Nose: The Great Keana Edition (PC)

 Nose is almost the platonic ideal of the soulslike. It has pretty much everything you'd expect from such a game: enemies that are significantly tougher than you, gates that are locked from the other side, a universal resource that's gained from killing enemies that serves as both currency and experience points, elevators with big buttons you have to step on to activte, a big poisonous swamp, and so on.

 

So closely does it adhere to the formula that it's almost difficult to describe without just describing soulslikes as a concept. I guess the best I can do is to note the ways in which it differs from the formula. Mechanically, there's not much new on offer here. It's a fir bit easier than the actual Dark Souls games and even Bloodborne, but it's not as easy as the likes of Code Vein. I think the biggest difference between Nose and its genremates mechancally is that when you're killed, instead of dropping all of your Keana (the aforementioned resource), and having to go and reclaim it, you just respawn having lost half of what you had. It doesn't seem like a big difference at first, but if you had a lot of Keana before dying, you might respawn with enough to level up a couple of times, making your next attempt very slightly easier than the last one.

 

It's aesthetically and thematically where Nose really makes its mark, though. It might just be because I'm playing it on the lowest settings (and my laptop still feels like it's going to burn a hole in my leg!), but it's got a very cute low polygon count look to it that makes it feel like what would have happened if a soulslike had been released on the Dreamcast (and if Dreamcast games had significantly longer draw distances). Thematically, it's kind of weird. There's people sitting around being sad, like in a normal soulslike, but there's also the whole "nose" aspect to the world.

 

It seems like the main god of the world is named Nose, and as you go around, you'll sometimes see giant noses carved from stone or sculpted in metal. The bonfire equivalents are well-like structures decorated with noses. There's a building called The Temple of Nose housing living statues and an angry drunk giant, and an early boss you fight is a giant black nose that scutters around on tentacles called Nose Hair Demon. I haven't completed the game yet, but I really hope there's some kind of explanation for all this at the end of it. or maybe I don't? Maybe it's better for a weird game to just be weird?

 

I definitely recommend playing Nose. It's a very fun game, with a perfectly pitched level of difficulty (in my opinion, at least), and it's also free! And don't worry about the computer thing, my laptop is old and preowned, so people who prioritise being able to play high-spec PC games should have no trouble at all on running it on its highest settings.

Cyvern: The Dragon Weapons (Arcade)

 It's a shooting game about, like the title suggests, cybernetic wyverns. But it borrows more from its contemporaries like Battle Garegga and Gunbird than it does its thematic forebears like Dragon Spirit and Saint Dragon. In the game's options you can change the title screen to say Kiryu in kanji instead of Cyvern, but as far as I know, this isn't the default option in any region. Which is odd.

 

So, there are three cyverns you can play as, and in shooting game tradition, they're red, blue, and green. They all have different normal shots, but the big difference between them is their breath weapons, referred to ingame as Banish. Red has a useless short-range flame thrower, blue is the best with a wide-spreading, semi-homing lightning attack, and green is okay with its powerful and cool-looking laser, that's just slightly impractical for scoring. 

 

Scoring and your Banish attack are closely related in a couple of ways. Firstly, there's a Garegga-esque medal system, though it's a lot easier to manage. Medals appear when you destroy ground-based enemies with your Banish, they start at fifty points, and gradually get up to ten thousand points, as long as you don't let any drop off the bottom of the screen. Though, since you completely control when medals appear, and because they're always on the ground rather than falling from the sky, that's not liely to happen. Furthermore, at least five medals of one level have to have appeared before medals of the next level will appear. With a bit of skill, you can get ten thousand point medals to start appearing about halfway through the first stage! 

 

There's some other scoring techniques, too. Power-ups are dropped by yellow ships, and if you destroy these ships with normal shows, they drop two half-power ups, while iff you destroy them with Banish, they destroy one full power-up. The full power-up is not only more convenient, but also, when you're already at full power, it's worth five thousand points, while the half power-ups are only worth five hundred each. Also, I'm not completely sure on the requisite conditions, but it seems like there are harder versions of the bosses that are worth signifiantly more points. I think the first stage requires you to have scored at least 175000 points and to not have lost any lives before the boss appears.

 

Unfortunately, while the game's mechanics are very interesting and fun to engage with, there's a massive problem in the game's design: the second stage. It's long, it's boring, it mostly takes place in a cloudy sky, with no ground enemies to kill for medals, and it ends with a boss fight that is also long and boring. The weird thing is, on occasions when I've made it through the other side of this ordeal, the third stage is a lot more entertaining, and a lot shorter. For some reason, the developers saw fit to scare people away from their game with this stage that suggests that everything you saw in the first stage was all the good ideas they had, and you might as well stop playing.

 

That being said, I think the mechanics present in Cyvern are interesting and fun enough that the terrible second stage isn't enough to make me stop playing, and if it ever gets an Arcade Archives release, I'll probably pick it up there. But unless you already really like shooting games, this really isn't a gateway game that'll make you change your ways.