August Media Post

Featuring Decline's Drops, Curse Crackers, Demon Bluff, UFO 50, and Spark The Electric Jester.



Deline's Drops

 
My immediate thought with this game's gameplay concept was "isn't this just circling back to Kirby"? Super Smash Bros, and consequentially all the platform fighters based on it, carry over a lot of design from the Kirby series, so making a platformer based on Smash Bros theoretically resembles making a platformer based on Kirby.
 
After actually playing this game though, I'd say it emphasizes different priorities than Kirby. The tankier enemy healthbars that encourage stringing together combos, and enemies generally more threatening attacks. With the exception of an unlockable item that gives you limited use fireballs, your moveset is only features melee attacks which obligates getting close to enemies. The platforming pretty easily distinguishes itself by not involving any flying.
 
The game feels very nice and snappy, it lacks have a bunch of the movement and attack restrictions that I tend to dislike in platform fighters anyways. I'm surprised to see aerials slow your decent so drastically, it's pretty useful though.
 
This game didn't really click with me, I'm not very sure why though. I'd say the game seems pretty fun in my head, but I felt pretty whatever about it when actually playing. Maybe the vibes were off, I didn't really like a lot of the music, or maybe the pacing was off, most levels felt pretty long. This is one of those games where in retrospect, I don't think I should've bothered so much with the collectables, I didn't get much outta them, and playing so on alert for them probably soured some of my enjoyment.


Curse Crackers: For Whom The Belle Tolls

 
This is the most pleasantly surprised I've been by a game so far this year. So much so, it's now my favorite game I've played so far in 2025.
 
Staring off, the movement feels fantastic. The long jump feels as fast as what I imagine the Mario 64 long jump feels like to Mario 64 diehards (the Mario 64 long jump doesn't feel that fast to me).

I'm not even using the item that boosts my speed here.

And there's enough nuance in every movement option to make flowing everything together really interesting.
 
Greatly complementing the movement is the level design. Since the game mimics a Game Boy Color's small screen size, level design is naturally very dense to keep the screen away from being empty, which I quite appreciate. The screen size does bring about some issues though, particularly trying to look vertically is tedious, because you have to stop moving. While there aren't usually distinctly separated pathways like in Sonic games, the levels and moveset are designed to open up multiple ways of traversing the same areas which makes them pretty interesting.
 
I found myself really enjoying how this segment flows.

The amount of stuff in this game also surprised me, it felt like it just kept unraveling with more and more. Levels are loaded with tons of collectables, there's a bunch of sidequests to do, and over half the levels are optional bonuses. Because I enjoyed so many aspects of the game, it didn't feel like a bunch of busy work to complete, it was just more fun to be had. I didn't get much use most of the different items because they felt so strong that they took away from how well designed the levels were without them (there are a select few spots designed with them in mind, but I'm not sure there's even like 10 of them).
 
I didn't innately mind the boatload of secrets in this game because I used guides to find stuff, although I feel like some stuff should've been more explicit. I don't think this was even meant to be a secret, but I didn't realize there were unlockable color palettes until I was nearly done with the game. They're off in the Feats menu, I just didn't think to click on the feats since their full descriptions were already on display, and as far as I know nothing, not even the manual which actually mentions the unlockable colors, mentions they're tied to the feats. A more strange one though was the 100% completion item, it's tucked away in a spot separate from any of the other items, without any indication it even exists unless you happen to check the spot after having unlocked it. I don't really blame anyone for this but, it was annoying how there's no comprehensive guide for everything, so I had to jump around a handful of guides.
 
There's one more thing I wanna mention with the secrets, but first I wanna mention the Arcade mode. This is one of the most fun score based platformers I've ever played, the core gameplay ties together even better with the implementation of points I think. I was initially worried this would be the kind of game that becomes way less interesting once you've found everything, and to an extent that's true since the sense of discovery fades, but the points in the Arcade mode give me a reason to come back to collectables. There were so few things to buy in in the main game, coins ended up feeling kinda pointless during most of my playthrough, but Arcade mode has you buy extra lives, alongside items tied to sidequests in the main game, and while even in Arcade mode I'd max out coins, points added a reason to collect them as well. 
 
Unfortunately I have 2 notable issues with the Arcade. The score multiplying curses are so much more impactful than any other strategic optimization, and some of them literally take away mechanics when enabled, I think they overcentralize the mode (you can literally max out the score counter with them). They're also an example of something I think is strange to be secret, without them the "A Good Job" feat is way harder to complete (once I knew about the curses, I was able to get 3x over the feat's requirement pretty easily). The more disappointing aspect of Arcade is how it doesn't feature all the levels. You don't even get to play all 25 of the main story levels, the last 5 are just straight up cut, alongside the 25+ optional levels from the main game (this is its own issue actually, but I don't think there's any way to replay most of the side quest specific levels in general without starting up a new save file). It does actually keep the mode's length nice and snappy (it takes me less than an hour), but it sucks that most of the game is unavailable in what I consider to be the more fun gamemode.

 
I was also pleasantly surprised by this game's writing. I actually felt interested in what characters had to say, and how things were going for them, which is not something I'd say for most NPC's in most video games. Actually caring about the characters made me also care about the world, so I read the lore, and it had me intrigued, the world was interesting. I found the main narrative lacking though, it's a very simple rescue plot, with twists and turns near the end, and throughout the post-game which didn't really compliment the stuff up to that point. The main plot felt like a minor piece of a much greater story.
 
All in all, I think this game will stick with me as something special.


Demon Bluff (Playtest)


I don't tend to play demos/betas/whatever much nowadays, since I prefer playing complete games. I didn't figure out this was a demo though until I was already in the game (I just kinda clicked the Run Game button on Itch without looking at the game much), and by that point I figured it'd be weird to turn back. Well now I'm kinda hooked, this game's really fun, even in such a barren state relative to what the final game is seemingly gonna be.
 
While the game is inspired by the social deduction genre, it personally reminds me of logic puzzles I really enjoyed in 5th grade.
 
Example I made myself.
 
I'm not a fan of how some card specific rules aren't told to you, for example the Wretch cannot be impersonated by any other card, which I'd say is a pretty notable benefit to have in a game about cards impersonating other cards. A more fundamental issue I have though is with how luck based the game is, I think it takes away from the fun puzzle aspects when a rounds come down to a 50/50 guess, although there's enough leniency that oftentimes I feel like I could've played better to avoid such scenarios.
 
This was deranged though.

I'm looking forward to seeing this game's full release, I've already dumped 30+ hours into the demo, so I imagine I could get a lot outta the full thing.


UFO 50


I've heard this game described as Action 52 except if they were all some of the best NES games, so perhaps I went into this with unreasonably high expectations. It's not a major disappointment to me, while I only like some of the games, it's not like I payed $200 like what Action 52 was meant to retail for.
 
Some of my favorite games are Velgress, The Big Bell Race, Hyper Contender, and Onion Delivery. Hyper Contender has the sort of novelty I really like out of small scale fighting games, I can identify it as a platform fighter, but I can't really name anything it plays very much like. As for my other favorites, they're just solid retro style games I'd say.
 
When it comes to the game's retro style, I think it pulls off the feeling of containing a bunch of old school NES games really well, with 1 pretty glaring exception, the aspect ratio. It's not even that the games were seemingly designed with 4:3 then retrofitted to 16:9, it seems like they were all just designed from the ground up with 16:9 in mind which kills my suspension of disbelief.
 

That then brings more issue into question to me, why can't I save in every game if they're all designed with modern, 16:9 based technology? Mooncat in particular was something I was actually somewhat intrigued by, but then I decided to take a break after like 30 minutes, and now I just have to restart the whole thing because there isn't a save feature. Mooncat doesn't even have Game Overs, so it's not like the lack of saves is even a test of skill. There's a terminal of all features though, I assume that's for secrets.


Spark The Electric Jester


Going into this, I thought it was just gonna be Sonic inspired, but it turned out to also seemingly be Mega Man and Kirby inspired.
 
I didn't like the movement in this game much. The speed is capped just a little low for my liking, and you can't break the speed cap using slopes like in classic Sonic games, which to me kills most of the fun of so many slopes being around in the first place. To increase the speed there's a Mega Man X style dash, but I didn't like having to press it so frequently. The core jumping felt good at least, although the level design focuses more on running than jumping I'd say.

The weapons were all alright, they added some variety to Spark's moveset, although I found myself getting a lot more out of the ones that granted extra mobility options compared to the ones that didn't.
 
Going in blind, I had no idea when this game was gonna end, and I ended up mistaking like 3 levels as the last level. The writing had some amusing moments, the story didn't stick with me much though. I was planning on playing through Fark's story as well, but I don't feel like it at the moment.


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