it might be too easy if I just get to stay in a corner and gun everyone down, but then that's the developers' problem to fix, instead of shackling me with unsatisfying restrictions.

Overall, definitely not a game for me. I can appreciate what it was going for, and the execution isn't bad at all, but I simply don't wish to repeat the same content so much, finding ever less interesting ways to kill the enemies to compensate for the restrictions placed upon my actions. Just give me mouse aim for dodges and shooting. As it stands, maybe if you want to try a mediocre platformer bullet hell, but otherwise I can't recommend it.

Furi

Ah, Furi. Another promising game I was looking forward to. Been almost 5 years since its release now too.

Furi is a top-down bullet hell hack and slash. The game is comprised of a series of bossfights - levels, if you will. You've got your melee slash, your ranged gun, charged attacks for both that deal more damage but leave you vulnerable, a parry, and a dodge-dash. Good, if standard, stuff. The boss fights offer a healthy amount of difficulty, but are also somewhat forgiving, giving you a full heal and one of your lives back after each phase, so there's a good chance of beating them on the first try since you essentially get a practice run every phase.

Now, I'll address the elephant first. This game has shoddy keyboard+mouse controls for how high action and precision demanding it is. I don't think it's an inherent problem in the type of game Furi is, I just think the developers didn't care to add it in. Like, give me my mouse cursor at the very least, instead of some reticle on the ground serving as a vague hint. For a PC game, this is unacceptable, and amounts to more than half of my frustration with the game.
The rest leans more toward personal issues. It feels like Furi is more oriented towards the speedrunner and completionist kind. The game's about 6 hours long, I think, but there's a more difficult mode, and extra praise if you do really well in the fights. While a norm for bossfights in all action games, I'm not actually a big fan of the rather rigid series of actions-responses you're supposed to do at times. I think Furi offers a good amount of freedom for a bossfight game, but it's inherently quite reaction-and-memorization based.
And finally, it just seems rough around the edges. The graphics are stylized, but still feel a bit... amateur. Same for the animations. Not bad, but a bit off. It's a minor grievance, and I'm not one to hate on game art, but it bleeds a bit into how responsive the game feels, and how well attacks and whatnot are telegraphed.

Overall, I can't give Furi a personal recommendation. If you're a fan of bossfights, hack and slash, and/or bullet hell, it might very well be up your alley, but I think it's far from perfection in any case. Just make sure you own a controller before playing, because otherwise I can almost guarantee you'll have a greatly suboptimal experience.