Vernal Edge (2023)

Man, I'm super mixed on this game... I don't know that I'll be finishing it. On one hand, the puzzle solving and navigation is really some excellent stuff. On the other, the music and sound design are so incredibly dull and boring that the whole atmosphere makes me want to sleep. The combat could be fun, but it's way too "Souls Inspired" for its own good, relying heavily on parrying and dodging enemies that can wipe out your health bar very easily... All while they sit there as tedious damage sponges.

I'm considering maybe restarting on easy - it doesn't let you change difficulty mid-game, which is dumb - but this game also lacks a walkthrough anywhere online, which is kind of a problem, because the game doesn't give a lot of direction on where to go or what to do next, but it gives you a bunch of areas accessible from the hub world right from the get-go.

I dunno man. I was really excited for this one.

Finished this yesterday, I think it's pretty good! The enemy variety is lacking in the back half, a lot of the later combat moves feel like more trouble to use than they're worth, and the final platforming upgrade is a bit of a miss, but the game smartly wraps up before it overstays its welcome and is bolstered by a string of great boss fights that carry it through to the end.

While the exploration and combat elements aren't particular standouts, the platforming and movement are consistently excellent throughout. Almost like tossing Cappy in Mario Odyssey, tons of your moves chain together to allow you to access areas that initially seem far out of reach, and treasure is always well-placed to reward players who experiment with their many options. Constantly asking myself "hey can I go up there?" and finding that yes, you totally can, was a real joy.

All in all, it's an impressive debut for the developer, Hello Penguin Team, and I'm excited to see whatever they cook up next!

Really appreciating this game's efforts to make its movement/speed tech feel approachable for non-speedrunners like myself. Unlike backwards long jumps or mockballs or obscure out of bounds glitches, the core concept behind the tech is super easy to understand and execute: you just divekick straight down into any slope to get zooming. And once you pick up the basics, you start noticing how the level design is constantly offering up little opportunities for you to gain speed and chart a more elegant line through each screen.

It's entirely optional, but the low stakes and fantastically zippy payoff do an excellent job of encouraging constant experimentation, and even when you're not powersliding it's still great fun just to imagine the other paths you could've taken through the levels. And then later on you learn to activate the same boost by wavedashing into flat terrain, expanding the possibilities even further!

Like, in the picture above you can definitely just drop down from the upper stairs and continue on your merry way down to the left, and that'll get the job done. But if you're feeling spicy, you can instead divekick the upper stair, use a slide-boosted jump to fly through the air to the rightmost stair, divekick that, and then powerslide your way over to the left stair and down into the depths of the level. Both approaches are totally valid, and practically every screen is riddled with little shortcuts like this that you can attempt or ignore at your pleasure. It's really charming!

I was pretty excited for this one initially, but I'm just not having a good time with it at 7 hours in.

I really don't like the floating island structure -- I think I literally visited the island with the movement ability I needed last. This means I'll have to do a crazy amount of back tracking to pick things up on almost every island.

The combat has some good ideas with the poise system, but it just isn't fun in the end. As NightTray mentioned in their status, it feels like you're using a styrofoam bat. Everything feels so unimpactful and even basic enemies take too long to kill.

Time to drop and move on. I tried to let me enthusiasm come back, but this one just isn't for me.

Vernal Edge comes out today and I'm pretty excited for it! Doesn't seem to be generating much buzz, but I thought the demo from last year was super solid, with crisp platforming and snappy combat that takes inspiration from Devil May Cry and Smash Bros. And I especially dug the blazing-fast slide ability, which takes a bit of setup to initiate but lets you cross levels at lighting speed for as long as you can avoid slamming into obstacles (kinda like a shinespark...)

Hope the full game ended up just as good as the demo!

Okay this demo was excellent. It's a metroidvania with smaller levels you can tackle in any order, like Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin. Unlike Portrait of Ruin, the melee-focused combat seems pretty well thought out, with a variety of fun and actually useful moves tied to directional inputs like Smash Bros, additional moves and passives as hidden loot, and a very cool stamina point system that gives you a clear window to freely combo on enemies after you've peppered them with charged attacks.

The core platforming feels lovely and has some neat idiosyncrasies, with Devil May Cry-style enemy steps and air dashes which combine with your charged attacks to eke out an extra bit of height or distance on your jumps. And the main speed gimmick of divekicking into slopes to slide down them and blaze through levels for as long as you can avoid bonking into something is super joyful and recontextualizes the already-solid level design in a mind-expanding way.

Really looking forward to this one!

The demo Is pretty rough around the edges, with visual stuttering despite a solid 60 fps and the dialogue and storytelling leave a lot to be desired, but it still feels pretty good to play. It also reminds me a bit of Record of Lodoss War: Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth, which I really need to get back to playing.

Steam Next Fest October 2022