Little Noah: Scion of Paradise (2022)

Little Noah is a very cute action platformer roguelite, with a generic and slightly under-baked, but charming story.

The gameplay centers around collecting "lilliput" over the course of each run. These lilliput can then either be assigned to your main attack combo or put in one of two skill slots to use as special moves. Much like Catmaze or Ender Lilies pressing the attack button then summons the lilliput to do an attack and then quickly disappear again. Figuring out how to build your attack chain of lilliput and which skills to use ends up being surprisingly fun. Outside of the lilliput system, the game largely sticks to the genre staples. My only complaint about the gameplay is that the screen can get quite busy and some room see multiple waves of enemies spawning in, leading to somewhat frustrating moments where you don't see an enemy before it's too late.

I'm really not sure why the game is a roguelite, to be honest. The storyline doesn't particularly lend itself to the format and could have used more room to breathe, and I think the systems would have been more fun to interact with in a metroidvania or even standard action platformer format. The last form of the final boss was the only part I struggled with after getting the basics down, but it takes an hour to get back there. I'd seen everything the game had to offer by hour 4, but it took me 6 hours to finish since it took me a couple of times to learn the bosses patterns. Note that I took a few months off between my first couple of runs and finishing the game, and was only a single hit off winning on my second try at the final boss-- if you're good at these games, you could probably win in half the time I took. That said, I enjoyed the base gameplay well enough, it wasn't so bad having an excuse to play for a couple more hours.

Definitely a good game to pick up on sale if you want a cute diversion for a few hours.