Recent reviews by BarryOgg

Etalag's quest.

If you know, you know.

Proof that even being a bit paint-by-numbers can produce a very good result if it's done with care and effort.

You've seen it before - an indie metroidvania with:

• A lone child in a dark world!
  
• A fallen kingdom plagued by a curse that turned everyone into undead, monsters, and undead monsters!
  
• A ruler that made the matters worse w/r/t said plague!
  
• Tragic bosses, including one that tried to contain the calamity all by themselves!
  
• etcetera

I might sound like I'm mocking it a bit (I am), but it's genuinely good! The controls are good, the movement upgrades allow for impressive maneuverability in the late game (and some fiendish puzzles that require those). You gain new attacks by absorbing enemy spirits a'la Aria/Dawn of Sorrow, but rather than grinding basic enemies you have to find a miniboss version. The art direction is nice, if very animesque. The animation is like if you took the skeletal animations of old Flash games (or Aquaria) and polished it to the highest degree. And it doesn't overstay it's welcome, I've managed to 100% it in the time shown above.

A faithful throwback to the 5th console generation platformers, for better and for worse. Graphics are colorful and designs are fun, but the draw distance is purposefully very short. Music is MIDI or MIDI-like. You can (and will) fully rotate the camera, but it sometimes gets stuck behind a corner of a nearby setpiece, etc. I don't know if I should mock or admire the author's dedication to reproducing the bad parts of that era along with the good.

I wouldn't exactly recommend it to people who didn't cut their teeth on pre-2000 platformers, but if you don't mind occasional pad-throw-inducing rage after failing to chain grappling hook jumps for the 30th time, go ahead. At the end of the day, it _is_ quite fun.

A good game that tries its hardest to strangle itself with its own design.

I went in expecting this to be Castle in the Darkness 1.5, and it's mostly what I got. It does the Dracula's Curse thing with three characters, but for the first half of the game you can switch them only at checkpoint,s which results in some make-work backtracking as you slowly unlock rooms juggling between character abilities gating progress. Likewise, the checkpoints don't really matter in the normal mode since you respawn at entrance after dying, so there's more backtracking between fast travel rooms.

Them major boss fights are good, shame that there's only five of them. The music's decent, but manages to be less memorable than CitD's soundtrack, where every other track was a banger (I checked to verify that my memory wasn't making me wear rose tinted glasses). Clearly, more work went into this one than into CitD, but the result is almost lesser, somehow.

A great parody, I believe, comes from a place of love. A place of true understanding of each element of the original, and a bit of playful ruthlessness with rearranging and changing them. This game is an example of that. Too bad that Blow decided to not be in on the joke.

Yay, I've finally managed to beat the tutorial

Do you like Daniel Mullins and his games?
His early work was a little too meta for my tastes, but when The Hex came out in '18, I think he really came into his own, commercial and artistically. The whole game has a clear, crisp idea, and a new sheen of consummate professionalism that really gives the experience a big boost. He's been compared to Toby Fox, but I think Daniel has a far much more bitter, cynical sense of humor.
In '21, Daniel released this, Inscryption, his most accomplished album. I think its undisputed masterpiece is a battle at the end of Act 1, a moment so memorable, most people probably don't care that much about the rest of the game. But they should! because it's not just about the rougelike deckbuilding, and the importance of narrative, it's also a statement about the 'haunted videogame' trope itself.

So.
The game forces you into New Game+ once you reach the ending. As in, once you do a certain thing after defeating the boss, credits roll and after you return to the title screen you are at NG+. You can't fight the true final boss on your first playthrough.
but also
the true final boss is only available if you fulfill a certain condition in the _previous_ playthrough.
But Also
Said condition requires, among other things, interacting with an NPC that will die if you kill a certain boss. He will tell you that his soul is bound to someone else's, but only if you meet him in a place that you usually get into only after defeating said boss.
BUT ALSO
said NPC will just fail to appear if you run without talking past his 1st spawning place. You know, like you probably would do on a NG+ because you've seen most of the game and are trying to get through it quickly.

I have not seen a game screw the pooch in such a colossal way in decades, probably. This is comparable to early Sierra adventure games. Words fail me.

It's been nearly ten years since a friend gifted me this game (or rather, its predecessor), and unless KIlburn decides to add some more characters in the future, this week marked the end of my experience with it.

When writing a review of a game 7 (or 10) years after its release, it's hard not to get a bet wistful with the retrospective. The mutual enjoyment of this game kickstarted one of my relationships, and then it nearly did so a second time. I watched people hack the riddle of The Lost mere days after Rebirth's premiere. A year later, the secrets of the expansion were guarded by a proper ARG, and I saw it unfold in real time on reddit and twitter. I saw Edmund McMillen, Isaac's designer, becoming a family man, nearly quitting gamedev, and returning to it. Over the years, this game, which started as a throwaway project for Edmund, became something akin to symbol of indie gaming itself.

In many ways, this journey over the years was as much part of the experience as the games themselves. I feel a bit sorry for the people that only now start their journey with it. Last year, as part of replaying Flash classics before the technology's discontinuation, I played a few hours of the 2011 original. Vanilla Isaac seems more cohesive, a more visceral a creepy experience better communicating the themes of an abusive childhood and resulting nightmares. Compared to it, Rebirth is much more "arcade-y". It plays smoother, the graphics are cleaner... but something was lost in the translation. Over the years, it has become an even more different beast, and now Repentance marks passing the torch to another developer, who pours his vision and ideas into it. In a way, it transformed from a metaphor of childhood to one of parenthood, of releasing your child into the world.

If you're new to the series, start with the 3rd one. Just trust me on this one, things will make much more sense if you do it.

If you're not new to the series, then you'll probably want to buy this one anyway, so my review isn't really needed. It's fine. It's good ol' CW, but in 3D. Exactly what it looks like.