Recent reviews by RIGHT LEG OF THE FORBIDDEN ONE

Excessively backtracky to a fault, and full of "walk to from point A to B and then back to A without doing anything" quests across the same five screens.

That said, the characters are charming even though I wasn't familiar with Epic NPC Man going in, and the fishing minigame itself is one of the best casual fishing minigames I've played. I liked it best for short sessions on my Steam Deck.

A casual little idle game with great spritework, a Gameboy aesthetic, and some good humor. Conceptually feels similar to a more autonomous version of those Digivice V1s that had reduced care mechanics, except you get more button prompts and don’t have violently shake your computer to walk forward. (My arms and my computer both thank you.)

I enjoyed how the game would function while not booted up, so I could sort up some actions for the day and then let the polk do their own thing, even auto-train stats via the options menu, without leaving my computer on. While you still have to manually select the adventure, the Yolk folk can proceed with adventuring without you if you set it to in the options. It should be noted though the yolk never seems to perform nearly as well when you’re away as it does when you’re watching it. (This is understandable. My presence is very inspiring!)

You have to raise a new hero every chapter. I liked this, but could see this being demotivating for some, since the game doesn’t add many new mechanics after the first chapter to make the other yolks feel different from the first. The game hints that sometimes your old yolks will come help your current one while doing adventures. This is a cool sounding feature that would maybe make people feel better about starting over, but I never once had it happen outside of kinda-sorta in a single scripted event.

Overall, the game’s very good for what it is, and it scratched the exact itch I wanted it to. However, I think in order to know if you’re the target audience you need understand what you’re getting: A cozy and mostly hands-off idle game that usually just wants you to check in on it for about 5-10 minutes without thinking too hard. It's not a game that you’re going to slap on your monitor and focus on for hours at a time.

A pretty solid game held back by annoying DLC practices but, most importantly, some very serious bugs.

As of writing this review, I’ve got about 15 hours in the game. Less true gameplay hours if you exclude the time I or someone else was in a menu modifying builds or managing the xcom-esque research system. In this time I have encountered many experience dampening bugs. These range from the commonplace, like people getting stuck in terrain forever if they get too close, to the more inane, such as the game showing some of the players a different map than they’re actually on. These have all happened repeatedly.

This is a bit hard to convey, so let me elaborate a little more on it: The game has repeatedly shown one or more players the wrong map. For example, the actual map will have a big multiroom building to the starting position's left hand side. For a few of the players, there will not be a big building but will often be some other terrain, such as for example a fenced in outpost. Sometimes the map geometry matches whatever the host has loaded, which makes the game unplayable for the bugged players because said players are constantly hitting invisible walls as they run into terrain or structures that are not present on their screens. Other times they are allowed to move around according to their version of the map, but the game is still messed up for them as the rest of the party are on a different version of the map, meaning that they will run through what, to the bugged player, is solid terrain or walls. Sometimes there are objectives that the bugged player can not physically reach due to the map desync.

The devs were aware of the bug and have posted that they were looking into it back in 2021. Since the bug is still present however, I can only assume that they were unable to figure out the cause or deploy a fix, and it’s very unlikely that they will do so now, three years later.

I think the game as a whole is fun, and lots of time and effort clearly went into it. The level design is good. The soundtrack is fine and I like how being low on health effectively remixes the music, or at least adds health warnings that sync to the music in some way.

The story is fun and lighthearted. The abilities all do cool things with unique behavior and there’s a lot of fun weapons, combined and otherwise.

There’s a lot of extra dialogue in the game for if you manage to do something in an abnormal way. The block/parry system being tied to her kicks is very fun, especially since the game doesn't often flat out require it, so it's always an optional cool thing to make your life easier as. The kicks serve as a tool for digging through terrain, and that's pretty cool too.

This isn’t even delving into the second character, who I didn’t play enough of to review but who clearly has completely unique movement setup and playstyle. We’re not talking “X has a megabuster but Zero has a sword” kinds of unique, I mean entirely different.

There’s a lot of fun attention to detail and it does feel like the game dev really cares.

Alright. That’s it. You’ve read the review. Go on and purchase the game now, pay no attention to the text behind the curtain.




Are they gone? Okay.


Dev. For future games you make. Please.

I respect the effort and obvious that went into it so regardless of anything else you've earned a positive review. Heck. For 95% of people who want to play this game the rest of this review won’t matter. But for me? It does. I say this out of love:

Constant Screen Shake is not your friend. Constant Screen Shake is not going to return your calls. It’s tearing us apart, and we’re both better off moving on without it.

Even with the screen shake turned as low as it would go (Nested under another option, when it really should be on its own) the screen shake is awful. I liked the game enough to truck through it for the most part, but on the final set of levels there’s a recurring turret enemy. It seems to fire roughly once per second. You have to hit it from at a certain angle or parry its cannons so you have to focus on your position and timing. Every time the turret fires a shot, my screen shakes. Every time its shots hit a wall, my screen shakes. Every time it hits me, the screen jars as I’m knocked back. The frequency (roughly twice per second) combined with how it isn’t an exact timing that my brain can easily adjust to while I'm having to pay close attention to my positioning and timing makes me nauseous and I will never be able to beat the game as long as its shaking isn't turned off by the options. I absolutely don't expect you to patch a six year old 15 dollar game for lil ol' me. But I sure would like for any future games you make to not do this, because what I was able to play I really enjoyed.

okay but any videogame from the year 2019 brave enough to casually tell me a characters favorite neopets species is above any and all criticism/reproach/bad vibes it is the law sorry i don't want to go to jail okay

View From Below is a turn based rpg about a lonely and depressed teenager getting thrown into a dark underworld full of strange allies and enemies with motivations he doesn’t initially understand. The game avoids “Menu Simulator” syndrome by introducing a varied array of minigames that determine how hard you deal or take damage. The graphics are all simple and 8-bit, but the music usually stays away from beeps and boops. The game leans heavily onto its story and characters in order to hook the player. View from Below is extremely impressive for its one person dev team and feels both competent and heartfelt.

+ The story is good and the characters are consistent. Every character felt like they had proper motivation. The primary characters all have proper arcs that flow naturally.

+ The game makes very good use of pacing. You always feel like you’re progressing, and the usually serious story is mixed in with little bits of silly humor placed strategically to make sure you don’t get emotional fatigue.

+ The art is very good for this style of game and the cutscenes are all very well drawn.

+ A small detail that I love: XP is gained as soon as you defeat an enemy. This means, in fights with several enemies, you are allowed to level-up mid fight. More games should allow this because it is cool.

+ Gaining a new spell every time you level up is good motivation to grind a little bit. Since each spell requires different inputs to cast, it really does help feel like you're getting something new each level.

+ Lots of small minigames are sprinkled around the world to give you a breathe of fresh air, and never outstay their welcome.

+ Random encounters are kept to bushes and the encounter frequency is pretty low. Usually I encountered one enemy per patch of grass unless I was bumbling about. This means random encounters stay fun and rarely become annoying. Running from battle has increased odds every time you attempt it, so even if the encounters do get annoying, you arn't necessary trapped inside them.

= I really wish the final boss consistently changed his overworld facial expressions to match the ones he's using in his dialogue icon. It hinders the mood a little bit when his dialogue box is laughing at me but his overworld sprite is :C

- The combat system was usually pretty fun and engaging. However, some evade sequences took about twice as long as they should have. There were a few evade minigames where, even versus bosses, I just allowed myself to get hit rather than play because they took too long to conclude and weren’t really fun. Some spells were too button mashey.

- The side quests never really felt worth it.

IF YOU ARE FAMILIAR WITH UNDERTALE: View From Below’s first chapter plays like a darker and shakier Undertale, but the game gets extremely solid once it gets confident enough to start telling its own story. The story takes itself far more seriously than Undertale and, while there are some goofy and funny npcs and moments, the game’s nowhere near as friendly or jokey overall. If you enjoyed Undertale for the gameplay and like a good indie rpg story, you should enjoy this. If you liked Undertale for the silly characters and slice-of-life moments, this won’t have the same appeal. When you start the game, there ARE going to be times when the list of npc archetypes causes you to start thinking “Hello, Sans. Sup, Toreal, Hiya, Undyne.” The game does end up carrying the characters in extremely different directions and, by the end of the game, fleshes them all out into their own unique characters. It feels important to mention both that the similarity exists and also that it eventually rescinds into the background almost entirely. Oh. And I hope you liked dodging Undyne's spears because now you get to do it three times.


TLDR: I liked it.

I’m not enough of a diehard Wonder Boy fan to really have much outright nostalgia, but I’ve really enjoyed all of the Wonder Boy games that I’ve played. When I saw this game, I was excited because of that enjoyment. Monster Boy is a really fun game for the first three to four hours, but after that the game’s quality starts to drop substantially due to a decline in level design quality and an increase in mechanics that do little save for waste time.

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Before getting into it, I do want to mention that there’s some things that the game does very well.

The art is great. The backgrounds look vivid and the animations for the various forms you’ll use throughout the game all have charm and personality to them. For example, the frog has a definite bounce to his running animations. The pig isn’t in shape and, in his idle animation, will swap what eye his eyepatch is on to lampshade the way it changes depending on what direction you’re running. The snake is very angry and has a large head that gets in its way. The art’s all very cute. There is occasionally a weird black fuss around some of the character art, but it isn’t noticeable during active gameplay.

The game has a lot of checkpoints, and they’re for the most part placed very intuitively. In addition, the game is good at remembering what puzzles you have cleared already, so even if you complete a room, die, and respawn before said room, the game will keep that room in a completed state so that you don’t have to solve it again.

The soundtrack is good. There’s a few remixes from Wonder Boy games thrown in, and they’re usually nice. None of the tracks are bad, though some have more life than others.

There aren’t a lot of glitches. Those that exist aren’t game-ending.

There's one or two animated cutscenes. They're very well drawn and fit the game's style.

The game’s fast travel system is really good. There are enough portals scattered around to ensure that you usually won’t have to do a whole lot of backtracking to get to an area you’ve already visited. Later on, you unlock an item that lets you warp to a portal from anywhere. This handily prevents you from having to walk back out of areas after you’re done exploring.

The controls are tight, responsive, and feel good.

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Unfortunately, the good comes with a lot of bad.

Enemy damage is oddly tuned. Some enemies deal a ton of damage, while some (even in the final level) deal very little. This makes the game seem unpolished, but isn’t a big deal in and of itself. it does, however, create a situation where heart upgrades don’t feel satisfying.

All bosses are super easy

The game’s a little inconsistent. Some blocks will look like other blocks but won’t behave the same or will require different things. Some enemies that look like other enemies behave differently. (Spoilers?) One boss fight in the game requires you to, mostly unprovoked, go into your options menu and change the settings. The game does not do any meta-messing or notable fourth-wall-breaking before or after this. (/Spoilers?) None of this is a huge problem, but it’s a thing.

For a metroidvania, there’s not a lot of reason to explore beyond simply wanting to do so. There are four kinds of exploration rewards: Spell Ammunition (used only in pig and human form and only rarely have impact beyond opening chests that require getting hit with X uses of Y spell in a row), Gems (used to upgrade gear. You don’t need very many. Just some for your chosen main armor with high defense that you’ll only swap off of when a situation demands it), Golden equipment parts (The sword is required, the other parts are optional. I can’t comment on how good the non-sword pieces are, but there’s no content you need them for. The game eventually tells you where to find them via two different maps) and Hearts (increase HP by 1) The golden equipment might be worth it, but spell ammunition and upgrade gems are very niche. As previously stated: hearts sound useful, but because some enemies deal 7 hearts of damage in a single hit through high defense armor, they don’t feel like a reward. Few of the exploration rewards make you feel like you’ve progressed anything.

The plot of the game is bad. This point is heavily influenced by personal preference: I don’t believe that all games need a plot. However, I do believe that most games need agency. In space invaders, for example, you’re defending against an alien threat. In Super Mario Brothers, you’re trying to rescue a beloved princess. Both of these have very little plot, but it’s understood that there are stakes. There’s a reason to succeed because there’s a large implied consequence if you fail. (The aliens destroy earth! The mushroom kingdom falls to the power of an evil king!) This game doesn’t have that for most of the game. The basic plot, without spoilers, is that your uncle is a drunkard and has turned everyone in the kingdom into anthropomorphic animals. Everyone is initially surprised by this, but otherwise really don’t seem to care that much. A few characters mention liking their new forms more than their old forms. The two characters that mention disliking the change after the initial shock dislike it because they don’t like the kind of animal their loved ones turned into. The big consequences if you fail your quest is that the people don’t turn back into humans, which isn't really portrayed as a bad thing. The secondary reason is that the king’s adviser alleges that your uncle will get executed for his crime. This could work for agency, but is hampered by the way the game makes the uncle very unlikable until the very end of the game. There’s also the weird logic hole where even if you turn everyone back, he still did the crime. Would reversing the curse really change his fate? Around Two levels before the game ends a secondary plot appears and reveals that we finally have an actual antagonist, but by then it’s too little too late.

The big elephant in the room is, of course, that the sense of difficulty is all over the place. I know there’s reviews that talk about the mid-game difficulty spike in both positive and negative lights, but I think there’s something a lot of reviewers aren’t really taking into account, and that’s the difference between hard and challenging. Enemies are placed with the goal of frustrating the player over challenging them. They appear from offscreen to knock you off of platforms, appear in your path to stun you while you’re on a timer, or will infinitely respawn in the way of your attacks to slow your progress. None of this is particularly deadly nor does it enforce nor enable much of a change in playstyle, but it all wastes time. This is combined with off-screen hazards like spikes and "gotcha" moments where something unexpected occurs last minute to try and reset your progress on a puzzle’s last step to create a weird sense of difficulty where the game has parts where it can be hard, but seldom parts where it is tricky, challenging, or fulfilling. Most areas are designed to waste your time with cheap tricks rather than truly provide you with an engaging challenge. I almost never walked away with a sense of satisfaction from solving a puzzle, and instead often found it annoying how long the game tried to make solving things take after I already understood them. Overcoming an obstacle is often a matter of memorization rather than one of skill or self-improvement. It never really feels like you're getting better at the game in the ways other popular hard games do, rather it usually just feels like you got better at that very specific one-shot obstacle because you memorized what was going to happen.

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In the end, the game is aesthetically presented well. if you’re a big fan of Wonder Boy, it probably has enough in the way of similarities, call-backs, and references to keep you engaged. If you want to judge this game soley on its own merits, however, it falls short in quite a few places. Maybe grab it on a good sale.

This game is good. Really good.

If you have any kind of love for old rpgs or even just western rpgs in general and don't mind the combat being turn based (which honestly works just fine) then you're going to love this gem. Modern RPGs should honestly strive to be like this.

It is also the first rpg in which playing as one of the "preset" characters instead of an OC was a super fun choice, possibly even the superior choice, as they all have unique story stuff they can go through, have custom interactions, and are all fully voiced. You also retain complete control over their build, so there's still enough of you in them to make it feel natural to play them.

The game is also fully co-opable, which makes it even better.

There are a few glitches in terms of co-op. If your clients control more than one character then sometimes their second character will cut-off their first from having a voiced response to "group huddles". Which is a bummer but isn't game breaking, just mildly inconvenient. Sometimes if someone's internet dips combat will stick until they leave and rejoin. A lot of small bugs that are not strong enough to change my mind about recommending the game.

You also get a lot of game for your money. The main campaign is long. Like, book length long. There's a DM mode for if you finish the story, but I haven't used it at all so I can not comment on its functionality or if it is fun.

I never really made it into the 3d platformer collect-a-thon craze. I was never super into banjo-kazooie. I liked Super Mario 64 but never actually beat a game of that formula until Galaxy.

I love this game, however. Fun controls that make sense, levels that feel designed around what your character can do and, while sometimes challenging, are never really frustrating, a cute and well-done aeshetic and visual style, and just lots of charm and cute humor kept the game very fresh for me. This is the only 3d platformer of its type that I've gotten 100% of the "stars" in, and there was never a point where I stopped enjoying it. Sure, some levels were a lot stronger than others (with the alpine peaks coming is as my definite least favorite) but even the weaker levels still felt fun. Game play was shaken up enough from world to world so that even though a lot of what you were doing stayed the same between worlds, enough changed to make them feel like they had their own unique gameplay identity.

I spur-of-the-moment bought the first CCN upon release and instantly fell in love with the game and characters despite never having touched almost any of the crossovered properties. When CCN2 popped up as releasing on my news feed, grabbing it was a no brainer.

Card City Nights 2 is a deck building/puzzle game based around activating cards by placing them in a chain. Each card has different arrows that can be connected and most cards have an effect such as damaging or healing. More gimmicky cards exist and there’s enough variation on the cards to keep most of them interesting, though unfortunately a handful of cards do get power creeped out pretty easily.

Fans of the first game are probably thinking that this sounds a lot like the first game. This game is not like the first game. I am going to quickly point out a few key differences:

*The entire game takes place on one board. You must now pay much closer attention to your enemy’s cards, as blocking is a very real strategy and, in fact, is one that the AI will start to utilize against you once you hit mid-game. In addition, more cards have effects on the opposing player to reinforce this change.

*Cards now have a countdown once activated, rather than activating immediately upon a completed chain. Activated cards in their countdown phase can trigger new cards matched with them. This pulls two new factors into play. First of all, you now have to have the foresight to have a card ticking down before you strictly need it, but not so soon that it triggers and does nothing. Second, this means that in many decks you will have to keep up a pace so that you constantly have cards activating other cards. This makes having a good flow of arrows in your deck a little bit more important than in the first game. This also makes a lot of the healing cards lackluster. In my experience there were two to three healing cards that will likely see much use, the others you will probably ditch.

*There is much more variety in the way of gimmick cards, now. In the first game most of the gimmick cards were pretty basic. They get more complicated and niche here, there’s a lot of options for decks. While I personally am not entirely sold on the validity of some possible gimmicks, they're cool enough to have fun with.

Overall I found the actual cardplay of the original to be more my style, but all the same I am glad they tried out something new. It keeps things fresh and all in all it is still a very enjoyable core gameplay, even if it takes a little getting used to. I enjoyed the new gameplay, I just found myself preferring the old.

The games presentation is great, there are quite a few charming characters (though a lot are really similar to their ccn1 personas, who are in turn inspired by their counterparts in other Ludosity games. It’s to be expected and doesn’t get in the way at all. I don’t have the greatest knowledge of Ludosity’s catalogue but I’d assume it is pretty cool to see the reimagined characters if you are a big fan of their games) a great soundtrack, and some really nice art. CCN1 had charming art, CCN2 takes that style and polishes the heck out of it while staying true to the series’ aesthetics. The game looks and sounds awesome. The game also encourages you to actively look at the art, as clicking various background objects will sometimes reward you with card sleeves, money, and rare cards. Finally, my childhood humongous entertainment adventure days have paid off!

The game is a lot of fun and I enjoyed my time with it. There were some downsides, though.

The game balance is a little wonky. Like the first game, the computer player grows smarter and more adaptive as you progress through the game at a pretty smooth rate. Not all decks are created equal, however. Since every enemy has a unique deck set, Around mid-game you’ll encounter extremely hard opponents followed by a chain of extremely easy ones. On one hand this does encourage you to build a new deck designed to be good against the deck you are having trouble with, which is awesome and is fair enough for near the end of the game. However when you encounter the first opponent that spikes difficulty, you probably won’t have the cards needed to be that flexible. This results in an indefinite period of grinding (because what cards you get are random. You could pull what you need in 10 tokens, or, while unlikely, it could take you 200 tokens). It’s not the biggest deal, but it does have potential to interrupt the game flow quite a lot and a more consistant curve would be preferable.

The hacking mechanic is cool, but since it requires coins AND a copy of the card you’re hacking AND you are not able to tell what the cards hacked effects will be until you have performed at least one hack on that card type, It is not very efficient to use until the end-game. I feel like the coin cost at the least could be done without. It’s not much, but if it were to be even a little more assessable earlier on in the game I would have had more time to explore the gimmicks and hacked cards before at the end-game.

All in all, I enjoyed my time with CCN2 and will probably attempt a challenge run (You unlock characters that, when picked, enforce additional rules on your playthrough). If you were a fan of the first game, then definitely pick it up. If you are new to the series, then I would recommend you start with the first game instead unless you anticipate playing a lot of multiplayer.