Recent reviews by Sarconius

As someone who really enjoyed Getting Over It (after the rage subsided), I simply cannot recommend Golfing Over It. While it has the same overall concept, the execution falls flat. So where to begin?

The narration is atrocious. The accent is so thick I can barely understand half of what he's saying without using the subtitles. The script itself in some parts is almost a direct copy of Getting Over It, with a few choice words replaced. I ended up turning off the narration halfway in because I felt like I'd already heard it all before.

The controls in this game are solid, but only when you're actually in control. You move the ball by holding down left click, moving the mouse to adjust your aim and power, and releasing. As long as the ball remains in the air, you can continue to control it the same way, but there are diminishing returns on the power of each hit until the ball settles on the ground again. Once the ball touches ANY surface, it will turn black and you will be unable to control the ball at all until it stops moving and turns white again. This is where the game becomes needlessly frustrating. Trying to maneuver through tight spaces or getting yourself off a wall your ball is wedged into will often cause you to lose control of the ball the moment you move it, leaving you helpless to watch it bounce slowly back down to the bottom. Yes, the controls in Getting Over It were much harder to learn and near impossible to master, but at least you were always in control. You could still salvage a bad fall and not lose too much progress. Any mistake you make in Golfing Over It, it's almost entirely up to chance how much progress you're going to lose. When you fall, there is a chance the game will pity you and bring you back to the point before you fell, but it only brings more attention to how badly it's designed that you would need a free mulligan at all. Making the player always in control of the ball, but ramping up the difficulty of the course would have made the game much more enjoyable.

The difficulty curve is nonexistent in this game. There's a few problem areas here and there, but I never felt like the game was getting more difficult as I climbed. In fact, a lot of the higher areas were considerably easier with much larger safety nets. The final stretch was so stupidly easy I didn't even feel any satisfaction from beating it.

If you're a fan of Getting Over It, do yourself a favor and skip this one. It's a shameless knockoff, and not a very good one at that.

It's games like these that make me wish Steam had a neutral option for reviews.

Castle in the Darkness is a challenging retro platformer that starts off very enjoyable, but ends up becoming a frustrating experience of instant death traps everywhere and save points few and far between.

So what's good about the game?
- The soundtrack is awesome, even weeks after playing it's still stuck in my head. If you're into chiptune music, you won't be disappointed.
- Exploring and backtracking is encouraged and rewarding. There are secrets everywhere, and most of them require a good eye or an upgrade you'll acquire later in the game. There are plenty of optional bosses, upgrades, and money to be found. Weapons and armor that are sold are generally affordable if you've been exploring everything.
- Most bosses are balanced. While some of them seem brutally difficult at first, after you learn their attack patterns, you'll be kicking yourself for not beating them sooner.
- Magic is fun and intuitive to use. Casting magic requires it to be charged similar to Megaman's charged shots, but it has unlimited uses, making it great for tearing up normal monsters as well as bosses that have limited windows of vulnerability.
- Bonus content for completionists! I won't spoil anything, but getting 100% ties up a few loose ends in the story.

Sounds fun! So what's wrong with the game?
- Instant death traps. Not a big issue early on, but by the second half there's so many instant death spikes, you begin to wonder why the game even gave you a health bar. There are several instances of spikes dropping from the ceiling that are near impossible to avoid without knowing about them ahead of time. This kind of platforming can be enjoyable, but it was poorly implemented here, mostly due to the next issue:
- Save points. The game is balanced enough for the first half of the game that save points aren't an issue, but as the platforming becomes more difficult, the save points feel further and further apart. Not only that, but the placement of save points are poorly done as well. There are a few boss fights where save points are several screens away in either direction, leaving you at risk of instant death before you can even reach them. Nothing more frustrating than beating a boss and dying before you can even save.
- Warp points. For a game that prides itself on exploration and backtracking, there aren't nearly enough warp points. This game is massive, and even getting to a warp point can take a while.
- Broken/glitched bosses. In a single playthrough, I encountered 2 bosses that stopped attacking and moving completely in the middle of the fight, making it an easy win but an empty victory. Another boss was shifted from its usual movement pattern when it was hit with my magic attack, making the fight nearly impossible to win.
- Lack of equipment swapping on the fly. When you first find new weapons/armor/magic, you have about 2 seconds to decide if you want to equip or not. After that, you can only change your loadout at save points. When some bosses are very hard to beat without a particular type of magic, you are practically forced to die over and over while you test each type of magic to see what works.
- Some secrets are too well hidden. While most secrets can be found with a good eye (cracks in the wall, etc.), some are just flat out too hard to find. We're talking illusory walls with absolutely no hints. Spending hours jumping into every wall in hopes of a secret is not fun.
- No map. I don't know what they were thinking with this one. A Metroidvania platformer of this size with no map is just ridiculous, especially with the amount of secrets that are in the game.

So would I recommend this game? It's tough to say. I loved the music and almost all of the boss fights, but my mind keeps going back to the frustration of cheap instant death traps and having to repeat those areas over and over. I imagine anyone just doing a casual playthrough would have a pretty good time, but if you plan to go for 100% completion, well, don't say I didn't warn you.