DunDunDunpachi
Patient MembeR
[Only restriction is that you need to have played it for the first time this year (2018). The game itself could be from any year, for any platform.]
Sometimes there are games that you love so much that you just need to shout it from the mountaintops. Which game really stuck with you this year and why have you turned into a fanboy/fangirl over it?
---
My choice is Flinthook. I consider it the first "platforming roguelike" to surpass Spelunky, one of my favorite games of all time and still one of the best in its genre.
The animation is cute and stylish:
Indie games have the (deserved) rep of lazily using 8-bit and 16-bit art to mask a lack of development talent. Even if there's beautiful sprite art, the animation is where almost all indies fall short, revealing the lack of fit and finish. Flinthook, however, does not skimp on the production. Everything is well-animated and glitzy. I never felt like I was playing a budget title like I do with most indies.
Traversal is simple with a high skill ceiling:
There's a lot of incentive to learn the physics because it's easy to die in this game. Your character -- Captain Flinthook -- does not have a lot of health and the recovery/invulnerable frames after being hit are pretty brief. As a result, poor handling of a single room can easily chop your health in half or kill you outright. When you master the movement, it feels so good zipping around.
I also grew to appreciate the slo-mo mechanic. It's crammed into nearly everything nowadays, so I thought it would be yet another lame implementation here. However, slo-mo allows you to pass through the bouncy-barriers, which you sometimes want to leave up (for one reason or another).
It doesn't focus too much on collectables but they're there:
Kitting yourself out with new gear never eliminates the underlying difficulty. Death is still around every corner (as well it should be in these sort of roguelikes).
I admit, I am charitable toward platformers as long as they're competently made since I really love the genre. However, I only have a small handful of favorites that I truly adore. When it comes to Flinthook, I can replay this game endlessly (just like Spelunky). I even made a humble thread about it that I forgot about until just now.
---
What is your 2018 under-appreciated game?
Sometimes there are games that you love so much that you just need to shout it from the mountaintops. Which game really stuck with you this year and why have you turned into a fanboy/fangirl over it?
---
My choice is Flinthook. I consider it the first "platforming roguelike" to surpass Spelunky, one of my favorite games of all time and still one of the best in its genre.
The animation is cute and stylish:
Indie games have the (deserved) rep of lazily using 8-bit and 16-bit art to mask a lack of development talent. Even if there's beautiful sprite art, the animation is where almost all indies fall short, revealing the lack of fit and finish. Flinthook, however, does not skimp on the production. Everything is well-animated and glitzy. I never felt like I was playing a budget title like I do with most indies.
Traversal is simple with a high skill ceiling:
There's a lot of incentive to learn the physics because it's easy to die in this game. Your character -- Captain Flinthook -- does not have a lot of health and the recovery/invulnerable frames after being hit are pretty brief. As a result, poor handling of a single room can easily chop your health in half or kill you outright. When you master the movement, it feels so good zipping around.
I also grew to appreciate the slo-mo mechanic. It's crammed into nearly everything nowadays, so I thought it would be yet another lame implementation here. However, slo-mo allows you to pass through the bouncy-barriers, which you sometimes want to leave up (for one reason or another).
It doesn't focus too much on collectables but they're there:
Kitting yourself out with new gear never eliminates the underlying difficulty. Death is still around every corner (as well it should be in these sort of roguelikes).
I admit, I am charitable toward platformers as long as they're competently made since I really love the genre. However, I only have a small handful of favorites that I truly adore. When it comes to Flinthook, I can replay this game endlessly (just like Spelunky). I even made a humble thread about it that I forgot about until just now.
---
What is your 2018 under-appreciated game?