Deep Shinonome Yin Yang Maiden (Switch)

 

 Upon seeing the screenshots of this game, and apparently not bothering to read the description, I bought it assuming it was a more horror-themed Kikikaikai-style shooting game. Other than each starring a young female exorcist, however, the two games have almost nothing in common! What Deep Shinonome: Yin Yang Maiden (which is the name it's given in the Switch's UI, while Shinonome Abyss: The Maiden Exorcist is what's on the title screen)actually is is a stage-based survival horror game, centered largely around your character's physical vulnerability, and the management of extremely tightly limited resources.

 

Each stage is a building, represented by a grid of (mostly) square rooms connected by doors. Some rooms will have torches or firepits, some will be traps: a spike pit surrounded by only a thin ledge, for example, some will have nothing, not even a light source. And of course, there's items to pick up in some of them. Sound is just as important as vision, though, as you can hear monsters in adjacent rooms, and can make noise yourself to attract their attention.

 

This is essential, since though you have a gun, ammunition is incredibly scarce, and really, it's only effective against the weakest monsters. But the monsters aren't particularly intelligent, and you can lure the corporeal ones into firepits and other traps to destroy themselves, and the spiritual ones through sealed doors or into shrines for similar effects. There's other, single-use weapons found lying around, too, like shurikens that can kill most monsters in a single hit, and grenades, that can clear out entire adjacent rooms.

 

 

Though you're an exorcist, your aim in each stage is only to enter through the front door, and eventually exit through the back. You don't have to destroy every monster lurking therein, though if you don't you'll be spending a lot of time avoiding them, and as well as weak and fragile, you're also pretty slow, so that's a difficult act to keep up for an extended period. So the meat of the game is surveying the situation very carefully, figuring out which monsters are where, and also where the resources needed to destroy them are. 

Of course, this means that it's heavily structured around playing stages repeatedly. Not only so you can get the lay of the land enough to actually complete them, but there's also a strong emphasis on scoring, with a complex rundown at the end of each stage, showing the points you scored for item use, destroying monsters, and finishing quickly. That doesn't mean they've skimped on the size of the game, though: there's a ton of stages, starting out moderately difficult, and judging by the star scale used on the selection screen, gradually moving up to inconceivable difficulty for superhuman genius players.

 

I like this game! It's compellingly addictive, to the point where I don't want to leave a stage I've started unfinished, trying over and over until I figure it out (and successfully eecute that solution), then often foolishly starting the next stage straight away and getting drawn in for another series of failed runs. It also definitely works as a piece of horror, being atmospheric and gruesome with relatively simple graphics and sound, and tying the horror into the mechanical design of the game itself, rather than just being a macabre skin draped over a generic action game. Definitely recommended. (Note: a lot of places online seem to have the game listed as a roguelike, but that's just an optional sidemode, the main game is a series of specifically designed and balanced stages).

Harpoon Shooter Nozomi (Switch)

 Though like any normal person, I prefer my shooting games to strictly follow arcade-style rules: no meta-progression, continues optional (and preferably punished), and scoring being based as much on skill (and as little on either luck or grinding) as possible. I will concede, however, that there is room for games to be experimental, and try different things within the framework of shooting games as a genre. Any such game, even if it's a good game, couldn't be considered a good shooting game. That makes sense, right? You're all on board with what I'm saying, right?

 

Harpoon Shooter Nozomi is such a game as I've just described. It's got a whole bunch of unlocking of weapons, unlocking of stages, various things like that, that mean that even in the "arcade" mode, scoring isn't completely skill-based, since the weapons you unlock in quest mode also get unlocked in arcade, and they tend to be a lot better than the ones available when you first start playing the game. There's also a heavy luck element, with each stage containing a pachinko minigame. You collect balls as you make your way through the stage, then use them in the minigame to secure materials used for unlocking weapons in quest mode, or points in arcade mode.

 

So, it's not a good shooting game. But is it a good game? Yes. There's two big factors that sway my opinion in its favour. The first is that that it's a game that's overflowing with charm. The graphics are all really cute pixel art, drawn with very bright colours and a very endearing, slightly messy style. There's lots of little references to other shooting games like Twinbee and Fantasy Zone. Nozomi makes little comments in the top corner of the screen based on what's currently happening in-game. When you're in the shop, you can see a bunch of little easter egg items from elswhere inthe game on the shelves in the background, and these even change from stage to stage! 

 

The second, more important factor is that this is a game with an overwhelming surplus of ideas, to the extent that I feel like that's worthy of respect on its own. As well as the aforementioned pachinko minigame and weapon shop/development system, I still haven't mentioned the game's eponymous gimmick! You shoot your normal weapon by just holding down the fire button, but when you press it, you shoot out a giant harpoon! There's various things the harpoon can hook onto, the main use being pulling apart larger enemies and bosses: pull the heads off of birds, the shells from snails, the rooves from buildings, and so on. There's some bosses where you have to pull away the boss' armour with your harpoon, then let go, and before it snaps back, shoot the harpoon to pull out the vulnerable cockpit! On top of that, there's a system of Dynamite Headdy-style secret bonuses, including hidden items, as well as secret little tasks, like pulling part of an enemy away from it, then while it's hooked, flying round it in a circle.

 

This is a fun and charming little game, and definitely worth your time, as long as you can disconnect the part of your brain that expects a certain kind of purity from shooting games. I recommend it, with that caveat. I'd also like to know if anyone has any information on the developer, Wandering Wonder. I haven't been able to find anything myself, and I'd like to know what else they've done!

Buccanyar! (Switch)

 A quick disclaimer first: after I'd already bought a physical copy of this game, and then played it for a week and a half, I found out that it actually has a western release (though I don't think it has a physical version), under the title Cats Away. But the Japanese version (technically) has an English translation included, that's the version I've been playing, and that's the version I'm reviewing. I assume at most, the only differences will be the name and (hopefully) the translation, but bear that in mind nonetheless.

 

Anyway, I haven't seen anyone talking about this game under either title, and when I saw it on both a list of Japanese games with included English translations and on sale for a low price on a certain Japanese second hand shop's website, I picked it up. Which turns out to have been a good idea, as this is an excellent game. It's clearly been made with a lot of passion, it's unique and fun to play, and it even has an interesting, entertaining story and even more surprising: actually funny comedy scenes that manage to shine despite a pretty bad translation (kind of reminds you of what I said about Sword and Fairy 6, doesn't it?). 

 

So what the game's actually about is nautical combat! Three sisters in a flooded world have inherited a special magic ship and a map from their dad, and as they travel around to the locations marked on the map in search of dad, they get involved in a surprisingly layered plot involving a cult trying to ressurect ancient monsters, they make a lot of friends (some of whom start out as enemies), as well as a lot of discoveries about the world, their ship, and themselves. Your part in all of this is mostly split into two parts, that can be succinctly put as the combat itself, and the background management that prepares you to survive and win that combat.

 

During the management part of the game, you sail around and visit ports. In the ports, you can take on missions (pretty much always being "go here and kill these enemies") to earn money, then spend that money on ship parts. Equipping ship parts has its whole own menu full of submenus, as it's surprisingly deep. There's a lot of different weapon types, as well as a lot of different ship designs, which eah have a different amount of spaces for putting weapons of different sizes, with some also having their own powerful bewpoke weapons built in. You also get to equip smaller boats, aircraft, and subs that can be deployed from your ship mid-battle. These are interesting too, as while most of them are just there to attack enemies, some of them will go around picking up items dropped by sunk foes, others might be fishing boats that catch fish you can sell for a little extra money, and so on. And of course, you also have to hire sailors (who are all cats, for some reason) to actually man all these guns and pilot all these little vehicles.

 

The combat itself is somewhat unique. All of your weapons just repeatedly fire and automatically aim once you've given the order to open fire, so your part in the battle is to actually control the ship itself: positioning yourself to hit the enemy better, and to avoid incoming attacks, especially the powerful special attacks that come from big boss enemies. You also decide when to deploy the aforementioned little vehicles (which then act autonomously), as well as giving commands to repair the ship, and switch between your three loadouts of weapons, depending on the circumstances. As the game goes on, you'll also get access to magic attacks, so you decide when to use those and which ones to use, too.

 

It took me a while to get into Buccanyar!, but once I did, it really got its claws into me. I've been having a ton of fun with it, and despite the poor translation, getting engrossed in its world, story, and characters. As well as being a great game on its own, it's also a nice thing to see in the wider landscape: a new(-ish) commercial game that's been made with a lot of love, that's both original and fun to play, and which doesn't have a single piece of nickel-and-diming or dark design patterns in it. It's just a great, old-fashioned, well-designed game that stands on its own. I can easily and unreservedly recommend it, and I don't think I'll get much disagreement if I say that it's exactly the kind of thing I want to see from longform-style videogames in the future: honest creativity and no scams or desperate trend-chasing.

Old Coin Pusher Friends 3 (Switch)

 In real life, coin pushers are a hated scourge, the disease that has overrun and essentially killed off everything fun and interesting in the UK's seaside arcades. But when I noticed there was a series of videogame adaptations of the concept, my curiosity was piqued: how would you turn such a simple concept, that's so reliant on physicality and prizes into a videogame that is inherently unable to offer either? The price was a mere pittance, so I gave the newest one a look.

 

Old Coin Pusher Friends 3 does it by having a simple board game happening at the top of the screen, with the coin pushing happening at the bottom. In the board game part, there's a guy journeying to visit the 52 stations of the Tokaido, and he moves according to dice that you win from the coin pusher game below. There's special spaces along the way, like a palanquin that'll carry the guy an extra distance, baskets of coins that rain into the pusher, enemy spaces, and more.

 

Enemies stop the journey while you fight them. You see, you don't drop coins into a slot to get them into the coin pusher, you shoot them from a gun! So when there's an enemy, you point the game upwards and try to kill the enemy before time runs out and they leave on their own. Beat them, and a bunch of treasures will drop into the pusher. There's two different upgrade shops in the game: one where you buy upgrades with your coin supply, and another where you buy upgrades with magatama. When you reach one of the stations, all the treasures you collected since the last one get turn into magatama at a rate of one for every four treasures.

 

As well as coins, dice, and treasures, there's also koban (you know, those oval-shaped gold coins, like what Meowth has on its head). Because while you're playing, there's a jackpot counter that increases for every coin you shoot. Get seven koban, and jackpot mode activates, during which coins and treasures will constantly rain down from the 'bove, until the number of coins that's fallen has reduced the jackpot counter to zero. If you're smart (and lucky), you'll eventually be playing in an almost constant state of jackpot mode, which is nice.

 

Old Coin Pusher Friends 3 is an odd little game. It's cheap, and I think it'll take about thirty to forty hours to complete. Furthermore, despite being an adaptation of a (low level) gambling machine conceptually, there's not much in the way of dark patterns in its design: it actually has an end, there's no real money shop or any extra stuff to buy after you have the game at all, in fact, and there's no imperative to check in every day. There's unlockables, both the aforementioned upgrades as well as a few optional cosmetics, but you'll have unlocked them all after a few stages. If the game sounds interesting to you, pick it up. It's not anything spectacular, but it's a decent enough way to semi-mindlessly occupy your hans while watching TV or whatever.

Angelian Trigger (Switch)

 Space Harrier is obviously an excellent game, but since the hard of thinking like to assume that there's no place for sprite scaling in a world with polygons, and that there's no place for rail shooters when free roaming flight sim-style shooters exist, there hasn't been a lot of iteration on its principles over the years, not by SEGA nor by anyone else. But Pixel, who made a name for themselves with Flame Dragon Fist Master Xiaomei, a game in another genre considered dead and obsolete by the ill-informed, the single plane beat em up, took on the task a couple of years ago with Angelian Trigger.

 

Just looking at screenshots, you can see one thing that this game has going for it: it looks amazing. Most of the graphics are made up of high resolution sprites, with those used for the player characters also being lavishly animated. There's some enemies (mainly robotic ones) that are represented by polgyonal models, but most of the enemies, as well as the stages themseves are super-sharp sprites. That aside, most of the other things the game does to build upon the basic concept put forth by Space Harrier are apparently attempt to "modernise" the genre, for better and worse.

 

There are two playable characters to choose from whenever you play, and they are actually different to each other: one can fly around the screen like the Harrier of lore and legend, while the other runs along the ground, but can double jump to evade ground hazards and shoot at airbound enemies, and does all these things a lot more quickly. There are also two modes in which to play: arcade and story. The game's clearly been designed with story mode in mind, though, with arcade put in as a concession to those who prefer purely skill-based play in their shooting games.

 

Arcade mode is what you'd expect: you pick a character and then you play through all of the stages in order, until you complete the game or get killed. However, there are twenty-four stages spread across six planets, and each stage is about five minutes long. So playing through arcade mode means concentrating on shooting and avoiding stuff for two solid hours! By contrast, story mode lets you start from any planet you've previously reached (even if you reached it in arcade mode!), and it also has unlockable permanent upgrades. It also has lots of cutscenes between stages, though they are mercifully skippable.

 

The big gameplay gimmick the game has to offer is the HDCPC meter, and its various uses. It slowly charges over time, and when it's full, you can press a button to spend it in one of three ways: projecting a shield over yourself to pretect you from a single hit, summoning a robot buddy to fly around and shoot enemies until you take damage, or shooting a load of homing beams at every enemy currently onscreen. The shield is he most important one, and it feels like success in the game hinges upon keeping it up as much as possible. There's also times when the homing beams are very useful, too, of course. The kindest thing to do regarding the robot buddy is to move on without mentioning its relative usefulness.

 

Angelian Trigger isn't a perfect successor to Space Harrier and the neglected genre it represents, but it is a game that's decently fun enough to play, and the more I've played it, the more I've grown to like it. It's definitely worth your time, I think. What's weird about it, though, is that in a bizarre circumstance from days gone by, it's a Japan-only release, on Switch at least (I think there's an international release on PC). Did you even know that that kind of nonsense still happened, outside of tie-ins to gameshows and the like? There's obviously no language barrier though, unless you really want to know what's being said in the cutscenes.

Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher (Switch)

 The Monster Rancher series is one with which I'm not very familiar. I do remember, probably more than twenty years ago, spending an afternoon playing one of the GBA Monster rancher games via emulation, keeping the fast forward button held down almost constantly. Even further back, I remember people complaining online that there weren't enough female characters in the anime about whom to write yuri. I am, however, a little more familiar with Ultraman, and with kaiju in general, and right from the announcement of a Monster Rancher game about raising Ultraman kaiju, I was interested. So it was among one of the first batch of physical games I bought shortly after I finally got a Switch late last year.

 

Once I started playing the game, it quickly became one that started taking up big chunks of my time. It's not a game I'm always craving, and not one to which I return every day. But when I do load it up, I'm usually there for well over an hour. The game's got a prertty repetitive design, but in a way that just kind of feels good and eats up time? It's split into weeks, and each week you choose what your kaiju is going to do: rest, train, fight in a tournament, or when they're available, fighting a wild kaiju or exploring a maze-like valley full of treasure. When you train, you pick one stat to increase, or two stats with the downside of slightly lowering another. Tournaments and wild kaiju fights are pretty obvious, and I'll get into combat more later. And all the other things make your kaiju tired, so resting is something you'll just have to do every few weeks. The treasure mazes aren't particularly interesting. You move your kaiju through a simple maze, until you find a place they can dig for treasure. They'll get a few items, occasionally one that might advance the plot a little (if you're even interested in the plot. You could easily play this game for a long long time and never even touch it). 

 

But how do you get a kaiju? The series has, since its start, been famous for the system whereby you put a music CD into your console to generate a monster, and that aforementioned GBA game had you inputting words to make them. In this case, there's something that's kind of a middle ground: the game has an inbuilt database of artists and song names, and at the summoning altar, you search for and select a song that'll probide the basis for your kaiju. The database isn't great, and it really doesn't seem like there's much metal representation, unfortunately. But it's still a decent enough compromise that keeps ties to the series' roots and isn't as boring as just typing in a word, like the GBA game.

 

The combat is interesting, a middle ground between action and turn-based that adds a little extra depth to precedings in a few ways. You can control your kaiju by making them walk towards or away from their opponent. At the bottom of the screen, there's four icons representing attacks, at different distances away from your opponent. You have one attack button, and pressing it will make your kaiju pergorm the attack represented by the icon over which they're curently standing. So distance management is important. Each attack consumes a certain amount of a resource called guts. This is constantly increasing at a speed determined by a few factors. I think (but I'm not sure) that your kaiju's speed stat affects it (it also affects your kaiju's chance of dodging attacks), but their current anger level definitely affects it: the angrier they are, the faster it increases. (Anger generally goes up when you make your kaiju train, and goes down when they win fights. If it reaches its maximum, your kaiju goes on a rampage, which could trigger a few different events).

 

Furthermore, the time limit for all fights, tournament or wild, is sixty seconds. This is actually more important than it sounds as knockouts are relatively rare, and if you're fighting an opponent that vastly outclasses you on paper, you could win a time out victory with a ombination of skill and luck. If you've managed to chip a little of a powerful foe's HP off, and they've missed every attack, you might try to run out the timer with lots of weak attacks, each eating up four or five seconds whether they hit or not. It might not be particularly noble, but it's still very satisfying to pull off.

 

I don't know enough about the Monster Rancher series to say whether the use of kaiju in this one is anything more than a thematic and visual gimmick or not. But even if it is, it's a good one. The ranch menu, that has you overlooking a sweeping vista which your kaiju looming over it is cool, and the battles between the big, lumbering beasts also look and feel cool (and their massive forms make the slow pace of their movement and the time spent waiting for guts to recharge feel appropriate, too). I've had a lot of fun with this game so far, and it's pretty clear when I look at everything I'm yet to achieve that I've barely scratched the surface, and that I'll be coming back to it for a long time to come. I definitely recommend picking a copy up.

Merchant in Dungeon (Switch)

 The English translation of the PC game Recettear came out back in 2010, and as much as I've enjoted playing its addictive combination of Ys-like action RPGing and menu=based shop management (it's one of an exclusive set of RPGs that's I've played all the way through more than once), I've also long wished for a game that scratched the same itch, but on a handheld. Merchant in Dungeon might not be the first game I've played in this quest, but it is the first I've written about. (I'll get to the others someday, honest!) 

 

It has almost the exact same premise as Recettear, too: you've been lumbered with a huge debt by a relative, and you've got to run an item shop to pay it off. There's also a heavy emphasis on item crafting, or at least, on ordering items to be crafted for you. There's a blacksmith and an alchemist/chef in town, and you can bulk order items to be made to fulfill orders that have been made by your customers. You can also buy multiple shops, restaurants, and so on, where your items could theoretically be sold. And as well as the manufactured items, you can also venture into dungeons to kill monsters for loot and hunt for treasure.

 

The dungeons aren't top-down action stages like in Recettear, though, instead being a bunch of rows of five cards, from which you can select from three at a time. The cards represent things like monsters, treasures, empty spaces, and so on. You keep picking cards until your party (made up of yourself and the strongest of the employees from your chain of shops) runs out of HP, or until you find and choose and exit card. With the battles being taken care of automatically, your input here is mainly down to deciding if your party has enough remaining HP, and choosing the next card accordingly.

 

That hands off approach extends to a lot of the game's other portions, too. The crafting, for example: all you have to do is pay the respective shopkeeper, and you can make the order. There's none of the ingredient gathering of the sort you might see in the Atelier games, for example. You'll be doing this a lot, too, as fulfilling the orders is your main source of income, the shops you open being mostly useless after they've sold a few restocks' worth of items. Fulfilling the orders also helps increase the affection each of the game's female characters has towards you, so you can choose to marry one at the end of the game. You can offer them gifts to make it go up even faster, but you really don't need to: by the time I'd finished the game, they were all 100% in love with me, without me even trying. There's a slightly unsavoury aspect to this part of the game too, as shallow as it is: while all of the female characters are drawn as adults, and they're also all employed in adult jobs, two of them are listed as being underage in their (well-hidden) character profiles. What a weird and pointless thing to add in there, to make your otherwise adult characters kids in that way. It's the opposite of the old "draw a little girl but pretend she's an immortal demon" thing, too. Bizarre, but then, the whole romantic aspect of the game feels like it was added as an afterthought and might as well not be there at all, anyway.

 

The main challenge of the game is raising the money to pay your next installment, but once you've completed a dungeon or two, you'll start getting such easily-fulfilled, high-value item requests that while you're given a few weeks for each repayment, you'll be doing it in less than one, and you'll probably be able to pay the last few one after another in one go. It kind of feels like the developers thought up all of these systems for different things to do in the game: the mass production, the card-based dungeon exploration, the management of employees and keeping multiple shops stacked, but then they didn't balance the numbers properly, meaning that getting through the game is so easy that you never have to engage with any of those systems on any but the most shallow level. (What a long sentence!)

 

Merchant in Dungeon is an okay game, and it'll probably keep you occupied for a couple of hours. But that's all. In fact, if you aren't writing a review of it, once you realise you can just charge towards the end of the game, you'll do just that, and get through it even quicker than I did. You can continue your save after paying off your debt, but there's no longer any goal to work towards, nor is there anything interesting enough to get you engaging more deeply with the game's mechanics. Hopefully, a sequel might come out that fixes the problems with this first game. I can't really recommend this one, though, unless you're curious enough to pick it up for a pittance in an eShop sale.

Bad Boy Brother (Switch)

 This game has another title, and once you know it, you'll also know why I was so excited to pre-order it as soon as I knew it existed: Simple Series for Switch vol. 5: Yankii Bros! The Simple series is back (and has been for four previous entries)! With a beat em up about juvenile delinquents! It's almost like they made this game specifically because they knew I was finally going to get a Switch this year or something.

 

It's not just in name only, either, as this is a game that really does keep the Simple spirit alive, for all the good and bad that implies. It's a game with several (too many?) ideas that all tie together well thematically that was also clearly a passion project for its creators. Also, it's got a whole bunch of randomness and grinding, and a ton of stuff to unlock, including both stat upgrades and new special moves. Luckily, the good outweighs the bad. And also: videogames are a creative medium, and most of the things we consider good practice are "rules" rather than "laws". (Of course there are some exceptions: real money shops and gambling are always indefensible and to a game's detriment, as are the dark patterns present in almost every modern phone game. I can't imagine there ever being exceptions there.)

 

What the game is is a beat em up, that uses a vague roguelike structure to facilitate some traditional Simple asset reuse and playtime extension. Each stage has five segments, the first four of which will see you fighting many enemies. They'll either give you a quota of enemies to beat, or an amount of time you have to survive/beat as many enemies as you can. The fifth segment will always be a boss fight, though the bosses are randomly chosen from a small pool for each stage. Before each stage, you'll be dealt a hand of twelve mahjongg tiles, which correspond to various stat and ability uprades. The upgrades increase exponentially when you get matching tiles, and even more if you're able to form scoring hands with them. After each segment, you're given a chance to swap out tiles from your hand with a random selection of four. After you complete a whole stage, you keep all the tile and hand-based upgrades you had at the end of it, then get dealt a whole new hand to get further upgrades.

 

Furthermore, there are aliases. Theses are made at random when you score triple sevens on the roulette at the top of the screen, which turns when you fill up a meter by hitting enemies a lot. They're made at random from words that enemies "drop" (also at random) as you're fighting them. They're always made up of an adjective half that determines their effect, and a noun half that applies a multiplier to the effect. Also they're always nonsense like "Jobless Chihuahua" or "House-Moving Sinbad", because of the multiple layers of randomness involved in their formation. There's also a shop to access between runs, where you use coins earned by defeating lots of enemies to buy more advantageous tiles to add to the pool, special moves performed by bosses you've beaten, and more.

 

Like I said, there are exceptions to many "rules" of what makes a good game, and while I usually hate randomness and upgrades in action games, Bad Boy Brother feels good enough that I can easily overlook them here. It's also admirably committed to its setting. You might expect a budget game that happens to include an English translation to be dry and functional, but all the text, even stuff like the game telling you it's loading or saving your savefile is written "in character", with a little cartoony tough guy edge to it. The most insane (and probably most expensive) bit of flavour is that there's a constant expository rap going on as you play, too. It's always in Japanese, and you'll be too busy playing the game to read the subtitles, but they are there, and it's just another sign of the commitment and passion the developers had for this game.

 

You've probably figured it out by now, but I really like this game, and I enthusiastically recommend it. It's just a ton of fun to play! It's got a worldwide release as a download, but even if you import a cartridge copy from Japan, it includes English and Chinese language options. Not only is it a good game, but it also gives me hope that the Simple series is truly back, and in the hands of people who are willing to keep up its silly, fun, experimental tradition.

Agartha-S (Switch)

 Agartha is a game that's been on my radar for a long time, and I recently got a Nintendo Switch, and it seemed like a good omen that it happened to be on sale for next-to-nothing the first time I was browsing the eShop on there. I didn't even know it had a console port! On first sight, it appears to be a generic indie 2D platformer with super low resolution graphics, but as soon as you actually start pressing buttons and playing the game, it reveals itself to be something far more interesting.

 

What makes the game interesting can be boiled down to two essential ingredients: the world in which it takes place, and the actions the playable characters can perform. The world is made up of various materials: water, dirt, rocks, lava, oil, steam, and so on. And the player characters can manipulate these materials in various ways. The first couple of characters you get to play as have temperature manipulation as their main way of interacting with the world.

 

They can freeze water into ice, or boil it into steam (and of course, steam can be cooled into water, too). Lava can be cooled into rock and vice versa, too. Water and oil can both be swam in, though you go a lot slower in oil, so you mgiht as well just burn it away if it's inconvenient to you. Later characters have more interesting abilities, like teleportation, the ability to push and pull stuff using telekinesis, wearing a hat, swinging around on grappling hooks, and more! There's some slightly more subtle stuff too, like the wizard having a lightning attack that's got a significantly longer range when used underwater.

 

The aim of each stage is simply to use your various abilities to find and reach the exit without dying (whether through taking damage, drowning, or suffocating), though occasionally there'll be a boss to kill before the exit opens. Furthermore, some stages will have a secret second exit that won't appear on your radar, and you'll get no indication that it's there, you just have to find it yourself. All the stages are laid out on a world map in the form of a grid, so suspicious empty squares on there might provide clues as to which stages might possibly contain extra exits. Though I've cleared most of the stages and filled in almost all of the map, I haven't completed the game yet, and I'm actually not sure what the ultimate goal is.

 

What I do know, though, is that Agartha (the S presumably referring to the console that plays host to this port) is a ton of fun, and I just keep going back to it, replaying stages to see how the different characters are able to get through them, and to look those elusive extra exits (and the rare gems that are needed to unlock more characters). It's a definite recommendation, you can get it on PC and Switch for a pittance, and it's totally worth it. Unfortunately, though, it's been out for a few years now, and it doesn't look like the developers, Kanagawa Electrotechnics Laboratory, have released anything since (though they have plenty of earlier games, including Virus Crashers, which I've previously reviewed).