Recent reviews by KAISERNEON

Jrago: The Demon Hunter is a truly unique and compelling game. The product of a single developer, and his first game, Jrago is a fantastic example of what you can do with premade resources and limited time to create something wonderful that features many of the best aspects of the genre, and achieves its own identity, without compromising on design quality.

Rather than an open-ended experience, Jrago focuses on action platforming spread across stages set up as chapters. You begin in Eden, your hometown, and your journey starts with traveling to Lighthaven to assist with repelling a demon invasion. Along the way you acquire spells, equipment, and subweapons to help you traverse the maps and slay demons before reaching a signature boss for each chapter area. Despite the focus on linear progression, it gets its metroidvania elements right, with backtracking to complete maps, uncover new bosses, and finish acquiring gear and spells later on after you arrive at Lighthaven.

Jrago has its own cautious and intense style of gameplay that doesn't quite fit into the mold of a typical action RPG. It may seem unusually punishing at first with virtually relentless enemy waves, but once you give it time, and adapt to the challenge it presents you, it comes together splendidly. Enemies are absolutely vast, and their attacks can stack without interruption, meaning if you act careless and get cornered, they can pile up and absolutely destroy you. It's both hilarious and intimidating seeing how many enemies can appear on your screen at once, but they are in fact limited in quantity, and only reappear after reaching a sanctuary (save room). Your best efforts are served by discreetly pushing forward, utilizing quick movement, deliberate positioning, and rapid spell and subweapon casting to trim enemy numbers, leveling up until you're sufficiently strong to defeat them with few hits and minimal damage, and then overtaking the stage boss.

There's a cathartic pleasure in mowing down vast hordes of demons with a relentless assault of spears, tomahawks, tornadoes, and melee strikes using tactical movement and positioning. Likewise, the bosses fall this way, with a platforming arena you navigate to unleash a healthbar-incinerating bombardment on them. As you gain power, the violence you dispense is just absolutely relentless. Toward the end of the game, this involves a bit of menu management to quickly switch spells, but it doesn't take time to navigate the menus or load them, so the gameplay is hardly affected. The enemies themselves are delightful in death, often screaming, splattering, or falling apart as you strike them down, and the major demons and bosses curse you with a guttural "DEMON SLAYER...!" once they're destroyed. It really drives home the feeling of being a righteous demon slayer as you get more powerful and accustomed to the game mechanics.

Speaking of feeling like a DEMON SLAYER, the game is driven by a strong and brooding instrumental Doom/Thrash Metal soundtrack composed by the game dev himself. This is easily a highlight of the game, especially when you can find individual tracks from the OST throughout the world along with their art covers. Complimenting this are eloquently written verses that build a Christian theme for the demon occupation and tragedy that befell the world.

As I mentioned before, the game utilizes a lot of premade assets, and they coalesce into a vivid and unique appearance that is quite unlike anything I've seen. The author took time to carefully arrange the visuals with aesthetic consideration, layering graphics and backgrounds to creature an impressive, almost psychedelic, gothic landscape. it doesn't come across as being cheap or effortless whatsoever. Honestly, if you can handle the gruesome charm of something like Cruelty Squad, you can easily see the somber beauty in Jrago's form.

You can clearly tell the developer played through his game and put careful consideration into progression. There's no wasted features, or errant design. Everything is paced properly, and all equipment and spells are given the proper time and usefulness to be utilized. There's a satisfying power curve that ramps and stays coherent all the way to the end, and the stage design builds to satisfying difficulty, with a few timeless nods to Castlevania.

Jrago The Demon Hunter is an incredible effort from a first time developer. To put it simply, Jrago is metal. It embraces the full sincerity of the aesthetic, and none of the ironic trappings of the modern era of pop culture. The game is fully recommended to Action RPG fans, metal heads, or just fans of obscure indie games that deserve more attention.

Something to note: The game is fully compatible with the Steam Deck, and offers a in-game visual guide to controls. The developer also provided a comprehensive list of guides on the Community Hub, along with a complete video longplay.

Chi Ninja has the aesthetics of a very early NES game, like the ones made around 1986, and plays better than you think. It honestly feels fantastic to dash around, sending shurikens back at enemies with well-timed strikes, bouncing off enemies with down slashes, lining up your own ninja stars, etc.. It has a lot of the tricks you'd intuitively expect from modern games, betraying the appearance of a retro title.

It could be great for speedrunners, but there's no timer. In fact, Chi Ninja is a very streamlined game. There are no hidden paths, no music, no stage select, and no options. It's just you, your ninja skills, and the blade (and shurikens too). However, there are save points, giving you a chance to suspend the game and come back later.

One thing to keep in mind is striking enemies with your sword replenishes your shuriken reserve. You're gonna need this trick for the bosses, which are hilariously oversized and pretty great all around. They seem cheesy at first, but your sword dash has invincibility, which is essential for knocking them down and traversing the curiously Mario-like stages. Overall, Chi Ninja is not an exceptionally hard game, but it demands dexterity, and feels rewarding to play. Maybe a sequel could expand on the concept, because the foundation here is solid. Overall, not a bad way to spend an hour or two, and appropriately priced for its entertainment value.

One neat thing to note: moving behind certain boxes and shrubs protects you, letting you strike from the shadows. It's not an essential part of the gameplay, but a nice touch befitting a ninja.

Metaloid Origin is not just a truly great-looking pixel art game, it combines some of the best attributes of handheld and classic platformers. It's richly detailed, with careful attention paid to the animations, effects, and spritework. It has clean controls, smooth performance, with cute and cool characters, a good variety of enemy designs all around, and provides all of this while accomplishing tight platforming and action. More than just "good enough", Metaloid has all the nuances, like the perfect hit stun feeling, the blinking invulnerability, varied enemy patterns, and all those sort of things you don't think about but expect naturally in a platformer in this style. Metaloid looks and plays very similar to an Inti Creates game, which is an outstanding achievement considering it is the work of a tiny independent studio, and from what I can tell, a single graphics artist. This game would have easily been a top shelf product on the Nintendo DS or earlier. Don't go into this expecting a strict Mega Man experience though. Metaloid Origin is doing its own thing to separate itself from the previous entry in the series while exploring new ideas and progression systems.

The premise is neat. At the start you can pick one of three powercable-tailed cybercats, called "Predators", and use their powers to fight against the disguised imperialism of the Lucian Corporation, a foreign superpower pretending to contribute while set on extracting the resources of planet Utopa. It's a cool story that doesn't weigh the game down, as Metaloid Origins is focused on delivering a great action experience first and foremost. Levels are very diverse, with large and open areas, but never too confusing since they all lead towards a single goal. You have to play them in order, but they're carefully designed as a result, reflective of a steady progression of character abilities you acquire, and progressing through the game has you finding a peculiar story-related foe, who upon being defeated, drops an item that unlocks higher levels of origin power giving you access to new and improved skills.

This mechanic leads to the other thematic aspect of Metaloid Origin. Building strength revolves entirely around collecting purple gems, the resource of planet Utopa that the Lucian Corporation craves, an item that functions as both a source of energy and currency for your Predator. These gems support everything from purchasing upgrades to healing, and even restarting from death, performing the role of extra lives besides. These gems are abundant and everywhere, floating in the air, bursting out of major robot enemies, even being found as packaged blocks in a Lucian mining operation. You'll be collecting and spending a ton of them, and you can make the game as convenient as you need it by farming for gems if you need extra healing or weapons to push through certain stages and bosses. Honestly, it's a great story-related way of providing accessibility without hurting the core gameplay loop that makes Metaloid fun.

My only complaints for the game would be that bosses aren't super memorable. They have quirky dialogue and cool designs, but they feel like outspoken versions of stage enemies rather than truly distinguished robot masters, and the English dialogue could use proofreading, but it's nothing that disturbs the overall enjoyment of the experience, and hardly a sin given the size and budget of the development team. Metaloid Origin is genuinely fantastic, a steal for the price, and you'll have a great time if you appreciate quality 2D platformers with gorgeous artwork.

Play as a voluptuous supernatural investigator named Anna who travels to an amusement park constructed inside the imagination of a friendly gentleman who makes churros, cosplay outfits, and dances for her, where she decides to retire from her job and takes over the park, making that gentleman her father, and a self-doubting coworker tasked with detaining her into her boyfriend, while dealing with the mess a cute, awkward, and equally busty nightmare-fueled girl causes all over the place.

You basically get that and a whole bunch of other things in Black Dream, an adorable, fascinating, and overall sexy and strangely wholesome game. The protagonist is very whimsical but self-assured, and the characters have distinct personalities revealed with an incredible amount of original handmade full-screen pixel art scenes. It feels like something you would discover on the PC-98, or a classic OVA made into an interactive anime adventure. It's not a visual novel, but not quite a regular RPG. To say it's a hidden object game is not descriptive enough either I feel. Basically, Black Dream is like a toybox for you to uncover a ton of cute and well-made novelties that combine into an adventure with a comical, quirky, and surprisingly sentimental story.

The overall impression Black Dream gives is very much like a lucid dream, with curious, richly detailed, and highly animated environments. A core part of the game is obtaining cute and sexy outfits for Anna that show up in nearly all the hand-drawn cutscenes and the main battle system that drives the gameplay. These outfits can also change the way characters respond to you, and even unlock achievements, hidden scenes, and endings. Black dream has quite a lot to discover, and gets you interested from the start with a great animated title screen and introduction. The game prevents routine as it keeps reinventing itself as you play it. Even with a roughly seven hour runtime to uncover everything, it never feels like you see anything twice. You can easily tell that Black Dream is a labor of love.

Overall, I'd have to say this game is a very fun and good-natured adventure, and makes the best use out of one of the oldest (and greatest) rpgmaker engines. It just got a massive free upgrade too that overhauled the artwork, gameplay, and cutscenes, making it a much better and overall more coherent experience. While it's not made for any particular audience from what I can tell, Black Dream is one of those obscure indie games I think anybody willing to jump into something strange will enjoy quite a lot. Definitely a recommendation from me.

Metagal is pretty good, all things considered. The sprite work is exceptional, with lush stages and enemies, putting it up there with the best looking games of the 16-bit era, if not better. The characters are endearing, with plenty of charm put into their animations and details that might get overlooked. For example, the gals have really cute defeated sprites when you beat them, and I appreciate how Metagal's theme gets remixed to fit the stage whenever she's the boss of one of her sister stages. What makes this even better is that you can play as the four primary gal bosses after you clear the game once with Meta, and they each have enough to offer that they are basically transforming the game into a new experience with each playthrough, a very nice and unexpected touch which helps give the game its own identity. There's an obvious Megaman inspiration going on here of course, but Metagal feels like a honest homage with its own charm rather than a derivative effort.

One of the differences is you can easily farm for lives, which can be used to restart at each screen or to even restore your health like e-tanks in Megaman. This isn't required at any point to complete the game, but it does make Metagal more forgiving than most. Your special weapon meter also recharges over time, and it's shared across all weapons including your charge shot, which is a nice touch that gives incentive to freely use every weapon you obtain. There's only a few of them, but the weapons you get are impactful and vital to traversing the stages and overcoming obstacles, so you want to use them as much as possible anyways. You won't be holding back on multiple full meters for a boss fight or swapping weapons around in an inventory screen like other megaman games. There are passive upgrades too of course, but you can get them in any order, and they'll unlock your potential in the same way.

Like other reviews are saying, there are a few platforming issues, and the enemy placement could be better in some cases, but the controls are on point, and there's nothing serious enough to damage your enjoyment that a little effort can't overcome. It only takes a few hours for a first run to beat Metagal, then you unlock the other gals, power them up, and aim for more clears, or even speedrunning if that's your thing, since the game provides scoring based on your time. Overall, I'd say the price is a very fair point for the amount of enjoyment you get out of the experience. I really like Metagal and will be moving on to the sequel for sure.

Smells good.

Basically, in Dark Light you take Hunk from Resident Evil, give him a katana and a bunch of guns, a ghost and lift jump from Destiny, let him space stomp like Isaac from Dead space, and set him out against a dark, sci-fi occult world to uncover the secrets of humanity's ruin.

Sounds good, right? Even in early access, Dark Light is a fantastic-looking, imaginative game. It's falls into the metroidvania genre, but cuts closer to Dead Cells with handmade map design. There is an intent focus on combat with a very high skill ceiling, with abilities meant for kicking ass rather than solving puzzles. You got high tech alternate-reality guns, swords, knives, and more, with hidden weapons derived from bosses, a classic "dropkick" style attack, a destructive dash that slams foes around, and a challenge present in managing these with rolls and parries to create openings in your opponents or to even send them soaring to their death. It can admittedly feel a little rough at times around the edges, with enemies and situations occasionally getting fiddly, but at its core Dark Light is excellent at combining the aforementioned attributes into a brisk rhythm for the player to discover.

The game's art style uses high definition pre-rendered graphics evocative of the PS1 era, with blackish hues balanced by intense teal, green, red, and orange highlights. Expect to see cybernetic and occult themes, with wires, robotics, and skull motifs everywhere, classical statues of angels and knights, dragons, powersuits, giant wasps, laboratory horrors, and more. It succeeds enormously at presenting a richly detailed apocalyptic cybernetic world reminiscent of darksynth album covers. The music in turn complements the art very well, and backs the intensity of the action and goes hard for the boss battles while maintaining a brooding ambiance when exploring the ruined and mutated landscapes.

Dark Light has a responsive and committed developer team of three adding features, squashing bugs, and filling in content on a reassuring schedule. What you have right now is a functionally complete experience that clocks in around 10 hours at the time I'm writing this. There's no ending yet, but it's still worth the ride and a good purchase if you're willing to support an indie game with a lot of promise. I at least recommend you keep at eye on it and jump in for its hopeful release at the end of 2021. Dark Light is already great and can only get better.

Well, you definitely get more than what you pay for with Leroy at the moment.

That, and the Tekken community put the Tekken team on blast regarding Leroy's balance, and Murray responded quickly and professionally, and promised quick balances, so my review is positive in light of these facts. We'll see how it goes. This dude is a badass concept, but wait for the February patch before committing to him.

1/15/2020: Addendum: the developers have addressed concerns over difficulty with a patch that lets players choose an easier mode so they can focus on the story. With this addition I feel I can recommend this game to anyone, regardless of skill level, looking for a unique and high quality metroidvania-ish experience.

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It's a mouthful to summarize, but Demoniaca is essentially a metroidvania using King of Fighters-inspired design and movement to create a platformer brawler with a fighting game emphasis on timing and attacks, a Gothic metal vibe, and graphics reminiscent of the Playstation era. If you give this game a chance and go into it with an idea to love what it provides, indie roughness and all, you're going to get a niche and highly rewarding experience, but it's nonetheless a challenging game that can seem hard to start with.

Look, make no mistakes (literally, in some cases!), Demoniaca can be devilishly hard, but strikingly competent and requires patience and effort to see it shine. It's easy to feel overwhelmed at the beginning; in fact, to make a comparison, the game is basically as difficult as starting Bloodstained on Nightmare difficulty. However, in Demoniaca your weapons are your fists and feet. You get an assortment of skills and spells you activate much like the ones you acquire in SotN, and you'll need to learn their inputs and their hitboxes and use them to attack the enemies safely. You have four different attack buttons, and you need to learn what they do as you're standing and airborne, along with the inputs needed to change their functions, when approaching the game. That's really the gist of it; you always have tools needed to engage and escape, and the game will punish you for being careless. This feeling eases up however, and if you play your cards right, you can become an unstoppable force towards the end, but you'll always have to stop and analyze each enemy you face off as you make your way through Demoniaca's surrealist gothic castle.

Speaking of which, I really love the aesthetic. The game is classic gothic edginess, and plays it completely straight and owns the aesthetic with pride. The prerendered backgrounds in particular provide dark and elegant designs that remind me of the type you'd find in a Tri-Ace title from 20 years ago, and the enemies are all hand-drawn in the sort of macabre style you'd get out of an old dungeon master notebook. The game never buries itself too deep into seriousness, but instead plays with the style and provides a captivating and fun romp through the products of an imagination addicted to all sorts of doomish and progressive metal. That's also another positive note: the soundtrack is boss and perfectly carries the tone of the game, and building your soul energy meter gives you a literal rush accompanied by a special track and animations that endure exactly for the length of the power up.

Demoniaca basically is a product of love, and captures all the roughness and nuttiness you'd expect out of a darling indie title that fears nothing. The game throws around explicit references to other games with glee, and has lots of amusing and eye-opening content, especially if you keep the adult visuals option enabled. If you want a hardcore game that satisfies, pick this one up.

Raksasi is a top-down action rogue-like with some RPG trimmings and item randomization. Basically, you get different items between runs, and naturally some will be amazing and others not so much, or even detrimental if you're not careful about what they do, but you'll always pull through if you pay attention, practice your reactions and improve your understanding of the enemies. Of course, that all depends on how good the gameplay is, but you know what? Raksasi feels great. The action is clean and accurate, and the experience is strict but never unfair. Because of that, some have compared Raksasi to a Souls-like experience, which is true in that it expects a lot of patience and awareness, but if you're familiar with Dead Cells, I think it's more accurate to say it's similar to that game, as both have a lot in common, including an emphasis on player skill rather than luck. You collect a lot of interesting and quirky items that will do a lot for you, but you just need to "git gud", so to speak, to really tackle the game's challenges.

That doesn't mean Raksasi is strictly for hardcore players, though. The game's tough, but what softens the difficulty is a progression system where you get to build your character's strength between runs. This includes hard stats, like health and damage, but there's some interesting nuance going on here too. You can add another weapon slot, start with an alternate weapon, extra keys, and a few other neat upgrades. There's a unique system implemented where you can add rooms to each level that benefit your attempt, such as a weapon armory, treasure room, challenge room, etc. and these rooms can be improved, making successive runs easier and more rewarding. For example, the armory starts with a single weapon and a randomization option, but you can upgrade it to feature four different weapons, and after that you upgrade it to have only two weapons, but immensely strong ones with end-game potential.

I'd also like to mention that despite being developed in Chinese, the developers are striving for a very fluent experience in English. What they have already reads very well, and they continue to improve the writing which is really cool considering the game has a ton of lore besides an intriguing background story. There's no machine translation going on here, so don't let the language tags deter you.

Raksasi is essentially a complete experience despite being listed as Early Access, and is being sold for a very reasonable price given how much content and variety the developers have produced already. Check out the early access description; the developers are committed to making something truly great, and they're very active in their Discord as well as the forums. If you're a fan of this genre, or merely curious, you really can't go wrong picking this one up. It's a great game and these guys deserve your support.