Recent reviews by platinumplatypus

.

Void Stranger has quickly become one of my all time favorites. I tend to have trouble sticking with puzzle games, but this one did an incredibly good job of keeping me interested. The puzzles themselves were a ton of fun, and the narrative and presentation were great, which helped a lot to keep me engaged on the harder puzzles that I would normally not feel up to tackling. I don't feel at liberty to get much more specific, it's a very "you're better off going in knowing nothing" game, but I highly recommend it.

TL;DR Good game, cute visual style, fun design choices, questionable anatomy. Highly recommend to both people new to shmups and people who are pretty experienced with the genre.

Really solid indie shmup with a pretty unique style. Outside/Sotonohito combines elements from both CAVE and Touhou games alongside his own ideas to make for really interesting attack patterns, and nicely ties it together in a way that makes it appealing to people who like either of those classic styles. I also greatly appreciate all the Ketsui references, they were really cool to see and didn't feel at all intrusive.

The one thing which really stood out to me about this one, and which I really enjoyed, was that it felt very heavily designed to favor players with good shmup fundamentals. With the small hitboxes and long deathbomb timing, a player who's already got a solid grasp on things like streaming/restreaming and resource management can really get away with some risky plays you don't normally see in other shmups. I found this aspect to be a lot of fun, I enjoy being rewarded for playing aggressively in most games regardless of genre and this one really did a lot for me in that regard. I'd still strongly recommend the game to people who are inexperienced with shmups, the easy mode is pretty good and there's a nice variety of settings to ramp up the difficulty, but I really think this game is at its best for intermediate or high level players who want to play something that lets them cut loose a bit.

I will say, I feel that the defensive resources could use a tiny bit of a nerf. With a strong hyper that helps restore your bombs, a strong bomb that helps restore some of your hyper, and a really long deathbomb period (that also applies to hyper activation), you can stretch a single life for a pretty long while just by cycling your resources and stretching long enough between uses that you don't run dry. This isn't bad per se, I like shmups where you've got resources to manage rather than just being all shooting and dodging, but I felt that a lot of the stages were a little underwhelming because I could usually blow through them with resources any time things got hairy, and be able to regenerate those resources pretty soon after. Bosses didn't really have this problem though since you can't regen resources as quickly during them, and the boss pattern design was stellar. I think the stage design was also pretty good but I just didn't have as much incentive to route since I was rarely lacking for resources. Despite all that, the defensive resources are still fun to use (I love games with hypers and this one did it really well) so it's not a big deal that they were a little overtuned.

Overall, one of my favorite indie shmups, and I'm excited to eventually play more of this game and of what Outside makes down the line. Also haha funny boobs.

I love the usage of subweapons and the shield system to make a super flashy game without it being impossibly difficult. It's a lot of fun to strategize and route with your subweapon usage in order to keep yourself alive.

Pretty cool indie shmup! The pacing is great and I really dig the style.

I like the subweapons, but I do think they could stand to be nerfed a little. A lot of the patterns are almost entirely nullified by decent gauge management. Unlike other games like Akashicverse and Hellsinker that have similarly powerful defensive tools, this one doesn't quite have the sheer input difficulty or technical complexity to justify having that much bullet deletion and damage output.

Overall solid game aside from those issues, and I'd definitely still recommend it despite them.

Neat, but not really anything special. Also in need of some tweaking to make things more enjoyable. More tells on attacks, higher movespeed and variable movespeed while firing, smaller and visible hitbox are the main things it'd benefit from. Bosses are also super bullet-spongy and don't really have much variation in attacks. With those tweaks and maybe some special mechanics to set it apart from other "just shoot and dodge" shmups I think it could be cool.

This game has been a fantastic stepping stone into the shmup genre as a whole for me. The game seems very well-designed, with a good combination of patterns being readable and requiring learning. The learning curve is very well done, with the transitions between both normal and hyper and hyper and parallel being pretty smooth.

Edit: Looking back a year or so later, I think what really stuck with my are the style and the way the scoring system was handled. The music is very energetic and enjoyable and the art is very vibrant without being over the top.

The scoring system is among my favorites in any game for how well it's woven into survival gameplay. You're already rewarded with high damage (or other utilities) for using your subweapons so by making killing enemies with the subweapon a primary source of score, it's a natural progression to start looking at situations where you're already using subweapon for damage and seeing how you can route it to get score from them. This is further ramped up by the way Parallel mode incentivizes scoring by giving you lives every 15 million points instead of giving two at specific score values like the other modes. You have a reason to play a little bit riskier and rework the stuff you were already doing to get more score so that if you get it right it pays off with more lives in the long term. Finally, I really love that bombs aren't an anti-scoring thing. So many games make bombing just a horrendous play when scoring so it's refreshing to see them being used instead to present the player with a question: whether to use a bomb in a scenario where it will have a lot of score value or to save it for a scenario when they might be in danger of losing a life. It all works together so well and I love it.

This game is fantastic. Unfortunately the majority of its life in public view was its existence as a funny meme rage game for streamers to play and viewers to laugh at. The vast majority of people never made it to the "endgame checkpoint" of the first babe, let alone played the other two babes. The game's main virtue in my opinion is how learnable it is. You're punished for your mistakes, but as you get better and better your mistakes happen less and less often. The controls are janky for a bit, but 10 hours in they're not. New mechanics are thrown at you, but over time you find ways to overcome them. Suspense is also handled very well. Progress feels good to make, and completing each babe (and the other alternate challenges) feels like a huge achievement, because of all the work leading up to it and the tension of not knowing whether or not you're safe until the very end. If you're willing to deal with some frustration in exchange for a rewarding experience, I highly recommend this. If you're not interested in said frustration/reward then you probably don't want to pick it up.
Also ♥♥♥♥ snake ring

Very good.

This soundtrack is absolutely amazing. Curtis Schweitzer is a mastermind.