Though I'll get to the more overtly puzzle-platformer types eventually, because Gabe knows I'm not running out of those any time soon, I thought I'd set the proverbial Stage 1-1 with a trio of -- if not exactly masocore -- quite challenging platformer games that demand a little more from the player than just some quick reflexes and an eye for shiny collectibles. I suppose I've already broke that seal with Giana Sisters, but here's three more platformer games where the player needs to pay attention and be a little more methodical than usual.

But not in a puzzley way, necessarily, because we'll be getting to those. Good golly, do I have a lot of those sitting around.

Ethan: Meteor Hunter

The game: Seaven Studio's Ethan: Meteor Hunter, a side-scrolling platformer with physics puzzles.

The source: Groupees' Holiday Helpings bundle.

The pre-amble: Ethan is an anthropomorphic mouse who is hunting down fragments of a meteor that destroyed his house. There's not a whole lot more plot than that, as this is a fairly traditional 2D platformer that's all about running though stages quickly gathering many shiny trinkets as possible.

As well the regular running, jumping and sliding down slopes (which builds up speed needed for larger jumps), Ethan can also manipulate items in the environment by pushing/pulling them, or by using his meteor-given telekinesis (think Rob Townsend "gem" The Meteor Man) to shift obstacles around the environment to help him reach other areas or grab sparkly meteorites. So I guess this is actually kind of a puzzle-platformer, but that's not generally the focus. Rather, getting killed a lot seems to be the focus from what I can tell.

The playthrough: Ethan Meteor Hunter has the aspirations of a Super Meat Boy, with its various sawblade encounters and fast, challenging platforming sequences, but is really another instance of a much larger throng of also-ran Indie physics platformers. A French platformer starring a cheese-loving rodent ("Banjo-Ratatouille"?), there's some early promise with Ethan: Meteor Hunter during its initial stages, but everything soon starts to fall apart. The pacing, usually so zippy with all the rapid sliding and jumping, grinds to a halt whenever there are blocks in the environment to be shifted around in minutes-long physics manipulation puzzles. The jumping, which is quite satisfactory when there's not much accuracy required, becomes too unwieldy and prone to accidentally overcompensating when a vertical-scrolling pogo-stick sequence requires some absolute precision in order to make it all the way to the end in the one perfect run the game demands of you. The physics puzzles are intriguing, but the player has a finite number of times they can freeze time, and screwing up can mean resetting to the last checkpoint. The idea is that you pause the game, start moving any number of blocks to where they need to be, and then unpause. If a single block was in the wrong place (or, as was frequently the case for me, Ethan himself) it meant undoing everything and starting over. As these puzzles will no doubt become ever more complex further into the game, it'll just mean even more frustrating cases of "almost, but not quite, so do the whole thing again".

It doesn't really help that Ethan: Meteor Hunter looks like it was made one of those basic freeware game development programs, with some very plain (and occasionally ugly) art design and blocky models. I'll always hunt after any collectibles going, but the game also rates you on the amount of times you had to use the pause feature (which you'll almost always go over if you're trying to get all the collectibles) and the amount of time it took to beat the stage (ditto). It seems the game wants you to hit all three targets with the same playthrough though, which is kind of ludicrous.

Perhaps worst of all, though, was when I discovered a sequence with homing missiles (yes, yes, let's just throw every Super Meat Boy obstacle in here somewhere) and the things not only moved so quick that they always caught up to you as soon as your momentum dropped after the initial bit of hill sliding, but they would inexplicably spawn directly on top of you whenever you respawned at the checkpoint. Unless you were fast enough to jump out of the way the moment Ethan reappears at the checkpoint crystal, he'd just get instantly killed by missiles that shouldn't be there over and over. It's at this point when I invoked my corollary to Wolpaw's Law: If the designers, coders and QA didn't give enough of a shit about their game to fix a bug this major, then there's no reason I ought to give a shit about playing it any longer.

The verdict: Nope. Just as well really, since I've already got enough of these games to get back to once May's done. Thank you for not adding to the backlog, Ethan: Meteor Hunter.

La-Mulana

The game: Takumi Naramura/Nigoro's La-Mulana, an archeological SpaceWhipper filled with mysteries.

The source: I actually bought this one from the Steam store directly, for like $2.

The pre-amble: La-Mulana's a side-scrolling 2D platformer that -- from the offset -- looks an awful lot like a Spelunky-themed SpaceWhipper. In actuality, La-Mulana's a callback to an era of SpaceWhippers before SpaceWhippers were even officially a thing. I'm talking old-school non-linear platformers like Knightmare II: The Maze of Galious and Dragon Slayer IV: Drasle Family (a.k.a. Legacy of the Wizard), both of which were released around the same time as the very first Castlevania and Metroid games. The game was originally devised to be a big old love letter to the MSX, Japan's answer to DOS back in the early 80s that existed parallel to the NES and other big Japanese home computer names like the NEC PC-8801 and Sharp X68000. The various software that Lemeza uses in the original version of the game were all shout-outs to big MSX titles, like Konami's Metal Gear.

The Steam version has been updated by Nigoro with a significant graphical facelift: though many of the sprites remain the same, the backgrounds have been reworked and look kind of stunning. It's the same sort of makeover that Cave Story received for its WiiWare/Steam debut as well and -- as was the case with Cave Story's enhanced version -- this also marks the first time La-Mulana has been officially localized into English (though Aeon Genesis has a perfectly serviceable fan translation for the original freeware version of the game).

The playthrough: I neglected to discuss the story in the pre-amble, so here goes: you play Professor Lemeza Kosugi, an archeologist dressed in the appropriate attire for tomb raiding, who has traveled to a distant corner of the world to discover the secrets of the eponymous subterranean ruins of La-Mulana. What's immediately apparent about this game is that it's far from the standard SpaceWhipper in terms of having some clear idea of what the heck you're supposed to be doing. There's a few tips to begin with, and it's evident you need to raise some money to buy a glyph reader, a translation device and a mapping device, but beyond that the game just kind of drops you off at La-Mulana's entrance and says "have fun at school, kiddo" before driving away.

As such, I've spent the first few hours just gamely poking every nook and cranny for some answers. There's a lot of cryptic hints about what you're supposed to be aiming for, and a few instances of puzzles that required a bit of lateral thinking to solve, but I'm already starting to feel like I have no sense of where to go. Some areas are too high-level for me right now (there's an area full of poisonous water that's easy enough to reach, and way easier to die in), and some rooms obviously require items and devices that I simply don't have yet. There's supposedly a lot of hidden stuff in the background that I'll probably have to scan inch by inch before I discover something that will allow me to continue, but the prospect of having to do that is not a compelling one.

Despite all this, I like La-Mulana a lot. It's clearly not meant to be a walk in the park, and given what little I know of its MSX inspirations, I don't doubt there'll be a lot of fatally unfair situations further down the road. But it's one of those games like Fez or Dark Souls that demand you shape up, pay attention and earn your fun. I definitely feel like there's a place in this modern gaming world for such experiences like La-Mulana, though I'm afraid just dedicating a single afternoon to it isn't going to be anywhere close to sufficient.

The verdict: I haven't gone too far in yet, so I don't imagine it'll be too hard to pick up from where I left off. All the same, this is going to require a bit more focus than I can afford it right now. Maybe someday later, when there's not much else on my plate games-wise.

Mark of the Ninja

The game: Klei Entertainment's Mark of the Ninja, a 2D stealth action game.

The source: The Humble Bundle 9.

The pre-amble: Mark of the Ninja is a stealth action game that's all about cones of vision and using light and sound to one's advantage. It's able to do this effectively by having the whole game be a 2D non-linear platformer, albeit the Thief or Dishonored or Deus Ex type of non-linear where there's always a clear destination to head towards and various optional paths one can take to get there.

The player is a "marked" ninja, empowered by mystic tattoos that will eventually drive him insane, who is sent on a mission to eradicate the enemies of the enigmatic Hisomu ninja clan. Successfully clearing optional objectives, finding hidden scrolls that detail the history of the Hisomu, staying quiet and concealed and finishing off enemies as stylistically as possible (or avoiding them all entirely) net you bonus points which can be spent between missions on improving your skills.

The playthrough: I don't really know how I feel about Mark of the Ninja. That's unrelated to how much I've played of it -- I both have and haven't seen enough, in that I've gotten the gist of how the game operates after two whole stages, while also sure that the game's going to start racking up the difficulty with new complications before too long -- but rather how certain aspects of it appeal to me very much while others do not. I don't think "ambivalent" is fair, because we're talking pretty big peaks and valleys in my enjoyment level. So I'll just start by listing those, then.

Peaks: Stealth games of this sort are extremely satisfying when the player has a decent handle on their limitations, and the limitations of the guards around them. In a stealth game, you ideally want to be able to predict what a guard does almost all the time, though in such a way that defeating them silently isn't always a complete pushover. If there's a guard looking your direction with a spotlight behind him, he's going to be very tough to kill regardless of how accurately I'm able to anticipate his behavior. Mark of the Ninja does an excellent job of providing that sort of sensory feedback, which means that getting spotted or thwarted is almost always the player's own dumb fault for their lack of situational awareness. That has a number of intrinsic frustrations too, of course, but none one could feasibly lay at the game's feet with a reproachful look.

I actually kind of like the animation style too. It's expressive and stands out compared to most of the pixelly or more overtly anime cutscenes of other Indie games. If anything, it's closer to one of those modern Nickelodeon action cartoons about spies or aliens or whatever, though with considerably more blood splatter than I imagine Nickelodeon would allow.

Valleys: However, it's not always as responsive as I'd like. This probably boils down to once again making the somewhat unwise decision to use a keyboard. However, I actually find the keyboard controls to be entirely acceptable, and the game always gives you a list of context commands for any given situation so there's no excuse for pressing the wrong key at the wrong time. The unresponsiveness comes from situations like dropping a body down a grate, where you're given two "drop body" commands - one of which drops him down the grate and the other just drops him on the ground above the grate. It's never clear which command is which, and it's almost impossible to intuit. Other situations where two commands might overlap include dragging a body behind an open door and having two simultaneous commands that use the same key to shut the door or drop the body. For occasions where time is of the essence, it's a pain to mess up one of these commands, because it's one of those cases where the game's UI is at fault than my own lack of alacrity.

For as much as I like Mark of the Ninja's artwork, I don't really appreciate the entirely self-serious tone of the game. It's meant to be badass, I guess, but it's like Samurai Jack without that cartoon's self-aware winks to all its ludicrousness. It comes off as sounding like it was written by 14-year-olds (quite eloquent ones, mind). Maybe that was the idea, given how I've already equated the animation style to a cartoon created for pre-teens, but I'm having a hard time not rolling my eyes at every mention of how awesome ninjas are and at the many over-the-top animations of the stealth kills. I like goofy, but there hasn't been a single hint of irony so far. Lastly, as someone who can be a bit of a perfectionist about this sort of thing, having the checkpoints spaced out so far apart isn't always appealing if I felt like I could've pulled off that last kill just a little bit better. It comes down to a choice of redoing the last fifteen minutes of methodical light-smashing and stealth-killing, or just saying "fuck it" and moving on. Both of those options are surefire ways for me to lose any motivation to play any further. Why would I want to beat a level with imperfections? Why would I want to go back and redo what was four perfect kills because of a fumble right at the end? Why bother?

The verdict: Stealth games that pull off their mechanics this well are a rare breed, but at the same time I've never been a particular fan of the genre. I mean, I guess I have played through Gunpoint and Dishonored relatively recently, but I just get so stressed out trying to perfect games like these. It's not like I'm at all invested in the Mark of the Ninja's overly sincere story about tattoo ninjas either. I'll stick this in the maybe pile.

Moment of Truth

Hard to say, as I don't feel all that close to any of these games, but I'll give it to La-Mulana. For as painfully abstruse as that game has been so far, I did get a few bursts of that rare breed of satisfaction one can only receive from figuring something out and getting past a roadblock. Once I start finding items that open more paths elsewhere and get a better sense of the game's tricks, I'm supposing that I'll enjoy it a lot more.

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