I checked out a few more games.
Healing Spree
This fits in a lineage with Moving Out, Good Job and Overcooked, but this time around you're a doctor.
You'll be dashing around, wheeling in patients, throwing them onto a bed or x-ray scanner, using stethoscopes and sprays and mix various ingredients together to cure your patients. Sadly the controls and mixing mechanics require a bit to get used to. You can't use the 'pick/drop' button to pick up the wheelchair, that's what the Use button is for. But when you're done with the wheelchair, i think you have to use the 'pick/drop' button to stop using the wheelchair, instead of using the use button again or trying to ditch the wheelchair with the 'throw' button. The x-ray machine and bed require you to press the throw button, not the use button. You can't grind an ingredient while you're holding another ingredient in your hand. It seems like you need to use two grinders to grind the ingredients together and then put both of them in the same device to combine the two effects. I imagine it just takes a little to get used to all the control intricacies, but i will say that my first attempt was an absolute disaster :D
Narita Boy
stylish 80's 2d platformer. You're a kid that gets sucked into a PC and meet characters named Motherboard and Techno-Father. You use your Technosword to battle enemies, in both melee and ranged combat. The combat feels quite nice with plenty of impactful hits, but sadly the platforming didn't do it for me. Narita Boy is quite a heavy dude with tons of inertia before he moves around in the air. The foreground art also obfuscates platforms at times making it hard to see at a glance where you're supposed to land. At one point an arrow pointed between two platforms obscured by the foreground, as if there's some hidden tunnel or elevator in between. Sadly it just got me killed over and over. The storytelling didn't do it for me neither. On one hand it goes for all the tropes you expect in a 'you got sucked into a game' game. There are hackers, there are computer parts, a game creator, glitches, references to code and all that jazz. But it all gets introduced to you in the very first message prompt to the point where the terms and names just washes over you. Game has a lot of style though.
No Place For Bravery
It's an isometric metroidvania with quite a deep focus on the combat. You don't only have a health and a stamina bar, but also a defense bar. Some enemies require you to parry their attacks, which gets their defense-bar down and opens them up to get attacked. Others can just be attacked directly. Enemies have a light, medium and heavy attack. medium attacks can't be blocked but can be parried, heavy attacks need to be dodged all together. If you attack an enemy during his block, your stamina takes a serious beating. This all makes it quite a challenging game. Weird quirk is that you don't straight up kill enemies as you get their HP bar down. You still need to hold a button on their near-death bodies to execute them and send blood flying around. Only executed enemies drop items for you. Will you stand still for a second for a chance to find a throwing dagger or potion?
Although i generally enjoy the game, there are a few downsides so far. First, the screens seem very obviously stitched together to the point where you can see the seams in the art. There was also a weird place where i had to sort of wiggle my way through a bit of stones and got very worried i softlocked myself. The dodge also functions as a jump, similar to Hyper Light Drifter. Sadly, it's distance is much shorter and the platforms seem positioned in such a way that you really have to wait till the edge of a platform to make it to the other platform. Especially in the middle of combat, with multiple arrows flying around the place it's extremely easy to miss your jumps. Finally, the game straight up feels like it has combat screens, instead of a more organic world where enemies are strewed around . The screen moves to the right ,and boom.. A combat puzzle with 3 melee enemies, a ranged enemy and a maze of fences. Good luck.
AK-xolotl
A cute crimsonland-like. A top down arcade-style bullet hell shooter where you gather weapons, dodge bullets and kill enemies until you die. Sadly it doesn't seem all that good yet. There's a dodge, but no indicator of the cool-down time it takes to regain your dodge. Guns don't seem to differ all that much neither. You generally spawn a yellow bullet and sometimes the attackspeed is a bit faster or it spreads in a shotgun pattern, but it still all feels quite samey to the point where i don't immediatly realize when my 'good' weapon has run out and i reverted back to my standard pea-shooter.
Don't Forget Me
Sci-fi point & click game about the evil government planting memory chips into everyone's brain and you trying to stop them from mind controlling their population. You're working at this facility that stores memories for their patients and to do so, you must dig through their brain. You do this by typing in keywords and hope that you slowly but surely uncover the background story of your patients. Sometimes it's quite easy to hit a keyword like searching for 'friend' after the patient told you a friend recommended your clinic to him. Others are quite difficult to find and don't seem to be traceable through the text itself. To find the keyword 'conspiracy' you just need to make the connection that an organization against the government must be part of some conspiracy.
Sadly, I don't think the writing is all that good, and it contains a few spelling errors. Normally that's not a huge issue, but in a game where you're typing down a bunch of keywords hoping that one of them will unlock information, you don't want to get screwed by a typo. The writingstyle also leaves something to be desired. As my boss asked me if i wanted to rage against the government, it took like 6 pop-up messages of him trying to convey that he wanted me to join the operation, before i could accept.
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