got_quiet

I keep feeling like I need to make excuses for why I'm both stressed out with work related stuff and also spending a lot of time on leisure that I don't really have time for, so this is my vow that I'm just going to stop feeling compelled to do that. I think most people get that sometimes when you're stressing out find yourself doing literally anything other than what you're supposed to be doing. T_T

Last weekend there was a rhythm game event on Steam. I love rhythm games so I downloaded a whole bunch and gave them a shot.

The Great:

Nebula Flow

A lofi rhythm game in which you are taking a jog with your dog. The dog produces a path that you follow. It's a simple four button game, up, down, jump, and a boost trigger that gives you more runway and time to see the next moves. The music is nice, the controls feel good, and the demo levels were a good mix of easy with some spots of challenge and achievements for doing particularly well. I liked this one a lot.

Rift of the Necrodancer

The first Necrodancer game is a rhythm game classic so it's no surprise that this more standard game is just as polished and fun. Necrodancer mobs travel down a guitar hero path and behave differently depending on what they are. It gets complicated very fast. The demo only has three tracks but I think I'm going to end up grinding them all to see if I can complete the hard modes, because those modes are pretty hard!

LEZ

A raw, no frills beatmania with six columns, a bunch of electronica, and difficulty that starts at fuck you. I saw about 4 levels of difficulty and 2 was the highest I could pass. I'll probably spend a bunch of time going through these songs and if I hit one I really like I might just grind it for a few hours.

The Good

Yoiyami Dancers

I liked the idea but damn it was way too difficult lol. You are a dancing girl on a large grid, and you need to dodge bullets and shoot enemies up ahead in time to the music. There is a lot crypt of the necrodancer type thinking, where you need to calculate your movement with the movement of the bullets to properly dodge, only it feels a lot more demanding than crypt did in the earlier levels. I enjoyed it but my brain was overwhelmed right away. The controls were also a bit janky and improved after I remapped a bunch of things.

Beat Slayer

A ARPG roguelike where you run around whacking little robots. There's a beat, a simple and repetitive electronic rock type soundtrack, and if you are always doing something on the beat your maintain a streak that buffs your damage. It's a pretty simple game but was smooth. The movement felt fluid, which I liked, and there's a Hadesesque overplot where you're fighting forward across each level to reach your brother who's held captive by the big bad. The biggest issue felt like the art direction maybe, which was a little zoned out and generic looking as far as the actual levels were concerned, though the character art was nice. And the gameplay was very repetitive. It's a two button game basically (dash+attack) unless something expands past the demo. It wasn't bad but maybe not quite good enough to buy.

Keylocker

This is a big ass demo. Took me 2 hours to complete. The art is a very cool neon style, and it feels like there's bones of a fun game in there, but as it is it's sort of a basic turn based RPG that likes to fuck with you by demanding twitch responses to every single attack and defense to survive. The windows in which you dodge an attack are very narrow, and while you're supposed to dodge when you see a flash I literally couldn't hit the button fast enough to get that to work, so you need to just get used to every attack and pre-emptively defend. Also, this doesn't sound much like a rhythm game, does it? I downloaded it because the trailer showed a guitar hero looking segment, but that part of the game was just one short moment at the very end of the demo, 2 hours in!

Outside of the twitch execution the combat doesn't have too much going on for it, and when you fail it lets you just start from the top again so at least there's no risk. I think the art and sound direction was helping the game coast through a lot of issues with gameplay.

Honestly I wish this was just a straightforward JRPG because the art really is great.

The Bleh:

Super Crazy Rhythm Castle

This is a couch co-op game for children. But it's also actually a simple and direct rhythm game, with a three line guitar hero element and then some random extra crap that you do on top of it. You can play it solo but it's a pain. For example in one level you need to fill up a timer by playing the music part well and then as the timer is going down you need to run around a room clicking on vegetables which are being sacrificed to a bag of weed killer. That's the sort of juvenile shit that happens here. So probably a lot of fun for elementary school children honestly but the game elements are both too easy and too stupid for me.

Pulse Code EP

The visuals of this game were interesting enough that I wanted to see what was going on with it, and the sound was cool, just a syncopated drumming sound, but it turns out that you do not interact with the music at all. All it really does is give you a sense for when the rounds begin and end, and the rounds themselves are something like a slightly more complex rock/paper/scissors game. So unfortunately the gameplay didn't live up to the art direction.

Compared to most demo fests I'd say that this was a big success.