Star of Providence (2017)

It is the early AMs of 8/3 and I finally beat the final boss of hard mode. The last two bosses I have to beat are the archives boss and the archives boss, but idk if I will ever do those two because of how tedious it is to even get to them in the first place, much less beat them and there might be a third boss I haven't beat that's on like the integer overflow third floor? I'm not sure. Who knows though. This might as well mark the end of me playing the game, I might play a run or two more, but I mainly just wanted to beat the hard mode final boss.

I originally played this game around 2020, whenever it was that Dunkey first talked about it. I remember back then that I had fully completed the game, including the final boss, but with Dunkey talking about this game again recently and wanting to be a rouguelite, I started playing it again. As of the time of writing, I still have to beat the true final boss and the archives secret boss. I think overall the game is fun, but I wish there was more too it. I wish the rooms had a little more variety and there were a couple more weapons, and I definitely wish there were more upgrades. This next part is also kind of a "get good" moment, but I also really wish to access the secret archives boss, you didn't have to no-hit the whole 4th floor, like come on man it takes like 25 minutes to do that and then it can so easily flushed away, and it's not even guaranteed to fight the boss after all that, you still go to do the archives. Overall, it's a fun rouguelite, but I feel like it is hindered by not having enough. I guess I didn't really talk about the bullet hell elements, but that's because I don't know much about the genre, to me it is all pretty fair and I enjoy it. Solid 7/10

Only played 1 run so far, but holy shit I can't believe I let this sit in my library for so long. It's like if you took Isaac and injected a healthy dose of Gradius. The 8-bit aesthetic worked very well, allowing for high contrast between the enemies and backgrounds. I don't think I took damage a single time because I lost track of what was happening on the screen, which is really nice for how bullet hellish the bosses were. The weapon power ups felt great and were impactful, but everything seemed manageable even when you ran out of ammo and went back to the default gun. Definitely gonna be playing a ton of this in the near future.