Super Zangyura (PS4)

 Also known as Maid-san wo Migi ni: Shooting Star, this is a game by doujin veterans Platine Dispositif! Which makes it all the more amazing that I played this via a standard edition physical release for a console in the PAL region!  What a time to be alive. Contrary to what you might expect from them, it's a platformer rather than a shooting game, though it does have a lot of their typical hallmarks: cute character designs, nice pixel art with beautiful colour palettes, brutally sadistic difficulty, and so on.

 

You play as a maid armed with a morning star, in a parody of/homage to classic-style linear Castlevania series, with the plot even having you storming the castle home of an evil immortal vampire. It's a little more puzzle-centric than Castlevania, though, with a lot of the game focussing on the acquisition of coloured keys for opening doors. As things proceed, just getting the keys won't be enough, since the game starts introducing elements like red herring doors that waste your keys, and while destructible walls appear early in the game, they actually become essential for progress later on. There's usually some contextual clues to look out for with regards to hidden stuff: invisible platforms will have torches on them, spikes that suddenly fall on unwitting players will have bloodstained floors beneath them, and the presence of destructible walls might be signified by a number of less clear clues, like oddly-placed enemies, suspiciously-shaped rooms, and so on. 

 

So while it's a difficult game, an observant player isn't subject to trial-and-error Rick Dangerous nonsense. And all of the above is just my describing the default game mode, the end of which reveals that you've actually been wasting you time storming the castle of the vampire lord's next door neighbour. But you've now unlocked overture mode, which is the actual vampire lord's castle, and it goes by the Super Mario Bros. 2jp principle of "they've completed the main game, so the first stage here has to be harder than the final stage there", and shamefully, I haven't been able to get to the first boss in this mode, let alone the final. You also unlock Knightmare mode, which is a completely merciless masocore version of the game. Also, after you complete the game for the first time, everyone's voice actor is swapped to be the voice of the pumpkin guy who runs the in-game shop. I don't know why, or if there's a way to get the normal voices back.

 

The difficulty all comes from the stage design, too: the controls are perfect for what they are, and it would be interesting to see a version of this game that focussed more on action and combat, rather than puzzles and investigation. We do get a little hint of this (and of the developers' STG heritage) during the boss battles, which are a lot of fun, but unfortunately very brief and the long stages space them out to be very far apart. It's a good game, but I wouldn't say it's one of Platine Dispositif's most exciting. It's definitely worth your time, but I would recommend waiting for a PSN sale, rather than getting excited and buying a physical copy like I did. Especially since there seems to be some kind of fault with the physical copies: when you first put it into your console, it'll register as an unrecognised disc. To get it to work, you've got to reset the PS4 with the disc in the drive, a solution I only found by chance and laziness. It'll work every time after you;ve done this once, though. And I assume it's a fault with the whole print run, since when I discovered the trick, I'd already returned one copy under the assumption that it was totally unplayable.