Recent reviews by Angry Nerd Bird

If the idea of playing a bard who finds out the universe is ending, and decides to save the world by going around and singing away the world's problems sounds like a fun time to you, then you'll want to try Wandersong.

I've never seen a game combine music and gameplay and art together in a beautiful and funny and heartfelt way, until I played this game. ♥️

By far one of the best games I've ever played. Tight controls, fun combat, great environments and enemies, fantastic music, challenging but balanced bosses. It's a great time, 10/10!

A stunning little story that brought me to tears multiple times. Worth every penny.

I was extremely excited for this game! The previous Spelunky HD is one of my all time favorites, and my gold standard for modern roguelike games. I can understand that Derek Yu wanted to make his sequel more challenging, but Spelunky 2 goes way too far with it, to the point that it isn't even close to fair anymore.

But to be fair, the game does some things better than its predecessor, and I wanna list some stuff off, both good and bad.

There's lots of new characters! Each character has a unique kind of rope that they use, which is a nice touch. I also really like the newer character designs and the big influx of new characters to unlock.

I like the new golden idol altars in zone 1 more than in the original. The giant pillar is much more manageable than a giant wild card boulder of death that could easily ruin a run by crashing into a shop or a vault far off screen from you.

There are many more zones to explore this time. Not only that, there are two different paths you can take at the end of zone 1! I love that!

I love the turkeys and other mounts that you can use and even keep between floors. Those are cute and I love them.

There are now mini game shops that let you enter a special challenge room where you can earn money and prizes. Sweet!

As for the bad things....

Moles are an obnoxious new enemy that can chase you through walls and floors. I've lost count of how many times they've dropped on me from seemingly out of nowhere because I can't see everywhere at once, or I ended up stuck between a gopher and another hazard and couldn't avoid taking damage because I can't watch the the whole screen.

There is a now an equivalent to the tiki trap that shows up in zone 1, and that's pretty neat! But the arrow traps are now 2 or 3 times as frequent as before. Staying on alert for them means you basically can't ever stop being paranoid about them. The first one wasn't nearly this stressful about that.

Enemies are far more frequent now, and avoiding one enemy very frequently leads you straight into something else.

The first zone has an actual boss enemy that will very easily instantly kill if you aren't extremely careful, and that got old really fast.

Sometimes a level will just randomly be HUGE. That wouldn't necessarily be a big problem on its own, except...

The ghost in this game is much more punishing for players who want to explore a bit. And the thing is, it already WAS punishing for players in the last game. It's just even more so now. It now splits into multiple faster ghosts if you aren't quick to get out when it arrives. The previous game already didn't really give you that much freedom to explore levels, so this change seems needlessly aggressive. I could see this being a feature in a version of the game meant to challenge speedrunners, but having it in normal runs seems cruel.

This game feels a lot like one of those "insane brutal challenge designed to make children cry" challenge mods made for the most dedicated fans of a game. Except that's just the standard game here. And its just not that fun to me.

This would be a whole other thing if the game had a difficulty option, and this were merely the hard mode. But there isn't an option to make any of this less of a chore.

I gave it my best try! But I just can't justify playing it anymore. I sank over 600 hours of my life into the previous game, and I had a blast with it. I'm putting Spelunky 2 down after 30, because it's just not worth playing any more.

Tedious: More Work than Fun

I've barely played it for an hour, but stripping me of ANY equipment and forcing me to return to the blacksmith after dying in a game where you die all the time has made it extremely monotonous before I've ever had a chance to get anywhere. Game requires too many points to upgrade anything, considering how much work it is to get any kills with the garbage equipment you have available in the early game.

The game is going for soulslike gameplay apparently, where I'm going to be repeatedly dying and gradually getting stronger as I experience the game. But it feels far more like a roguelike. Everything in the game is constantly trying to murder me and traps and enemies are all over, in ways that feel far more like Dead Cells or Spelunky than the likes of Dark Souls. But it gives me the same layout each time.

So I'm getting without giving me anything new to explore each time I venture in, making it feel more nad more boring every time I go back in to re-clear the exact same level as last time.

So I'm getting the tedius repetition of a soulslike, with the aggravating difficulty of a roguelike, without the upsides of either to offset them. Nuts to this. Getting my money back.

This game is a true-to-life experience about lives of the people of Possum Springs, a backwater place and former mining town. You play Mae Borowski; a 20-year-old girl who has just dropped out of college and has returned to her hometown for reasons she doesn't care to explain.

For the most part, the gameplay is simply Mae wandering around town; She talks with her friends at work, she talks with the neighbors, she can talk with her mother every morning, and with her father every night before bed. Along the way, she can spend every day hanging out with one or more of her friends; she and her best friend (Gregg), his boyfriend (Angus) and Mae's childhood friend (Bea) meet once a week to play music together in the form of a guitar hero style minigame where you play the bassline.

There are occasionally dream sequences that hint at strange things happening beyond our realm of understanding, but that's spoiler territory.

I came into the game expecting funny dialogue and a neat story. And I got that. But what I didn't expect was how much I would connect with everyone in it. The people - the way they talk to each other, the way Mae can interact with them, all seem so grounded and relatable. Everyone has their own lives, their own story.

Despite being the protagonist, Mae isn't the center of everything going on. She's just a clueless goof wasting her days away, and avoiding talking about her problems the way so many children and young adults do.

I've never had a game drive me to go out of my way to talk to everyone I could find, over and over, before. The writing is very good, and it makes the town and it's people strangely compelling.

There is a point in the game that affected me so deeply that I had to stop playing and think about my life, for a little while. On one evening you get the chance to hang out with Angus, who eventually talks about his past while him and Mae look at constellations in the night sky.

Their conversation turns to belief, and Angus explains how some severe childhood abuse led him away from believing in things we cannot see. There is a line by Angus that hit me so hard, I had to walk away from the game for a while. It struck a chord with me in a way no fictional media has ever accomplished beore. Alec Holowka, the lead developer, is a gifted writer.

That said, the game itself is rather weak on the gameplay front. The writing and music and art design are exceptional, so I didn't mind it. But folks who are less impressed by these type of things will likely find themselves bored with the game.

Regardless. The characters are so memorable. The music is amazing. The story is good, though it serves more as a means to an end in a game that is primarily about the characters rather than the plot. And it works just fine.

I can't praise this title highly enough.

10/10 -Bea is the best.

I have one rule with JRPGs; make the battle system fun and more complex than "Select attack, select target".

Undertale is crazy and sad and cute and I love it.

The fact that whether or not anything dies is entirely up to you is inspired.

Great game! Hardly a Rogue-like (or rogue-lite) but a very solid experience and worth the $15.