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Go! Go! GOTY! '15 ~Day Five~ (Castle in the Darkness)

Day Five

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Well, Castle in the Darkness didn't get a whole lot worse difficulty-wise. The aptly-named Torture Chambers and hunting for the well-hidden McGuffins that unlocked the final ending took some time, but I think I'd already seen the worst of it by the time I wrote up yesterday's Go! Go! GOTY! entry. Either that or I actually got better at the game, but let's not go crazy with crackpot theories or anything here. Needless to say, there'll be less kvetching about fake difficulty this time, though I've still got my eye on you CitD.

Oh jeez. When these things open up, it never ends well.
Oh jeez. When these things open up, it never ends well.

The game has some very mild RPG elements common to a lot of SpaceWhippers, and IGAvanias in particular, where you'll regularly find better armor and weapons as you proceed. They're sometimes out of the way, requiring some tricky platforming or a boss, but are almost always worth the extra effort. Besides, it's worth fighting every optional boss anyway for the max health boost. Castle in the Darkness might not have a map - which would be a grave offense for any SpaceWhipper were it not for the fact that the game is a very linear affair excepting the handful of dead-ends and breakable walls in each area - but it does exploration well. Well, in this case, would be approaching the idea of going off the beaten path in the same way the Souls series does where alternative roads tend to lead to very difficult and usually optional regions that the player has to either nut-up and tough out or make a mental note to return to that place when they're a bit stronger. (Man, did I really compare yet another game to the Souls series? Sorry. That's some ostensibly egregious video game writing.)

This is the NSFW boss. That's short for
This is the NSFW boss. That's short for "NoSFerWatu." No, I just made that up.

The magic, meanwhile, is very conditional. The game cleverly sets the strength of any assigned spell - cast by charging the attack button for a while - to be equal to the player character's presently-equipped weapon. That means that every spell has the same damage output. What multiple spells provide you with, then, is a strategic smorgasbord for handling bosses and other tough enemies. The default fireball is useful for the first big bad of the game, the giant suit of armor that Vinny took some time defeating in the above Quick Look, but you'll soon find more and with them more options when prepping for the next big fight: a tornado attack that fires a scattershot of projectiles; a room-crossing laser beam that is easy to aim; a short-range shotgun blast of energy; a defensive ice shield that surrounds the player character; a quartet of soul projectiles that homes towards nearby enemies; etc. I stuck with the soul homing shot and the tornado for most of the game, but there are situations where the boss's weakspot can be hard to reach without a decent spell with the right spread of bullets. Oddly enough, it doesn't quite have the versatility of the 25+-year-old Mega Man games since you can't equip new weapons and spells on the fly, but the principle is similar. Designing bosses while regarding multiple possible strategies are how you inspire hope when the player crashes and burns with their standard equipment in the first fight - just equip something else and learn the patterns.

OK, so the game might've borrowed from Castlevania a bit more than anything else...
OK, so the game might've borrowed from Castlevania a bit more than anything else...

If you're down with masocore platformers, the type of game that feels like the entire design document just reads "u mad bro?", then Castle in the Darkness is a fine one of those. It's not quite as bad as Pid, 1000 Spikes or Super Meat Boy - I was able to get 100% completion after two days, though my patience was tested to its limits a number of times with the lousy checkpointing - but it's no walk in the park either. I suppose its biggest crime is that it feels very similar to all the other heavily-referential love-letters to a bygone gaming era with pixel graphics, absurd difficulty and/or SpaceWhipper elements. For that reason I'd perhaps suggest that it's not particularly essential if you're the type of weirdo to be rummaging through your 2015 backlog for last minute games to play before writing a GOTY list. Hypothetically speaking.

Hi Matt! Thanks for making this game! It was OK!
Hi Matt! Thanks for making this game! It was OK!

(P.S. How cocky is this piece of music for the Windy Ruins area of the game? If you don't follow, try listening to it side-by-side with the Final Fantasy III battle music. Maybe its just another level of reference...)

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