faea gaming: May '25
Hi!! This month, I wound up putting time into an awful lot of shorter games, both by making true on my effort to power through some indies I had lying around, as well as hopping around a few more platformers. A lot of short 2-5 hour experiences here… and even more that I didn’t even put that much time into :’) So let’s get into them!
Games I Finished
Sayonara Wild Hearts
I can’t be too grouchy towards a game that came together so well at the end (and maybe before that… I was playing this in like 30 degree heat, sorry!!!), yet I can’t help but feel that most of the gameplay elements do more harm than good. Particularly the death/retry system – in a game with such loose controls and heavy visuals, having *any* mistake break the flow of the song is frustratingly dissatisfying, especially for a game with no actual failstate. There’s a reason rhythm games work the way they do! You can mess up a good amount without having the music and the visuals interrupted at all, and you’re only taken out of it if you mess up big time. Here you can’t *fail*, but will probably get your flow broken quite a lot regardless. If it weren’t for how cute the constant gameplay twists are, it’d almost feel like I’d have a *better* time watching it on YouTube rather than playing it myself… And I think that’s one of the meanest things you can say about a game. Anyway it starts off with clair de lune epic version so is it really that bad
Black Bird
Really cool one-time experience – I’m a big fan of the aesthetic direction, and without having seen much True Mode stuff, it feels very playful with its imagery while gives you just enough to, like, slightly project onto it if you feel like it (vetoed Steam review: “this is how it feels to be a girl”). But I can’t lie… I kinda… hate? How this plays? There’s nothing necessarily *wrong* with it (well maybe aside from readability), but the combination of that and, like, five other small mechanical details chafe against my processing difficulties juuuust right to make it feel a little bit rancid all the time, and I found myself constantly ramming enemies and bullets I didn’t know were there. Can’t really offer anything substantial here because of that! It’s a huge shame because I wanna rep Onion Games so bad, but I just don’t like this very much :(
I’m 3148th in the world though so watch out
Sonic Adventure
As I said last month, I think this game is largely pretty fun! Very pretty, too, both through the environments themselves (colour palettes being a big standout to me) and how the levels’ setpieces feel like they exist primarily to accentuate the visuals of the levels. Though having now played everything the game has to offer, I think my main complaint is repetition – in a game that’s pushing you through so many different gameplay modes that you may or may not actually like, repeating the same story through very similar levels and repeated hub-world puzzles over and over makes it a lot harder to push through the bits I’m less fond of. Since most of the stories seem to be going for a very different appeal – Sonic’s fairly linear platforming, Knuckles’ exploration, Tails’, uh, skipping as much of the level as possible, etc. – I think everyone’s gonna have their parts that they love and hate in a way that leads to fairly unique relationships with the game, and interesting discussion on it… at least, if the well didn’t seem dangerously poisoned on Sonic game discussion. Oh well!
The latter half of this game was defined by the rougher bits for me, since I ended up playing almost in reverse order of enjoyment: Sonic, Amy, Gamma, Knuckles, Tails, Big, then back to Sonic’s last few stages to drill in the idea that the camera might *actually* suck at times? I think it’s usually fine, and the fixed cameras bring out a lot of spectacle that a more traditionally-”good” implementation couldn’t, but they end up placed in more open platforming sections to rip your camera towards where the game thinks you’re going, regardless of where you actually want to. Combined with a slew of other design and mechanical frustrations in the last hour or so of Sonic’s story (for example, the platform transition in Egg Viper literally not happening one time and just killing me), and it felt like I was finally playing the game its detractors said it was… but the rest of the game was at the *very* least quite competent, and for the most part quite fun!, so while it all happened late enough to feel a bit sour, those aren’t the feelings I’m left with now that I’m done.
Umurangi Generation
Despite learning that I’m not really a video game photography person, I think this is still pretty excellent. It’s a loud, angry end-of-days cyberpunk game where every aspect of its being feels like it lightly pushes against one another in a way that emboldens its narrative. Very calm, almost observer-like photography makes said setting feel really eerie, the world’s problems feeling too far out of reach. And the strangely-inconsequential but always-present Gameplay Bits felt like corporate breathing down my neck, trying to get me to ignore what’s in front of me at times: through random-feeling, inexplicable objectives, a timer trying to rush me through, and sorta sterile buzzword-y photo-grading dictating your pay for each shot. It even does the Armored Core “here’s how much money you LOST!!” after each stage! I might not be living loudly on the front lines, but I *did* pump the bloom to ridiculous levels on a picture of neon *”kill facists”* graffiti.
Touhou Kinjoukyou ~ Fossilized Wonders (Trial Ver)
Marisa is good!! Yay!!!!!
This grew on me the more I played it – the main turnaround is that the stages felt far more compelling as I played and got used to the peculiar setups and ways it makes you move. Stage choreography is one of the most important things to me about this series, and even just up to Stage 3 I think this one’s really interesting! I think the main point of contention will be the abnormal enemies – UFO-like enemies that spawn on filling a meter and shooting at you, that can spawn even during bossfights. You also need to kill tons of them to get any meaningful resources in this game! Between that and the high pattern difficulty, it’s a really tough game with very little room for error… without using Imperishable Moon. See, the *other* meter you can fill gives you a TH17-esque hyper shot that you can customise while picking shot types – one of these gives you a shield (direction dependent on shot type) that lets you ram into bullets and delete them, which after timing out clears the screen and turns every enemy bullet into a revenge bullet. With how often these activate, you can skip what feels like half of the challenge of the game! The balancing here is absolutely bizarre, but I feel like I have to play the game juuust enough to where it’s still cool. And if ZUN nerfs Imperishable Moon for the full release… I hope the resource game gets less stingy in return!!
I am feeling a bit shitty about the genAI usage, though. I didn't know about it when the demo launched, and as much as I think this game seems really cool, I don't see myself playing the full version because of it. At least there's like nineteen other mainline Touhous that don't use it!
Demo 1cc :)
NiGHTS into Dreams…
This game is really cool: it feels like a 2.5D acrobatic early Sonic game in how it both wants you to go really fast and is constantly pushing against that through its small screen size demanding a certain level of stage memorisation – a dynamic that did feel a bit chaotic for me at times. The difference is that scoring highly involves repeating each bite-sized microlevel over and over as much as possible before timing out, which lends itself naturally into building said memorisation without feeling like I’m ‘grinding’ a level. Though I’m not much of a Score Woman – I did appreciate the game forcing it on me to some extent, but it’s never my priority in a game – so more than the scoring mechanics, the coolest thing to me is how much the levels play with 3D space. Very reminiscent of Klonoa in how it’s a game that plays on a 2D plane revels in breaking that limitation, though here it’s more about perspective changes that move it away from being purely a sidescroller. It switches organically into a third-person snowboarding minigame at one point!! That’s videogames!!
However!! I HATE the Jackle bossfight and I want to kill him with shotguns!!!!!! Whether or not I end the fight in twenty seconds or time out running in circles depends entirely on whether the camera lurches around in a way that lets me tell where his cape is or not after I hit him, which feels really out of my control for a boss that both gets reused every time on replays (I don’t think I’d be ranting about this if it was a one-off) *and* in a game where boss clear time gives a massive score mult for the entire level. For a score game, I’d be willing to compromise that an annoying, difficult boss like this forces you to replay the level over and over and gets you more familiar and building a better score route, but I felt like I just wanted to clear as fast as possible so I could get back to the fight as quick as I could.
Sephonie
It’s just really, really beautiful in a way that makes me not really care that I didn’t like the platforming that much; as much as I did feel cold towards the often fairly rudimentary platforming and the awkward wallrun detection, it’s the game’s way of showing off its environments and incredibly beautiful soundscapes. While I wasn't fond of the flowery prose in Anodyne 2, I think I was more receptive to it here from its application to the dreamlike, almost surreal presentation of the flashback stories. Those stories draw from an ocean of lived experiences in order to reflect on the idea of connection – between people, between groups, between humans and nature, between nature and humans – in ways that often really feel like the developers were bleeding their hearts out for this. Some parts I felt hit really close to home while others, by circumstance, would never be able to… but I think they would want me to try to connect with them, if only by listening and understanding.
Also the puzzle game is cute even if it’s not very hard ALSO WISHLIST ANGELINE ERA!!!!!!!!
Heisei Pistol Show
I don’t think I’m very good at talking about stories, especially not ones dense and unconventionally-told like this one is, so I’m not going to speak on this in too much detail – I don’t think I really can. But I think this is the one that makes me want to explore RPGMaker history more than anything; feels like an entire culture of games that I’ve never even really considered. Near the end of the game I realised my body felt like absolute sludge and the worst I’ve felt in weeks so I think I definitely owe this a replay down the line (and also because the game basically called me boring if I don’t. I’m not boring!!!!!!!)
^ I wrote this after the first playthrough, but then replayed it a few days later as it requested and a lot of its ideas cut far deeper than the first time round. Feels like the sort of story that gives you a slightly new perspective every revisit. Absolutely masterful use of its art direction for its storytelling, and an overtly tragic story but with little shards of hope poking through… Living a reasonably comfortable life as a 25 year-old queer person in 2025 makes me feel like I’m living the future that Parun was so desperate for, and it’s crushing that he isn’t here to see it.
The Beginner’s Guide
Gifted by a friend for an exchange :) I assigned her NiGHTS into Dreams… I hope she likes it. It's an interesting story told in a fairly unique way, though it’s hard to talk about it without basically spoiling the entire story. What I can say is that I think this veers dangerously between charitable and very uncharitable readings; I’m getting “take art for what it is rather than what you want it to be” and “thinking about art too hard is not good, actually” from the same ideas and I think that’s a bit eerie. The main point of the story also, like, completely rolled off me lol I didn’t really care. I'm less interested in the exploration of the characters and more interested in the more direct conversation it’s having with the medium – I’m just not sure if that conversation is a good one or not.
FRANKEN
It’s cute! It’s funny! It has kind of ridiculously good presentation! Like, the amount of unique really good spritework (and light animation work nearer the end) kind of floored me!! I giggled a lot! MOON RPG AND THE FROG FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS MENTIONED
moon: Remix RPG Adventure
I really struggle immensely with the “figure out what to do” genre of games, but coming back after like three months, with some newfound willingness to lightly lean on a guide for nudges AND when I was already very close to the ending, feels weird… I sort of wish I just committed to the guide-use back in February instead of taking a 3 month-long break that made me forget everything I’d done before. And it only took a brisk 3 hours of basically just tying up loose ends and acting on clues I’d already found!! Although that was mainly just to reach the ending – there’s a lot of stuff I didn’t finish up because it’d been too long and I’m very wary of not letting guides just play these sorts of games for me; I’d rather just miss the stuff I really couldn’t do, if it’s an option.
Anyway the game….. Yeah it’s good! One of the best games ever! Yeah! Absolutely adore the way it expresses love for our own world, and slows you down in a way that forces you to do the same. One of my favourite small details that encompasses its approach to, well, everything is the way the fishing minigame works: you have to press a fairly slow, steady rhythm in order to reel in a fish, and trying to mash or even press faster won’t fill the bar enough. I’ve still got to sit on the ending for a bit and work out exactly what it means for me, but I really love the way it drives home its messages. I’ll be rotating this one around my brain for a while, I think. It’s making me think about “power fantasy” in games, which is a word I love to throw around in my brain a lot but probably never interrogated what I really think it means, but I think this game has an incredibly fascinating relationship with the idea… one that I’m not gonna get into here because I’d need to spoil the entire game, sorry!!
A Hint of Purple
The first thing you’ll notice is the obvious cribbing of Disco Elysium’s UI + framing, which I’d normally be mean about but it works with the subject matter here and it’s also very obviously its own thing and not actually trying to *be* DE. Anyway I was sort of afraid of playing this because aspects of the subject matter are, like, tangentially relevant to me. I think it handles those topics very delicately and with a lot of care; it’s very chilling, with a lot of detail in the way conversations play out that made it hit particularly hard. Although it’s brief to a point where I’ll probably unfortunately not remember it very well, but that’s a me problem rather than a “short games” problem.
Formless Star
Cute :) I’m not too much of a fan of the creature-hunting itself so I didn’t find all of them, but I like splendidland’s cute/odd creature designs and artstyle so this was a nice way to spend like half an hour. Lots of good silly gags.
Pokémon Emerald
Although I’ve come around on a lot of Emerald’s ideas *in theory* (mostly discussed last month, I think), I’ve just played this game too much in my life for it to hold me for too long. Can’t grab me as much when I’ve internalised it for over 20 years, you know? So I think my adult life is always gonna hold this as a pretty alright Pokemon game. But using my silly team of Intentionally Kinda Bad Pokemon made some of the harder fights more interesting – at least, as much as they can be when the solution is to set up the stat boosting move and then win. Did you know that Dusclops after +6 Calm Minds was unable to ohko a Tentacruel with Psychic? I thought that was interesting.
Touhou Koumakyou ~ the Embodiment of Scarlet Devil
LATEGAME MAY 1CC LETS GOOOOO THIS ONE’S BEEN HAUNTING ME FOR MONTHS
My hang-up with EoSD was always its pacing – the first 3 stages are calm to the point where they feel like I’m on autopilot after some practice, then the last 3 bump up the difficulty pretty significantly – but the better I get at it, the less I mind. Because even though it makes the ‘Start’ button harder to click than in other games because it’s much less engaging throughout, stage 4 is now starting to blend in with the difficulty of the first three stages and it’s all just positive feedback that I am getting much, much better at these. (This is also all really awkward to say when my 1cc replay loses a life on stage 3 and rams like two bullets in 4 lol…) The biggest wall for me with this one was the resource stinginess, since I’m not very consistent at these and EoSD punishes silly mistakes a lot harder than the games that shower you in lives and bombs and cherry borders or whatever. But I got my 1cc with multiple *very* obvious big misses, so I guess I’m just getting good enough at the hard stuff to give me leeway to mess up the easier stuff.
This one spiked back up to one of my favourite Touhous after improving at it, both because the later bosses have really tough patterns that feel like they're testing my fundamentals more than learning the specific patterns (that's the strength of the randomness here, I think! Sakuya's nonspells are so cool and fun imo) and also because my design complaints fading away just lets me concentrate on how gorgeous this game is. It’s a very simplistic beauty that feels like it comes less from the patterns and more from the music and the backgrounds, but I think it has some of the best of those in the series. I think it helps that the gameplay is at its most basic of the Windows games too – shoot, dodge and score while transcendent visuals and music blast out at you; isn’t that what these games are all about?
Games I Haven't Finished
The Dark Spire
There’s some really interesting ideas in here! The thing I’m fondest of is that actual random encounters are scarce, while fixed encounters often exist behind doors or at the entrance to rooms; speaking as someone who just found a good grinding strategy, it discourages levelling by walking up and down next to the safest tile and encourages exploration instead, as the best way to find stuff to kill is to find new rooms to open! Additionally, it enforces that travelling back with low resources will get pretty tense, as you get kicked back out of a room if you run from its fixed encounter – you can run and go back in to reset the enemy types, but that puts you at extra risk of getting ambushed. I also love that this game uses spell slots!! I love spell slots in these games! I feel they encourage using more of your toolkit than an MP system does – I can cast my best spells a certain amount of times but still have the rest of my arsenal once they’re out, while with MP I feel I’m more likely to just use those better spells until I run out of resources entirely.
Although, there’s a couple of things that might stop me completing this. One is the heavy RNG-reliance of physical combat – spells are strong but heavily limited through slots, which is a great dynamic, but the physical attacks that both you and enemies often rely on have extremely temperamental accuracy which often makes physical combat feel like a slot machine more than a game. And the map progression often boils down to holding onto this key item you found 10 hours ago and figuring out the specific place to use it, which is fine… until one of the items that I THOUGHT I had, I simply don’t. Going back for that stuff isn’t too hard (so long as you know what it is, and where it came from…….), but it’s not a design language I find particularly interesting, so to me it feels like sort of annoying busywork, or just guide-diving. Though I’ve mainly been playing this in like half-hour intervals before work and during commutes, so there’s a good chance I get through it just based off that. It’s a good place to have a game that’s fun, but doesn’t take over my thoughts once I’ve put it down, lol.
2D SONIC THE HEDGEHOG GAMES (1, 2, 3+K)
Sonic 1 has a really interesting conversation with speed, being a game where it’s easy to become Fast but very hard to maintain Fast. The small screen size and hazard placement places a reliance on level knowledge, which is fed into by lives being really hard to come across without being competent, game overs sending you to the very beginning, and the game being relatively short. I didn’t see too much of Sonic 1 (my PB was Zone 3 Act 3) but I started to learn to enjoy what I did; improvement started to feel like a natural process, while meaning I could also get back to the later bits quicker. A smart, albeit slightly cumbersome, structure that felt like it was always feeding back into itself.
I didn’t expect its successors to follow up on that structure – I know people don’t like Sonic 1 that much! – but I felt the structure didn’t shift to anything I found very interesting. I didn’t play much of 2 or 3, but the little of 2 I played felt very neatly split into the Fast Bits, where you go fast and nothing really stops you, and the Slow Bits, where you can’t go fast and do sort of rudimentary platforming. Sonic 3’s levels felt more nuanced, but just help drill in that it's the specific type of challenge Sonic 1 offers that keeps me invested. Also, I don’t like the spindash! Sonic’s weird walking -> running momentum is really fun, why are we discouraging that.
Pokémon Moon
I burned out pretty hard on Emerald earlier on in the month, so I started Moon instead, and realised that I was actually just burned out on Pokémon… Oops :’) Even still, I got more into it than I expected considering my particular gripes with modern Pokémon games are still all at full force here. My main compliment here is that the writing is actually really fun – harder to complain about all the forced dialogue when I just like reading it quite a lot (this is why I’m also *GENERALLY* receptive to BW1’s story-focus, and don’t really like it in XY). It’s a bit dumb but it’s a bit cute :) I’ll chip away at it I think.
Kirby Super Star
Kirby is my “keep gambling” series… I don’t like any of the ones I’ve played a great deal, and I’ve played quite a few at this point, but I keep finding myself trying them. This one was specifically on request of a friend, so even though I didn’t like this one that much either I don’t mind the short time time I put into it. I don’t have much to say about these except “not for me”, so I’m just gonna say that this is probably the best looking game on the SNES :)
DOOM 64
Getting less interested in this as I go (maybe should have dropped the difficulty, lol, I’m playing on “I own Doom”, which is one level above default, and I’m not particularly great at these games) but I think this is a really cool thing. Feels more distinctly crawler-y than DOOM in how the levels are generally a lot longer and focused harder on the navigation itself – and also because of the controls!! We’re King’s Field now, fuck yeah!!. Don’t think I like it more than DOOM because I remember the combat sections in that game generally being more interesting, but I think the direction of this one is really neat.
Solatorobo: Red the Hunter
I’d describe this so far as “pleasant”: it’s got bright, colourful visuals in lots of different styles (3D environments and characters, 2D anime-styled portraits and that one fully-animated intro/cutscene bit), combat that’s not too demanding or honestly interesting but is also sorta fun in a button-mashy way, lots of silly little side activities and quests, and story-writing with a lot of focus on its fairly distinct and colourful characters. But it’s also not been ‘challenging’ in any way – in difficulty, in mechanics, in storytelling – which adds to the “pleasantness”, but means I’m not getting a great deal out of it outside of being a cute time-killer. I know it’s supposed to get a bit funky later on, so I’ll stay strapped in for that.
Metroid II: Return of Samus
I’ve been a bit afraid of actually tackling this one since I’ve been building it up in my head for months as an extremely ‘me’ game, but that often means setting overly-high expectations; plus, I’ve never played a Metroid game I’ve really liked, so…?
So, I loved this a looottttt :) :) :) Spritework and tile placement is brilliant – easily some of the strongest stuff on the console – and I love the music; realising that my low-HP noise was actually *that* and not the music, and then hearing it slowly disappear once I started healing up was one of the most quietly comforting moments I’ve had in a game. Love how little it does to make you feel cool outside of the music that only plays in areas where you *aren’t* doing extinction; you’re clearly very powerful but it feels fittingly clinical more than heroic. I just loooove worlds like this in a way that’s probably completely antithetical to the feelings they’re trying to evoke, lol. I love that hardly any of the biological enemies except for the Metroids are actually aggressive! We love slaughter fuck yeah!!!!
There’s a lot I WANT to say about this game’s world design that I think made it easier for me than other Metroids I’ve put time into (Super, Prime 1/2, Dread) but I ought to wait until any of those are fresh in my mind before speaking on them. Think I’ll give Super another go soon, cause that seems the most interesting to re-evaluate; I could easily see myself going either way on it.
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Thanks for reading as always :) As usual, feel free to drop something in this box if I said something interesting or if you want to know other short indies I have amassing in my Steam library that I'm gonna try to get around to in the next ten years. See you next month!