Alec Padua
9 Year of Shadows is a challenging but rewarding metroidvania with some lovely pixel art, an intriguing story, excellent soundtrack, and an exciting armor system based on Greek mythos. Navigating the map can be a bit tedious, and some of the combat encounters fall into a repetitive cycle, but if you're looking for a unique metroidvania with a lot of style, 9 Years of Shadows gets a lot right.
To The Rescue gives us an immersive experience of what goes on inside a dog shelter. Animal lovers will certainly enjoy this simulation. It also brings in challenges when it comes to time and resource management so every second will count.
I wanna root for this game so that it’ll have more content in the future but at the state of this build, I can’t really see any longevity when it comes to replayability. You can get bored once you’ve collected the weapons and cleared all the bosses. It’s probably a good top-down shooter game if you want to get introduced to a less stressful version of bullet hell. There are plenty of better ones in the market and this game may still have a long way to go.
Thymesia is a mixed bag and simply doesn’t do enough to stand out. There are some neat ideas when it comes to how you approach combat encounters with plague weapons, but a lack of polish remains a constant obstacle in almost every facet of it. When it works, and all the systems line up, you can have a lot of fun, but that rarely happens. Despite its excellent visuals, the world feels shallow because of its linearity, and the use of annoying enemies to compensate for a lack of intricate level design makes an already difficult experience, exhausting.
Ravenlok is a charming fairytale voxel adventure game that features a decent variety of enemies and puzzles. Despite the lackluster storyline, it's a fairly short game that's worth playing with its simple combat mechanics easily accessible for everyone. Although Ravenlok might not appeal to players that prefer a challenge, this simple simple action-adventure title will certainly eat up your afternoon.