I hate how harsh this sounds because the truth is Hollowbody is a labor of love. Developer Headware Games seems to be a mostly solo affair and the parts of Hollowbody that work are incredibly impressive. The fact a one man team cannot only produce something so close in tone and intensity to the peaks of the genre and even get it published on console is frankly inspiring. But it just has too many hiccups to come together the way it wants to.
Zero Parades is about being failed. It’s about how your failure affects people you love and how their failures shape you, but beyond that it’s about how the framework we live in prevents us from success.
Homura Hime is a fun game. At its best, it’s a unique and distinct blend of Ninja Gaiden and bullet hell systems that forces you to develop a rhythm and dance to it. At its worst, it tends to drag out it’s welcome and stutter under what is a fairly light load. But it has heart, and it loves a genre I love and doesn’t ask much up front.
Romeo Is A Dead Man feels like it’s out of sync with the rest of the industry. It’s a time capsule, a character action game with labyrinthian level design, a big weird story, and an expectation you play it by its rules and not the other way around.
It’s a lonely journey through a cold world that I’ve found myself drawn to continuously since I finished it. With this, one fact keeps coming back to me — nearly 15 years after I first saw it, Routine is out, and it’s good.