Victor Vitório's Reviews
With beautiful visual presentation and exemplary pixel art, 9 Years of Shadows doesn't quite achieve the same level of refinement in its gameplay and story. Some boss fights are truly fun and challenging, but the rest falls into the realm of average quality. This is a game I would recommend to anyone looking to indulge in the aesthetic beauty of sophisticated pixel art, as that's where it truly excels.
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Time Flies is a humorous, existentialist philosophical exercise that has us flying like flies, trying to make the most of our short lives. Each time, we have just over a minute to explore the areas, find points of interaction, and decipher simple and creative tasks, until we manage to complete them all in a single, ephemeral race against the clock. It's a game I wish would last longer, reflecting the bittersweet truth of each person's journey: it may be good, but it's also brief.
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Much shorter than most metroidvanias, Trash Quest manages to take advantage on every moment of its brevity and minimalism to deliver a polished, fun, and aesthetically pleasing experience. The platforming action wastes no time and challenges us with its efficient cyclical structure, resulting in a game that feels like a draft of something greater, but that is in itself well worth a good afternoon's play.
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With its high points outweighing its low points, Primal Planet sets the platforming action in the harsh survival of a Stone Age populated by dinosaurs and invaded by alien ships. The mid-campaign, with its narrative emptiness and trivialization of some mechanics, gradually loses the emotional strength and gameplay dynamic of the beginning, which is compounded by the poorly functional mapping. However, those who enjoy facing dinosaurs and exploring the corners of dangerous, interconnected 2D worlds will have reason enough to venture into this prehistoric world.
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The low-resolution textures don't detract from the sheer beauty of Wuchang: Fallen Feathers. Being a proud Souls-like game, it offers challenging combat — with unpleasant difficulty spikes — and exploration through interconnected environments, but character progression goes beyond the genre's formula, featuring a large skill tree that centralizes the various aspects of evolution and can be redefined at will to modify your approach and experiment with different builds.
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Somber Echoes pleasantly surprised me with its beautifully crafted visuals, the rewarding exploration deepened by its detailed mapping system, and the very effective ability to propel Adrestia into the air in any direction, acquired early on. Combat could be better implemented, especially with more interesting enemies and more monstrous boss fights, so those focused on this aspect of side-scrolling action will likely find it less satisfying than those more interested in exploring a beautiful, well-structured world.
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Wonder Boy: Asha in Monster World is a good addition in the form of a remake to keep alive a classic series that has its merits, but doesn't go beyond a visual overhaul and minimal gameplay improvements. While unimpressive, the cartoonish charisma, effective simplicity, and accessibility will appeal to those who enjoy action platformers with a retro RPG feel, as well as children.
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The best thing about Shadow Labyrinth is the unusual idea of transforming Pac-Man into a metroidvania and also a minigame that reinvents the classic format we know. The adaptation in itself is successful and the execution delivered a competent game, but one that lacks relevant highlights that make it above average in the genre, marred by unnecessarily long areas and low-quality visuals.
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No More Heroes 2 is more than just a 3D version of the previous games. The variety of weapons and scenario conditions deepen the strategic aspect of the gameplay, and the freedom to choose any level to play from the beginning provides a very welcome openness, ranging from accessible to challenging. The presentation is quite generic, lacks any story and has some UI elements with positioning issues, but what matters most really works: the cooperative fun for up to four people to coordinate amidst the good old chaos of playing as a team.
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My experience with Everdeep Aurora was a mixed bag, filled with lovely highs and uncomfortable lows. The beautiful visual presentation and impeccable music are certainly the highlights, as are some intuitive objectives that made for some great exploration here and there. However, the superficiality of mechanics, the complete lack of directions and tutorial, the poorly articulated narrative, and the questionable layout of the game screen and menus marred my adventure.
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With a lot of new content in every aspect, Lies of P: Overture is worthy of the title of expansion. Although it partially wastes the potential of the art direction by spending too much time in bland corridors and caves with little visual appeal, these extra chapters maintains the quality of the main campaign as a whole, being a significant and mandatory extension for all who enjoyed the adventure of Geppetto's puppet and want to delve deeper into it.
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Ruffy and the Riverside is a good foray into the 3D platform genre, standing out for its well-done aesthetic mix and a useful central mechanic of swapping textures to alter the world, solve puzzles, progress through the campaign and obtain the dozens of collectibles available. These two aspects are the game's high points and, although its potential for experimentation is not fully realized, they make for a unique, enjoyable and fun experience.
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Awita: Journey of Hope is visually beautiful and delivers responsive controls and fluid animations. In other words, it has the solid skeleton of a good metroidvania, but it lacks substance to cover those thin bones. The lack of content in terms of systems, level design and items is further mitigated by its short length, as the game ends before the player gets tired of it. Without something to compensate for its shortcomings, there is nothing to make it reach the average of the genre.
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Chronicles of the Wolf is a magnificent spiritual successor to the Castlevanias that followed the metroidvania structure. This game continually surprised me with the depth of its exploration, which is both challenging and intuitive. The retro feel of the experience may end up intimidating to some audiences, but if you enjoy side-scrolling action platformers in general don't let this rich and dark adventure pass you by.
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The best thing about Disney Illusion Island Starring Mickey and Friends is, firstly, the cooperative multiplayer for up to four people and, secondly, the fluidity of the character movements and animations, two factors that partly compensate for the lack of combat and the simplicity of the level design. However, the unambitious production and the lack of use of Disney characters still make it clear that this is a metroidvania that, even if it is fun to play in a group and bears the name of a big brand, was not made to be memorable.
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To appreciate The Siege and the Sandfox, you need to keep in mind that almost everything in it is focused on building atmosphere and narrative and stealth gameplay. The “stealthvania” approach is legitimate, but the simple mechanics and laborious navigation through the levels do not contribute to making its execution worthwhile. I recommend it to those who want to appreciate beautiful aesthetics and immerse themselves in a fantasy from the Arabian Nights while listening to a lovely narrator who accompanies each step of the journey.
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Walking the fine line that distinguishes metroidvanias from Zelda-likes, Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo nails the fun of adventure and displays a strong identity of its own, which is shown both in its irreverent satire style, as well as in the gameplay of ricochets and yo-yo tricks.
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With its unique approach to the 2D platform genre and an enjoyable story told in long dialogues, Aureole: Wings of Hope is a great surprise that gives us the tools to balance high speed and meticulous movements when throwing a halo both in search of secrets and in the race against the clock.
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With a lot of charm in its cartoonish parody of crime stories, Duck Detective: The Secret Salami makes the pleasant surprise of shaping a seemingly banal premise into a story that has much more than we can see at first glance. The simple mechanics of searching for clues to fill in gaps of deductions are superficial, but require reasoning to reach conclusions and the brevity of this tale prevents its pace from becoming boring and repetitive.
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As a sequel, Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping repeats the dose of its predecessor, which means both that all the charm, enigmas and surprises are present, with deeper plot twists than it might seem at first glance, and that there is no innovation.
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