Reseñas recientes de BaronHaynes

Neat, fast-paced collectathon platformer with a low-pixel retro theme. You play as a floaty puffball that collects glowy things to restore color to the world. The difficulty ramps up pretty quickly, and the requirements for advancing are a bit steep, but there's a lot of satisfaction to be had in controlling this character well.

It's not my favorite indie platformer on here, but it's definitely worth a look if you like these.

A very fun, but (at the moment) unpolished game that gets a lot of its enjoyment out of who you play it with, and how. Played competitively it's a bit of a mixed bag, with some courses being a little too clever for their own good and some glitches and connection issues causing problems from time to time. As a less-serious party experience, it's an absolute riot. It takes some time to figure out which of the adjustable settings are suited for actual gameplay and not just one-off gimmicks (there are a lot of goofy ball shapes that are funny for 2 minutes and then never again), but you can get many hours of entertainment out of this game if you and your friends discover the right way to play it.

The lobby badly needs a search feature and some word filtering, though. It's like wading through an edgelord septic tank.

This is an astonishingly good game, easily the best open-world platformer (or "Metroidvania") I've ever played, and a really gratifying experience from start to finish. I had never heard of it before it was released, and going in with no expectations, I was surprised how much I ended up loving it.

As with most open-world platformers, there's a focus on exploration and upgrades to open new areas, and a variety of enemy types and difficult boss fights. You will stumble on battles you're not prepared for; you will get killed far away from respawn points; you will get lost and have to figure out what to do next. For a lot of players, these are automatic pluses -- part of this genre of game is about getting lost and having to find your way, and the thrill of accquiring a dash, wall climb, or double jump and remembering which areas you couldn't reach that are now available to you.

And Hallownest and the characters that populate it really made me want to find my way through it. The game has such a rich personality, grim and bleak and haunting in its setting, but feisty and cute and compelling in the life you encounter on your journey. It's dark but (in my opinion) not depressing. Much of the backstory of this world is hidden in the margins and up to you to piece together, but with enough work almost everything becomes clear, which is appropriately a reflection of the genre in a mechanical sense.

These kinds of games can get bogged down in backtracking, repetitive or bland areas, unintuitive hints on what to do next, and a lopsided difficulty curve depending on what you unlock in what order. For me, Hollow Knight miraculously minimized all the negatives of the genre while emphasizing all the positives. This is a wonderful world to explore and master, both mechanically and aesthetically. I highly recommend giving it a try!

A really strong action-platformer, think Ninja Gaiden by way of Super Meat Boy. It's more focused on platforming than combat, with enemies going down in one hit -- the challenge lies in skillful navigation of hazards with double jumps and ceiling/wall climbing.

A lot of modern "retro-style" games look and feel neat for a while and get bogged down in simplistic gameplay, but Mute Crimson+ is the real deal, steadily increasing in challenge and complexity. This is a tough and rewarding game and I highly recommend it.

My playtime is really high on this because I did speedruns of it a couple years ago. I was given a dev key to try it out, and later bought extra copies for friends because I enjoyed it so much.

Despite the thumbs down, this is more of a mixed review (which I wish Steam would allow). Just Cause 3 is like a 6/10 game - it's very possible to have a good time with it, but you have to slog through a lot of repetitious gameplay via clunky controls, and plenty of crashes and technical issues.

BETTER THAN JC2:
-More versatility with the grappling hook, like multiple tethers and reeling enemies off cliffs
-The wingsuit is pretty fun once you get the hang of it
-It's fun to feel like you're leading a resistance army against the island
-The music is very good

WORSE THAN JC2:
-Minimap is gone
-Weapon upgrades are gone, and the game is a lot more boring for it. You'll find your favorite early on and it'll never improve in accuracy, damage, or ammo capacity.
-Gear Mods are collected by doing challenges. Many challenges are frustratingly difficult and farming them slows down the game
-The island is bigger and emptier with little to do and less rewards to find. There's a lot of boring travel time.
-Enemy ragdoll physics from getting shot, tethered, or thrown around are less entertaining. There's less satisfaction combat
-Your most common phrase will be "Who the ♥♥♥♥ is shooting at me"
-Movement feels much clunkier and you'll spend a lot of time overcorrecting, trying to get Rico to jump off ledges, turn around, or let go of a grapple.
-Closing the wingsuit or grappling in from it requires hours of challenges to unlock, and it's a pain in the ass to land with it until then.

I wish I'd had a better experience with it, maybe it's more fun the better you are at it, and if you know exactly how to pace yourself. Maybe I'll change it to a recommend if I play it a second time. But as I tried to free all the little towns around Medici, it quickly became tedious busywork, and you spend so much time in the air that it's hard to feel like anyone down there matters.

Buy it on sale if you liked JC2 and want some more, but if you're hoping for a markedly better experience, it'll probably disappoint you.

Secrets of Rætikon is a flight-based puzzle platformer with a gorgeous low-poly aesthetic, nimble controls, and some excellent and imaginative setpieces. It's hampered a bit by technical issues, punishing item-collection requirements, and -- depending on your point of view -- how the final section of the game works. I'll talk more on that later with a spoiler warning.

You control a bird-like creature trying to activate a large machine with an unknown purpose. You explore several large forest and cave environments to collect the energy you need. Along the way, you'll encounter by a variety of flora and fauna, some peaceful, some hostile, and find runes that expand the lore of the world once you translate them. The translation element was really impressive to me, and seemed to embody the philosophy of the game: a high level of trust for the player to intuit and understand what was necessary without explicit hints or hand-holding.

This sort of thing is a high-wire act in puzzle-platformers or adventure games, rarely tried since the early 90s. Done wrong, it's baffling and arbitrary, and leads to players getting lost and failing to understand quirks of the game's mechanics that aren't explained. Done well, it gives an immense satisfaction that you had a creative idea and it actually worked. I had several of these moments playing Rætikon.

Translating the runes isn't automatic even as you pick up the letters, and your bird character has to cling to the rune stone while you're trying to decipher what it says, still able to be attacked (or drown if the rune is underwater). Similarly, some machines and environmental challenges are presented with no clues about what they're for or how to interact with and navigate them. I was careful to keep track of artifacts I found, where I had left them, and where they might be necessary, and the game rewarded me for it in a way I wasn't expecting. Trusting the player to bring their A-game and be patient and resourceful enough to figure it out is a huge risk, likely to alienate a lot of players, but the rewards are similarly big in a way that's hard to quantify.

The game unfortunately has some the technical issues common in indie development, like objects getting lost behind foreground elements (most indicate the presence with an outline, but not all), or the player character getting stuck under heavy objects or inside level geometry (uncommon, but it can happen). There's only one auto-save and no manual save system. Every single sliver is required to finish the game, although you have a button that will indicate where nearby ones are. Hostile animals are difficult to actually fight off as you don't have an attack button, but you can grab them or use the environment to damage and kill them (I actually like how the ability to attack is almost accidental, an indirect result of the grabbing mechanic). The environments are almost too large, some taking a long time to traverse empty space or backtrack many screens carrying different objects when you're not sure where they go.

Overall, I appreciated the approach of this game and had a lot of fun playing it. There's one caveat, which is hard to explain without spoiling anything, so avoid this if you don't want to risk it.

Secrets of Rætikon's story and aesthetic aren't what they appear to be, exactly -- there's a tonal shift toward the end that (in keeping with its gameplay approach) isn't explicitly hinted at by much of what comes before it. How you respond to where the developers chose to go depends on how invested you were in what the game appeared to be up to that point. A number of people in other reviews were very unhappy with where it goes. My personal feelings were that it didn't ruin the experience and in a way I appreciated the unexpected boldness of it. I don't think it was cheap, but I wasn't emotionally invested in the world the game took place in the way some other gamers might be. It was a genuinely shocking moment, to assume you were doing one thing and be totally blindsided at the last moment by what you were actually doing. That said, I'd 100% understand someone having a viscerally negative reaction to how this game ends. I recommend this game with the caveat that the endgame may sour the experience for you, depending on your point of view and what you wanted out of it. Hope that helps!

A short, light, relaxing puzzle game that you can finish in one sitting. It's actually refreshing to see a puzzle game that doesn't overdo it -- a lot of them will have 50, 100 levels that ramp up in difficulty and confound you for hours of play time but not give much reward. Polarity doesn't either, but it's just simple enough that it never becomes tedious or repetitive. Sometimes you just want a snack, not an eight-course meal.

There's not quite enough here to justify the full price tag, but it's a great sale pickup.

DeadCore has what's probably my ideal scenario for a game: You fall through the sky and land near the bottom of an impossibly high, architecturally abstract tower, built out of moving and floating pieces, patrolled by mechanical sentries. You have powerful movement options and find tools to make them even more powerful. As you progress, you see flashes of words associated with your immediate task, seemingly the thoughts and warnings of people who have been here before you. Climb to the top.

This is platforming in its purest form - dash, double jump, avoid death fields, boost high up, create your own shortcuts, shoot down enemy sentries, and keep climbing. The movement mechanics are so robust they have a visual artistry to them. The music is a combination of ambient soundscape and thumping electronica.

What little context exists is abstract and light. You find logs with flavor text but they're all pretty interchangeable. DeadCore is just about climbing the tower and (optionally) collecting the sparks that activate something at the top. It's incredibly fun.

Note on speedrun mode: The game has been patched a few times to remove major climbing/clipping exploits, but several still remain. There are obscure ways to boost yourself from the bottom of a level to the top. Unless it gets patched again (which seems unlikely), don't sweat the leaderboards too much and just play it the way you want to.

Closure is a solid puzzle-platformer, hampered only slightly by its limited scope but aided by gorgeously stark visuals and moody score.

You play as a weird little spider thing that puts on masks of people's faces and traverses their memories (I assume, as there's no spoken dialogue). Platforms are only solid when a light source is illuminating them, and you manipulate a variety of these to create or remove terrain so you can reach the exit door in each stage. The mechanic is consistent, buta llittle finnicky -- terrain partially lit by orbs tends to create sloped edges or free-floating pixels of floor, which combined with slippery controls will kill you a few times. The most frustrating moments come from falling through a floor or wall after painstakingly setting up platforms in a 1-2 minute stage, because you weren't quite precise enough. But engine quirks come with the territory in indie platformers, so it's easily overlooked.

What makes Closure really work is the way the level chains are paced. It has over 100 levels, but cerebral puzzle-solving is broken up by stages that serve only to (literally) illuminate the backstory of the characters whose lives you're navigating. You only realize this as you're moving through it, and realize there's no puzzle beyond carrying the light to the exit and seeing the environment unfold ahead of you. It's a neat trick that made me want to keep playing in a way that an unbroken string of puzzles wouldn't have.

The game has some rough edges, but it's a very enjoyable playthrough if you like puzzle-platformers. Definitely recommend.

The concepts for a solid game are all here, but this is very cheaply made, unpolished, and poorly balanced.

Controls and physics are extremely sensitive, leading to you spending most of the game overcorrecting the ball's movement. I had to adjust the mouse sensitivity on a per-level basis. The mouse cursor leaves the game boundary when trying to whip the camera around too quickly. It's easy to accidentally click the mouse and restart the level. Everything has really basic textures, simplistic music, and stock sound effects. The game minimizes when you click away from it, which is pain when trying to stream it.

This game is playable in the most technical sense of the word. It could've been a fun experience with more time and attention. You might enjoy it if you're looking to beat an obnoxiously challenging game out of spite. If so, good luck!