I’m sure we all have a few games that have been sitting around unplayed in our Steam libraries for years. I think I bought En Garde! around the time of its release in 2023; it was on sale, and I figured I’d get around to it eventually. Now, in April 2026, I was finally between games after spending an unreasonably long time beating everything in Heretic + Hexen. This adorable title, a student project with vibrant art and a unique take on the action genre, looked up at me with puppy dog eyes like I’d left it out in the rain overnight. I’m glad I let it inside when I did, though; it turns out it’s exactly the kind of game I like to stumble upon, warts and all.

Those experienced with the action genre know that the toughest moments aren’t fights against towering bosses and tough enemies, but dealing with crowds of low to mid level foes. Though it’s actually a lot of fun to learn different strategies and use moves you would otherwise ignore to deal with crowds, many players prefer simple duels with no distractions. Unlike other action games, En Garde! thrives in the crowded scuffle by design. Adalia de Volador, the lovable rogue fighting against Spanish oppression in Mexico, won’t be able to brush armies aside with ease or juggle an enemy in midair for a full minute like Dante or Bayonetta. In spite of what you expect from a fencing-themed game, En Garde! sets itself apart by encouraging you to play dirty.

En Garde!’s combat is fundamentally quite simple. You have basic attacks, a parry for quick ripostes, and a dodge for attacks which can’t be parried. Enemies have only a couple hit points, but you have to break down their guard to hit them. There’s no standing and waiting in En Garde!; it’s always best to keep attacking enemies, as it’ll drain their guard and force them to attack so that you can counter it. It’s simple and effective, but you’ll find it lacking as tougher enemies start to appear and your foes come in larger numbers. Captains have shields and heavy armor which normal attacks won’t break, and certain tougher enemies get all of their guard back when you don’t dodge or parry their attacks correctly. Unlike some other action games, the action can always reach a point where even the sharpest players won’t be able to parry or dodge through everything.

How do you deal with groups of sharper, tougher foes when your moveset is so simple? It’s easy; just improvise! One attack I haven’t mentioned yet is the kick, and it’s the move that opens up a world of possibilities. Kick your enemies into walls, down stairs, or right off of cliffs when you open them up! Better yet, kick props into enemies or vice versa. Knock down a crowd by kicking a stack of crates into them or kick enemies right into a weapon rack to drop it on their heads. You have to catch an enemy off guard, either by avoiding their attacks or disorienting them with props, before you can kick them directly. This means you can’t just kick everyone around all the time, making it more satisfying to kick an enemy in just the right spot.

Of course, there’s also a button to quickly interact with even more props in every arena. You can throw stuff at enemies to stun them, cut down ropes to drop cages and chandeliers on your enemies, or toss a bucket over an enemy’s head to keep them out of the fight for a while. When simply fencing your enemies doesn’t work, unorthodox tactics sweep them off their feet and embarrass them enough to make their guard easier to break. The varied arenas and props make your approach to every single fight different, and the variety of enemies is enough to further change up your approach. My only gripe here is the lack of a real manual lock-on system; the less strict targeting makes sense with how aware you must be of your surroundings, but it didn’t always agree with who I wanted to hit.

Last but not least is panache, the mechanic which really ties the theatrical theme together. Many action games put an emphasis on stylish play, but En Garde! is once again unique it how it defines style. Panache fuels a set of three powerful attacks which restore a point of health; a strike which depletes a lot of guard, a spinning slash to disperse crowds, and an unblockable kick that makes it easy to put your enemies in bad spots. You won’t earn much panache from your usual fighting maneuvers; instead, you earn it with bold and otherwise impractical flourishes. Swing over a crowd on a rope or a bar, landing on the other side as they can’t help but stare in shock! Slide over a table towards enemies, stunning them with your bravery! All of this has the perfect flair for a musketeering game like this, but it does feel a little like the game is bluntly looking for ways to get you to move like it wants you to. The special moves are nice to have with how busy and chaotic the game can get - especially on hard mode, where your health is halved - but earning panache is one part of the game that doesn’t quite flow as well as the rest.

Fortunately, even En Garde!’s hard mode feels quite fair, despite the game claiming that normal mode is the intended experience. Of course, it’s not as hard to design a solid difficulty curve when the game only has four levels. Yeah, I was able to finish the game on hard and its bonus arena mode in about four and a half hours, which is probably the most disappointing thing about the game. The arena mode’s random aspects do help to give it some replay value, at least. This game’s status as a cleaned-up student project explains all of its best and worst aspects. That’s why it doesn’t have a lot of content and seems a bit rough around the edges sometimes, but that’s also why it was made with so much creativity and heart.

Matching the appeal of its roguish gameplay is its wholly charming aesthetic. Your adventures as Adalia de Volador consist of four largely self-contained episodes exploring her escapades against the establishment. The entire first episode sees her fighting through the city guard in an elaborate test orchestrated by her bumbling brother Alejandro, who unconvincingly disguises himself as “El Vigilante” with a domino mask. The third episode introduces Zaida, a fellow rogue who isn’t above using Adalia’s crush on her to her advantage; the almost childlike admiration Adalia has for Zaida is adorable. The overarching villain is the Count Duke - both count and duke - who taxes the city dry and responds to caricatures of himself by burning them all in a huge bonfire in the city. The simple setup of a people’s hero fighting to keep the occupying government in check plays well into a lighthearted and quite funny tone, employing all the classic genre tropes with a self-aware touch. The colorful Mexican cityscapes and flavorful music give the game a vibrant feeling.

A lot of credit has to go to the performances here. Clara Cantos’ performance on Adalia is nothing short of spirited from start to finish; you can tell she’s having a ton of fun taunting her enemies and delivering witty retorts in the heat of battle, and her intonation fits the character perfectly. Angela LeBlanc and Julien Masdoua are also doing well as Zaida and Alejandro respectively, selling me on Zaida’s cool cynicism and Alejandro’s klutzy theatrics effectively. Although Mathieu Lagarrigue’s performance as the Count Duke is arguably a little flat, his intonation suited the image of the cruel, narcissistic noble well enough.

Quite a lot of the fun really comes from the various enemies’ lines in combat. The back-and-forth between Adalia and her foes is very charming, as they complain about her unorthodox tactics being unfair or taunt her for running away only to end up with a bucket on their head moments later. Their reactions to getting kicked down the stairs, watching Adalia leap over them in awe, and the like are fittingly cheesy. The tougher enemies like Captains and Duelists have more distinct personalities; it’s always fun to hear Captains complain about the lacking quality of their soldiers and to stuff Duelists’ self-important dignity right in their faces. It’s the perfect tone for a game about performing slapstick comedy against your enemies to come out on top.

Overall, En Garde! isn’t exactly some kind of groundbreaking masterpiece, but it is a fun, charming little romp. I don’t have much of anything bad to say about it, and just about anyone looking for a good time can enjoy what this game has to offer. I’m always so happy to stumble upon something like this because it just feels like something made by people who really cared about bringing their idea to life. Though its creators may not have had a ton of experience, they were still able to pour their creativity and talent into something that put a smile on my face. When stupid people who do nothing but play Call of Duty and Fortnite all of the time complain about games no longer being fun, I can’t help but think of things like En Garde! There’s always someone out there making the kind of game you want to see; sometimes you just have to look outside the mainstream.

If anyone’s ever told you that success is all about connections, there’s perhaps no better example of such a thing than Raven Software’s rapport with id software in the ‘90s. John Romero had taken a shine to their work on the otherwise-unsuccessful Black Crypt in 1992, and id would agree to publish many of their later endeavors. The one that would put Raven on the map was 1994’s Heretic, an early step towards creating a Dungeons and Dragons-inspired game that pushed the engine from id’s revolutionary 1993 title Doom in new ways. They’d later get even more ambitious with 1995’s Hexen: Beyond Heretic, one of the most advanced Doom engine titles of the time. Though Doom’s imitators were so numerous that the first-person shooter genre spent nearly a decade being referred to simply as “Doom clones,” Raven’s unique fantasy titles always stood out for bringing their own take to an established formula; this approach would define the company until Activision essentially just banished them to the endless Call of Duty grindstone around 2013.

Nightdive Studios, ever crusading to revive the old classics for modern audiences, turned their attention to Raven’s iconic pair of medieval shooters last summer. The remaster is not only an excellent opportunity for me to experience these titles for the first time, but it also introduces a number of changes that raise interesting ideas on what sorts of liberties remasters can take. These games, emblematic of attempts at innovation in the age before Quake added a real third dimension, occupy an interesting middle ground between adventure and shooter design that lends them a unique feel. How do they hold up today, and how did they affect the games of today?

At D’Sparil’s Gate

If either of these games was to deserve the archaic “Doom clone” moniker, it would be Heretic. Originally consisting of three episodes with nine levels each, one of which was secret, it fits Doom’s structure exactly. Almost all of its weapons are medieval-style analogues to Doom’s; wand equals pistol, Hellstaff equals plasma rifle, etc. The levels are wide labyrinths where navigation usually depends on collecting keys and hitting switches, killing the hordes of enemies along the way. The simple story of fighting demons is replaced by the slightly-less-simple story of fighting back against D’Sparil, the tyrannical Serpent Rider who swayed the world of Parthoris into worshiping him. See, that’s why it’s called Heretic! You can look up and down now, for what it’s worth, but it leads to weird texture warping and you’ll need the vertical auto-aim anyways.

However, simply calling it “Doom but medieval” feels reductive. While Heretic maintains all the Doom fundamentals, it finds much of its value in the ways that it builds additional mechanics on top of them. Heretic includes an inventory, allowing you to store useful items and power-ups for on-demand use. Most unique among these is the Tome of Power, which provides a unique boost to each weapon when used. This can be as simple as raising the number of projectiles and the fire rate of the shotgun-esque Ethereal Crossbow or as weird as turning your Hellstaff into a weapon that summons damaging rainstorms above enemies. One item turns enemies into much less deadly chickens. Though power-ups like invincibility and flight are also quite potent, the simple ability to carry health potions with you is perhaps most impactful of all. Heretic smartly prevents players from carrying more than one of each item between maps, encouraging you to use them instead of letting them collect dust while you wait for that hypothetical perfect moment when you absolutely need it.

Heretic’s enemies are also a good deal more creative than Doom’s. The original Doom’s enemies are really quite simple, and even Doom II’s new monsters are largely riffs on the existing ones. Heretic’s monsters use a wider range of attacks, perhaps most evident in its bosses. Iron liches fire exploding ice shots, walls of fireballs, and even really disorienting homing tornadoes which screw with your aim. Maulotaurs (no, I didn’t misspell “minotaurs”) use fireball spreads, grounded waves of fire, and a charging attack which can stun you briefly. Even basic enemies like the extremely common Gargoyles and the Disciples of D’Sparil add a lot more unique flavor. Enemies have a way of feeling quite bulky, though, especially for the numbers in which they appear. This is also partly due to a weirdly large degree of damage randomization on all the weapons which makes them feel inconsistent. It doesn’t help that the Firemace, easily the least derivative weapon in the game, is basically useless, either.

The good folks at Raven effectively leverage the medieval aesthetic in Heretic’s maps. The maps resemble fortresses and dungeons better than the maps in Doom ever resembled much of anything, and there’s a ton of great texture work for basic surfaces and a variety of wall decorations. Like the inventory, the maps also take inspiration from adventure games in their puzzles. The sorts of things you need to do to progress in some Heretic levels could easily have passed for secrets in Doom. The sum of these changes is a game that feels like an effective adventure-themed next step for the Doom formula. While it’s not as tight and lean as Doom in the action department, the breadth of tools at your disposal and the new foes makes it all feel pretty fresh - even when it makes things a lot easier.

Heretic + Hexen includes the original two Shadow of the Serpent Riders expansion episodes as well as the all-new Faith Renewed, and Nightdive has once more proven their deep understanding of these classics with their new episode. Faith Renewed’s maps ramp up the challenge in a good way and lay themselves out such as to never be as confusing as Heretic’s worst maps. I played the five classic episodes in their original states (you can disable the remaster’s changes in the “difficulty modifiers” sub-menu when starting a new game) and switched to Nightdive’s new mechanics for Faith Renewed, as I assumed they’d built their own expansion around them. Both were fun, though I can certainly see why Nightdive felt the need to change some things about the old episodes. I won’t complain about making the Firemace actually useful, and the original first map of Serpent Riders is an ungodly affair with too many enemies and too little ammo. That said, I think Nightdive’s map changes and new mechanics are a little too wide-reaching in some cases, especially for a game that wasn’t exactly begging for a fix. If you’re curious, I recommend playing the game in its original state first and switching to the enhancements if something is really bothering you.

It’s Like Playing D&D Alone But if That Wasn’t Super Depressing

Now, here’s where things really get interesting. Where Heretic applied a medieval twist on the fundamental Doom structure, Hexen: Beyond Heretic went… well, beyond. Though still a boomer shooter at its core, Hexen blends much more of the fantasy adventure genre into the mix. To this end, Raven pushed the Doom engine’s performance farther than ever. Vertical aiming returns and is now complimented by jumping, lending a much better sense of verticality to the not-quite-3D engine. Hexen’s environmental detail and lighting are also very sophisticated for the time, featuring destructible props like pots and trees and a ton of decorative wall textures. Your quest through Cronos to take down the next Serpent Rider, Korrax, ends up feeling much grander and more immersive.

Primary to the game’s fantasy feeling is the roster of three playable characters, each with unique weapons and stats. Baratus the fighter is the fastest and toughest character with an emphasis on melee; only two of his four weapons can attack at range. Daedolon the mage is the slowest and frailest, but he’s the only character who starts with a ranged attack and he generally fights better from afar. Parias the cleric strikes a middle ground with speed and durability, starting with a melee weapon and finding reliable ranged options later on. Each character has four weapons: the starting weapon which uses no mana, one weapon for either blue or green mana, and a fourth superweapon which must be assembled from three pieces and uses a hefty amount of both mana colors. Each class also uses the collectible fléchettes differently, which is kind of like a fifth weapon. Taken on the whole, you have more weapons and ways to play, but completing a Hexen campaign from start to finish as one character will leave you wanting some more variety - especially since the Tome of Power doesn’t return.

Hexen’s map design is also a big departure, and it’s a major reason the game feels so much more like a fantasy adventure. The linear episodes have been replaced with sprawling hubs, collections of interconnected maps featuring puzzles that require traveling through the entire hub to solve. Hunting down the proper switches and keys is a much more involved affair, for better or for worse. The first hub, The Seven Portals, is notorious for its confusing multi-network of various switch puzzles, and this does comprise much of how you navigate Hexen. I will admit that, when I pulled a switch in a later hub and saw the message “One ninth of the puzzle has been solved,” I couldn’t help but sigh. Watch out for crushing ceilings and floors and bottomless pits, too. While the feeling of navigating between each area lends a fun sense of scale and purpose to the world, it does grow tedious at times, especially because essential switches and keys are sometimes hidden in obscure, easy-to-miss corners. I’m used to investigating wall textures and checking weird corners from other boomer shooters, and even I got stumped a few times. Hexen is at its worst when it stalls out like that.

The map design is indicative of the unevenness which pervades all aspects of Hexen. While the weapons are generally more creative than Heretic’s, some of them are duds, which stands out more in light of how few alternatives each character has. The new hub system also means the game doesn’t stop you from stocking up on items anymore, which can really trivialize things in light of how common many items are. You’ll be playing the majority of the game with your fléchettes and healing potions maxed out at 25, with replacements found quickly after use. Despite the scale of the game, enemy variety is quite scant, which once again makes the more annoying enemies stand out. Centaurs and their more powerful but visually identical Slaughtaur variants use their shields to reflect attacks, often forcing time-consuming approaches to killing them. Swamp areas are filled to the gills with Stalkers, mermen who can only be killed while they’re popping up from underwater to smack you. The Heresiarch is a dreadfully annoying boss fought twice in the regular game with an absurd amount of health who occasionally activates a projectile-reflecting barrier - killing him is a chore. Hexen ends up being more ambitious and interesting than Heretic, but not as consistent and rougher around the edges.

Fortunately, this is where Nightdive’s remastering touch comes into play. Like Heretic, this game’s original expansion, Deathkings of the Dark Citadel, and the brand-new Vestiges of Grandeur are also included in Heretic + Hexen. Oddly enough, the remaster settings change less about Hexen, but the changes they do make are all great. Many of the game’s worst weapons feel a lot better now. Most noticeable is the addition of a shield to Parias’ originally-pathetic mace; melee attacks can now be parried to open enemies up to a brutal counterstrike, transforming Parias’ gameplay completely. If you want to mix things up, there are various pedestals in the hubs which let you switch your character without starting a new game. Maps have new visual touches that make it easier to track your progress on switch hunts, and the automap now marks keys and the many hub teleporters to provide a fairer sense of direction. Enemy counts in single-player have been reduced a fair bit to cut down on tedium, which is especially helpful for Deathkings.

Vestiges of Grandeur also ends up being an excellent demonstration of Hexen at its best. A lot of care was put into the environmental design of the maps, and while the game still consists of a sprawling puzzle across a huge hub, the main objectives and even secrets feel much more intuitive to follow. Vestiges’ only hub uses nearly every progression item from the original Hexen, but it’s all laid out with such a good flow that I barely ever stalled out. It’s an expansion which zeroes in on Hexen’s best moments; exploring sprawling medieval worlds as you fight your way forwards through intense encounters. It’s this expansion which is the clearest proof to any modern audience that Hexen’s unique genre blend has merit, even though the original game stumbled in places.

At the end of the day, neither Heretic nor Hexen broke the most ground or felt the best to play, but they are excellent examples of fun takes on existing design space. The flood of Doom Clones in the ‘90s and our current oversaturation of live-service shooters are quite similar, and these games are a good example of the difference between a truly derivative clone and an inspired new experience. Heretic combined the fundamentals with new flavor and meaningful differences that changed your approach, and Hexen’s sweeping changes to the world and gameplay demonstrated just how much potential the genre still had. Though neither game stands as a real historical landmark, they’re emblematic of all the different people putting their own spin on the current thing - and just how many of those people can end up making something worth playing. Next time you get bored of what you’ve seen before, step outside of the mainstream a little bit - or look back to the retro classics.

Even as fighting games have managed to widen the net more than ever in recent years, the long-standing stigma that these games are too “hard” remains. The approach to this for the past decade or so has been to try and remove perceived entry barriers. Some changes like input buffer windows are good, while others like simplified characters and combos have their ups and downs. Experienced players complain that fighting games are losing their spirit in an effort to boost sales, and to make matters worse, these changes haven’t done much to change their reputation as overly hardcore, unwelcoming games. What exactly does difficulty mean in the context of a game where the goal is to defeat another player? Why are other competitive genres widely perceived as more accessible? Finally, why have many new players jumped in, and what keeps them around?

“Difficult” has always seemed to me like the wrong word to describe any competitive game. When single-player games are described as such, it’s to say that players will need a certain level of skill just to make progress and see the entire game. If difficulty is defined by the benchmarks you have to reach to succeed, then the difficulty in a fighting game (or any other player-versus-player genre) changes every round. When people say these games are difficult, they’re usually referring to complicated inputs and combos or the nuanced interactions that happen in the neutral, advantage, and disadvantage states during the match. However, your understanding of these things only has to be as good as or better than your opponent’s; I can say from experience that many players even today don’t really grasp these things. Sure, some people are out there putting hundreds of hours into Street Fighter 6 to compete for millions of dollars on the world stage, but their prowess doesn’t make it any more complicated for two friends to chill on the couch and mash buttons. It also doesn’t make that casual experience any less legitimate; if you’re having fun, you’re playing the game “for real.”

This isn’t any different for other competitive genres. A beginner shooter player will probably be more concerned with learning how to move and aim at the same time than they are with concepts like proper positioning or skill shots. Racing game casuals care more about staying on the track than they do about shaving milliseconds off of their lap times. Though the difference between a beginner and a pro isn’t any smaller than it is in fighting games, beginners don’t feel like they’re not playing “the real game” or complain that it’s too hard simply to play at all in the same way. Why aren’t these games “hard”?

The reason is in how these games accommodate casual experiences. Shooters have been a single-player genre since their inception. Extremely popular shooters of the past decades like Halo and Call of Duty always packed in campaign experiences which let players get a hold of the mechanics outside of a competitive environment, not to mention their various extra cooperative modes like Firefight and Zombies and the ability to team up with friends against other players. Many shooters are designed just for single-player or co-op modes even today, but the basic genre fundamentals are largely the same as they are in multiplayer games. Racing games always have a ton of engaging ways to play alone, and they can be fun even without any other cars on the track. Even MOBAs, a genre with a similarly “hardcore” reputation as fighting games, let you play on a team with five of your buddies.

Fighting games, by contrast, usually feel stiff or boring in single-player form. Single-player often amounts to the game lining up a bunch of computer opponents for you to beat with an unfair boss at the end, a format which is fundamentally unchanged from the arcade days. More than dull, this format fails at teaching the ins and outs of the game in a fun, intuitive way. Teaming up with your friends is impossible too, save for certain tag games with modes where different players can play as a team’s various characters. Getting together with your friends usually means running king-of-the-hill rotations and a bunch of parallel one-versus-one matches. This can be plenty of fun, but it’s not as forgiving as getting to team up against random players with your friends. Instead of your more skilled friends helping you win, they’re the reason you’re losing even if they are trying to help you get better. Without good casual modes or a smooth learning pipeline, a lot of players only see fighting games through the almost unreachable expertise of high-level tournament clips and then wonder why it doesn’t look like that when they play.

It also doesn’t help that fighting games still tend to be full-price games with a lot of paid DLC. It is quite literally harder for some people to afford even trying the game, and the genre might have some progress to make in terms of simply marketing itself. I’m going to focus on the gameplay reasons these games are hard to approach, though; I just felt that was worth mentioning.

This probably makes fighting games sound archaic at best or needlessly cruel at worst, but that’s not really true. The dilemma here is that what makes fighting games struggle with casual modes is the same as what makes them really fun: they are deeply fine-tuned around the experience of fighting another person. Characters automatically face each other, with inputs checking your direction relative to your opponent. The classic balance between attacking, blocking, and grabbing is predicated on conditioning opponents into making mistakes and making predictions based on how your opponent plays. There’s honestly something intimate about the fighting game experience. With layered character designs and nuanced systems, players have a lot of room to express themselves through their play. Even those pesky motion inputs which so many players decry as archaic become satisfying to perform and help each character literally feel different in your hands. As you hone your skills and develop your own playstyle, the experience only gets more fulfilling. Hitting that “rematch” button over and over with a friend, always ready to see how the dance plays out again, is just about the peak of video games.

That depth is what makes fighting games awesome, but as I mentioned before, it’s also why the usual tricks to make onboarding easier don’t work very well. Many fighting games have opted to simplify many of the more difficult aspects of the game. Mashing a single button may result in an autocombo, classic inputs will get replaced with simple ones, or the combo system will be designed such that many characters have very similar combo routes and offensive approaches. While this has resulted in some good changes that have made modern fighting games feel less stiff, going too far in this direction is bad for the opposite reasons; it flattens the game out and leaves players without as much room to experiment or play their own way. Moreover, the things which actually stump new players, like the tempo of a match and frame data, remain the real difference-makers.

In some way, developers want to solve the “issue” of skill gaps. However, the potential for those skill gaps is what actually gives the game its substance. The problem is that beginners won’t understand what it is they’re losing to and what they need to learn. These are not impossible problems to solve, though, and the past half-decade’s fighting game renaissance is proof positive of that. You might be surprised to learn after what you’ve read here that fighting games are arguably in the best place they’ve ever been right now, and it’s all because of a few games that managed to understand what new or more casual players actually care about.

The Super Smash Bros. series is often excluded from discussions of fighting games as its own thing in spite of its immense popularity, but I believe this disqualification is part of why fighting games have stubbornly struggled as long as they have. It’s true that Smash’s open-ended “platform fighter” style is very different and outwardly simpler than traditional fighters, but it is a franchise which has long understood what casual appeal means for fighting games better than most. The platform fighter style can accommodate many more players in a match along with zany stages and items that make the game into a renowned casual experience. The casual side of Smash also allows single player to be fun, since the computer opponents don’t have to engage players on their own. Even the simple input style doesn’t stop Smash games from being quite technical at high level, with Super Smash Bros. Melee especially being famous for its depth and complexity. While it’s true that the series has often shied away from competitive play, as was certainly the case in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, the best games in the series show that there’s room for all kinds of players in the genre. Just about anyone who likes playing Smash seriously these days started by messing around in free-for-all matches with their friends, and that’s really important.

If there is any proof that fighting games won’t succeed by dumbing themselves down, we need only look to Street Fighter. 2016’s Street Fighter V attempted to draw in new players with a simpler gameplay system, but failed hard at launch because there was almost nothing to do besides play ranked matches online with bad delay-based netcode. Without casual modes, new players didn’t see much value in the purchase, leaving experienced players to complain about the lack of depth compared to Street Fighter IV. Only with years of updates containing new modes, characters, and moves did Street Fighter V come to feel like a complete experience. The game also added much better “rollback” netcode later on, which became the industry standard after Guilty Gear -STRIVE- launched with it to great success.

For 2023’s Street Fighter 6, Capcom learned their lesson from their previous failure better than I’ve ever seen in the industry. Instead of boiling characters down, every returning character was expanded out with new moves and lots of room for engaging, expressive decision-making. Traditional “classic” controls and simplified “modern” controls coexist effectively, letting players run with the input style they like best. The new Drive Gauge system and its associated mechanics are extremely fine-tuned, layering the game with an exciting sense of risk vs. reward at a base level. An elegant mix of simple fundamentals and complex optimizations make the game’s flow more intuitive without compromising the satisfaction of mastery at all. Naturally, online play is done with rollback netcode, preserving the game’s smooth and precise feel.

If that wasn’t enough, the game’s World Tour is perhaps the most effective single-player mode in any fighting game. Framed as an RPG with a custom main character, players can experiment with all kinds of moves from every character while growing stronger as they face opponents who test the player on relevant fighting-game skills like anti-airing and blocking. Though more of a tutorial than anything, it succeeds where fighting games have failed for decades by introducing new players to the genre’s mechanics in an intuitive, entertaining way. Combine all of this with an extremely robust suite of quality-of-life and accessibility settings, and Street Fighter 6 is among the most bang for your buck in the entire genre. There are minor gripes to be had with the balance and such, but this is easily one of the best fighting games for players of all types.

So, fighting games will always be “hard” because the challenge and room for growth are what make the experience worth your time. What fighting games don’t have to be is hard to try. The real challenge of fighting games isn’t in the techniques; it’s in the ways that fighting games have obfuscated the transition from casual to competitor for decades. The fundamentals of fighting games really are strong, and they’re the only reason the genre is still going strong today. If we want it to grow and thrive, though, we need fighting games to work harder at showing players of all kinds the value of the experience. The only way to get more serious players is to give casual observers a window into why fighting games are awesome, and besides, don’t we want casual friends and solo players to have fun, too? In short, the way to make fighting games better is to make them better not just as fighting games, but as games on the whole.

I’ve always believed that “perfection” is a sort of unattainable thing in our imperfect world, but most video games do not agree with me. They present a set of problems which players are challenged to solve, and the most fun comes when you’re still solving those problems. Thus, many games keep the fun of improvement going by asking you not only to beat those challenges, but to beat them better - do it faster, take less damage, or just be cooler. Stick the landing in all of a game’s given categories, and you end up with a “perfect” grade, or an S-rank for “super,” or something to that effect. Sure, literal perfection may not be practical, but games are good at making us feel like we got there. I’m interested in what different games call perfection, how they balance challenge and fairness in pursuit of it, and why they care to do it at all.

Do Everything

Likely the most basic and approachable form of perfection in games is the simple 100% completion. Every single task in the game is already designed to be beatable, so this automatically comes across as an achievable goal. Just about any game under the sun is happy to pat its players on the back for sticking around through the whole thing. Many games even have one last section unlocked after you’ve completed everything else to make sure you end on a high note. The challenge and time demand of 100% completion vary from game to game, especially if those games have other, more specific perfection tests. Longer games with more to find tend to place the most emphasis on completion, especially if exploring is central to the experience. Shorter, linear games are usually less satisfying in this regard; the difference between beating and completing the game is shrunk down, and many linear games don’t have enough bells and whistles to make completion tracking worthwhile.

That said, there’s still room for interpretation in how the 100% experience plays out from game to game. Games sometimes leave certain things out of their built-in completion tracking, such as their achievement systems. A game might give you an achievement for doing some silly trick or finding an easter egg, but such minor things usually don’t matter for the wider completion rating. That doesn’t stop people from adding them to their own personal completion challenges, though. Many games with single-player and multiplayer components track completion separately between the two; multiplayer achievements can depend on your opponents’ actions to a frustrating degree and may become nearly impossible once player counts dwindle years after launch. Sometimes different in-game metrics have their own completion tracking. I’ve found every shrine in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but I didn’t bother hunting down each of the thousand niche Korok Seeds. I got a reward for the shrines that had nothing to do with my Korok Seed completion, and it’s clear the game doesn’t really expect the average player to literally turn over every rock in pursuit of them. Once again, it doesn’t stop people from trying. Some people just really want to do EVERYTHING.

Do It Faster

Being the fastest to finish a stage or even an entire game has become one of the most iconic signs of perfection in gaming. It dates back to the early days, when we were finally transitioning from endless score-attack arcade games into structured experiences that began and ended. Now that games could be finished, it followed that those who once chased high scores on arcade cabinets might now try to show their mastery by finishing the game the fastest.

Developers caught on to the “speedrunning” bug pretty early on. 1986’s Metroid was one of the first games to reward speed clears. Once you were done exploring the labyrinthine depths of Planet Zebes (without a map, even!), the game would display your time; do it fast enough, and Samus removes her bulky power suit to reveal that she’s a woman! That was kind of a big deal in the ‘80s. Sonic the Hedgehog was all about going fast from the start, further establishing platformers as one of the most prolific speedrunning genres. Quake’s smooth movement and replay-saving capabilities inspired a collaborative speedrun called “Quake Done Quick” which eventually grew into the speedrunning charity convention Games Done Quick.

One thing that has been thoroughly proven in this long history of speedrunning is how punishing it can feel. Even the slightest mistakes can cost just enough time to shut you out of whatever threshold you’re trying to reach. Players have to focus constantly until the timer stops and they can put the controller down. Anything from a single level to every bit of content in a game, depending on the type of speedrun being done, needs to be memorized with a route planned in advance. Anybody who’s familiar with the speedrunning community, where players dedicate an ungodly amount of time to running a game over and over in the hopes of nailing every single precise trick they can, knows that it is a true test of both skill and patience. Developers know that the majority of their players aren’t going to hunker down for hours of practice and failure to try and set world records, so when they do implement speedrunning challenges, they have to be careful to set reasonable goalposts.

Most games that implement speedrunning challenges are the shorter kind, as everything from routing to execution to simple endurance becomes harder the longer the speedrun is. Games often have ways to break their speedruns up into smaller chunks or various challenge sections as well. Sonic games which rank your performance do it on a stage-by-stage basis, for instance. There’s also some generosity going on under the hood with some games to make the act of speedrunning a little more forgiving. Metroid Dread locks certain rewards behind completing the game in under four hours. That sounds hard, since Dread is a decently long game, but it doesn’t count time spent in loading screens and loading a save sets the time back to when the save was made. One often finds that the game is willing to award its highest honors in these regards with much lower standards than the wider speedrunning community will. Even though the run could be more “perfect,” the game’s standards are usually more than demanding enough to put your average player through their paces. They get the speedrunning experience to the extent that the designers want them to have it, which usually means cutting it off before it gets really frustrating.

Don’t Mess Up

Now this particular metric is an interesting one. Players have been inclined to show off in all kinds of ways for all of gaming’s long history, and different games acknowledge that in their own way. In the early arcade days, you could show your mastery by racking up a high score and staying on the cabinet as long as possible to put your three-letter initials (or “ASS”) on the leaderboard. Later on, you could take on bosses, stages, or even the whole game without taking damage. Come Devil May Cry and the ensuing era of action games, and the game might actually tell you how cool you were playing, encouraging you to get better and better just to see that score go up. Competitive genres like fighting games and shooters let players show off various skills against other players, presenting ways to not only defeat your opponents but to toy with and humiliate them. Though “cooler” or more “stylish” gameplay can be subjective, there is one thing in common with all of these judgments: taking damage and/or dying are not cool.

Representing mastery like this can come in the form of optional requirements for accolades or increasing the punishment for existing failure states. Devil May Cry 3’s prestigious SS rating for a level can only be accomplished by collecting tons of orbs, fighting stylishly, moving quickly, AND avoiding all damage, but simply progressing through the game doesn’t force you to do any of that. In fighting games, defeating your opponent without taking any damage - even the chip damage you sustain while blocking - results in a perfect round, the ultimate show of mastery over your foe. Shooter games like Quake and Halo give you fun medals during a match to recognize impressive feats. Recent Halo games in particular have added the “Perfect” medal for using one of the game’s various precision weapons to kill a full-health player in the minimum number of shots - just enough to break their shields followed by the fatal headshot. On the other end of the spectrum are modes where damage or death end your progress outright. Some games like Hollow Knight and Doom Eternal add optional modes where dying means losing all of your progress, defining perfection as having mastered all kinds of aspects of the game enough to avoid a failure state which is otherwise an expected, minor setback. Other games like Dusk or Devil May Cry 4 and 5 have modes that turn one hit into fatal damage, incurring the more severe penalty of death for smaller mistakes. Either through encouragement or force, these techniques get players to tighten up their play more than they normally would.

Bring it All Together

These are the most popular methods by which games judge your performance, and by now, you might be thinking that this doesn’t sound much like “perfection” at all. In a way, that’s true - it’s usually more like “good enough for you to take a break now” - but the reason I bring up that word is because of the hours I’ve put into games which use it to define their toughest challenges. Pizza Tower and Ultrakill have a lot in common despite belonging to two completely different genres; they’re both creative indie titles with distinct aesthetics, high-speed gameplay, and a prestigious “P” ranking for every stage which demands mastery on every front. In Pizza Tower, you need to maintain a combo from start to finish by defeating enemies and picking up items, all the while raising your score to the S rank par score and completing the second lap. For boss fights, you just have to clear them without taking any damage. In Ultrakill, you must clear the stage under the par time, kill every enemy, and play well enough to rack up a high amount of style score without loading any checkpoints - if you die, you need to fully restart the level.

I’ve put days worth of effort into getting P-ranks in these games. In both titles, it can be such a precise and uncompromising challenge that I’m sometimes unsure whether I can (or want to) do it again. In the worst cases, day after day would stack up filled with attempts where I took a hit at the wrong time, died when I shouldn’t have, or just barely didn’t clear the level fast enough for that perfect rank. Every failure has the exhausting effect of simultaneously making you want it even more and sowing doubt that you ever can do it, with the balance shifting towards the latter the longer it takes. In the best cases, finally seeing the P-rank cross my screen came with a feeling of triumph; I had enjoyed getting faster and sharper and had a fun final run to earn the rank. In the worst cases, tiresome memories of near-wins and days of toil made the eventual success come only with the relief that I could move on forever. Keep in mind that even these high benchmarks set by the game are far from perfect, if the gameplay you can find from these titles’ greatest players is any indication.

For a game designer, the last thing you want your players to think is “glad I never have to do that again.” At the same time, challenge - even challenge beyond what the majority of your players are looking for - is a core part of what makes games so satisfying to play, learn, and triumph within for the long term. With that in mind, we see why so many developers ride the knife’s edge of including extreme challenges that must nonetheless feel at least mostly fair. For as exhausting and intense as Pizza Tower and Ultrakill’s P-ranks can be, leniency still exists; a combo can still be recovered after taking damage in Pizza Tower’s main levels, and Ultrakill doesn’t punish non-lethal damage very strictly. Other games like Sonic Generations and Devil May Cry 5 have less demanding chases to their max ranks, never quite reaching the same tension that the prior games do but still providing a fun incentive to engage with the game’s proverbial next level.

Difficulty in general is about stoking investment in the sweet spot between boredom and frustration. These ultimate challenges need to scrape as close to frustration as they can; they can’t always stay on the right side of it, but by doing a good enough job, the effort will prove worthwhile. The chase for the perfect rank has made up many of the highest and lowest moments I can remember from games. In a way, the risk needs to be greater for the reward to feel good. I’ll never forget the way my stomach churned as I shotgunned Doom Eternal’s last five levels on Ultra Nightmare, especially when I nearly lost it all on the final boss. My run may not have literally been perfect - plenty of folks out there have done it faster, or cleaner, or et cetera - but what was really perfect about that was the challenge the game had set for me. There are yet higher peaks to reach, but the perfection in these challenges come when the designers know exactly how hard-won the victory must feel to satisfy. Games uniquely must sometimes risk the lowest lows for the highest highs, and I respect the games I’ve played which knew just how hard to push me to that edge.

I replayed Doom: The Dark Ages recently, and there was one song that stuck out to me this time: “Steel Beyond the Grave.” In a game filled with loud, fast music, what stands out about this song are the parts where it is slow and quiet. The track is backed by a modest, step-like tempo that feels heavy. Though no less intense than the rest of this metal soundtrack, there are times where the guitar quiets down behind the beat, seeming to loom just over the horizon of the thing. At the climax we hear perhaps the most intimidating use of a theremin (that instrument which makes those wobbly sounds you probably associate with UFOs in old movies) I can recall; mimicking the guitar’s own earlier crescendos quietly behind a renewed melody, it caps off the sense of fearsome approach that the whole song has communicated. This song is for a level where you have fought your way out of Hell after literally dying, now unleashed again with the sole gameplay objective of “Punish the guilty.” I am struck by how effectively it conveys the feeling of some ferocious beast stalking its prey, then pouncing for a vicious kill. This excerpt is a good example:

After listening to this song obsessively for a few days, I realized I wrote exactly one pathetic sentence about the music in my review for Dark Ages.

For a franchise which some people jokingly call soundtracks which come with a free game, one sentence is really not enough. Music is absolutely crucial to the mood of Dark Ages and so much else that I’ve written about on this site, but I can never seem to make the space to talk about it. Why is that? For one, I’m just not as qualified when it comes to music. The literacy I have for video games, film, and literature, honed both in my free time and the grand majority of my higher education, is simply not matched for music. I don’t really listen to “real” music, though video game soundtracks tend to back me up while I’m writing, drawing, or working. For another, gameplay is a major focus in my understanding of games, so it tends to occupy the majority of my writing space. After that, it’s onto the story and mood, largely informed by writing and aesthetics. As a visually-minded person, music tends to land last in my priorities, though it is truly no less important or effective in defining how a game feels. This article is my attempt to make up for this blind spot and highlight just how many amazing ways video games use music.

One of the few times I’ve done right by the music was in my article on Quake. In that article, I hone in on the transformative effect Trent Reznor’s masterclass in unsettling ambience has on the feel of the game compared to its predecessors. Quake’s action is no less exciting than Doom’s, but the change from metal to ambient mood music converts the atmosphere completely from one of power to one of tension. This helpful example demonstrates the power that the soundtrack alone holds over the feeling of any given video game scenario. While visual style and effective character writing can set a scene, music is often what brings you into that scene and tells you how to feel about it.

Music has been pulling that weight since some of gaming’s earliest days. Castlevania’s haunted halls wouldn’t be half as memorable without its excellent musical complements like Vampire Killer and Heart of Fire. The eight stages in your typical Mega Man game each have a distinct identity, and you can be sure that the music is working just as hard as the level design gimmicks and visuals are to round out those themes. The Kirby series’ tone shifts from colorful forests to intense battles in dimensional rifts are all mediated by a musical identity which effortlessly manages to nail every kind of style all the way from bubbly background music to speed metal. The music’s not really doing anything complicated here - you just stick it behind the gameplay and let it do its thing - but that’s often enough.

One of my favorite simple applications of music like this is Pizza Tower. The game is defined by its deliberate effort towards being as zany and discordant as possible, and the music plays a big part in this. Just as the whole game jumps from theme to theme with crudely-styled art, the music combines retro-style midi instruments with bizarre samples like random quotes from old movies or cheesy yelling and laughing sound effects. Much like the rest of the game, it sounds like it should suck, but it’s clearly made by people who understand the fundamentals well enough to make it really good. I laugh along to the music as much as I laugh along to the rest of the game because it all seems like it’s in on its own joke. Listen to a clip from “Hot Spaghetti”:

This all goes to show that music is best when it complements the rest of the aesthetic. It’s relatively easy to do this in film, as you have full control over when and how the music appears. In games, where the player exerts some control over what happens, matching the mood can be more difficult. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention; this particular obstacle led to the creation of dynamic music, one of the most artistically unique applications of music in video games.

Its implementation was simple at first. In Super Mario World, hopping on Yoshi’s back would add a catchy percussion section to the existing background music, complementing the benefits of teaming up. Modern multiplayer games sometimes apply this depending on how well you’re doing; Mario Kart 8’s music adds percussion when you’re in first, and Quake Champions’ tracks fully transition to more intense, exciting versions when you or your team have the lead. Turn-based RPGs would have separate music for combat and exploration, and this trope would come to be used in games with more seamless distinctions between the two such as Devil May Cry. Simple music triggers like this help the audio match your actions better, but dynamic music can go even further.

The major pioneer in dynamic music was Doom (2016), a classic which was groundbreaking in more ways than one. Mick Gordon made his name as a composer with this game. Doom (2016) was founded on its fast-paced and varied combat, and the soundtrack was designed to intimately match every moment of it. It does the trick well enough to just have action music playing during the action, but what if that music had its own ebbs and flows which suited the changes in intensity? Factors like the number and strength of your enemies, the weapons you’re holding, and more play into a delicate system which moves each action track along different points to fit what you’re doing down to the detail. This has inspired similar systems in other games like Devil May Cry 5, where the series’ classic style rating influences which section of the combat music you hear. The better you play, the better the music!

Rather than designing the music to respond to the gameplay, some games force the gameplay to respond to music. The obvious example is rhythm games like Dance Dance Revolution, but games have recently begun to implement rhythm mechanics into other genres. Metal: Hellsinger is a shooting game where your shots and other abilities improve if you do them in sync with the beat, featuring an original soundtrack complete with vocals from famous metal singers like Serj Tankian. Hi-Fi Rush similarly combines rhythm mechanics with the action genre. Timing systems like held and delayed inputs - common to both rhythm and action games - combine to give combat a fresh and fun cadence. The emergent “rhythm” of stringing your own combos together meshes effortlessly with the fun of following the beat. Hi-Fi Rush’s biggest moments are punctuated by licensed music from such artists as Quake’s own Nine Inch Nails to Wolfgang Gartner, somehow. To prevent streamers from getting copyright strikes by playing the game (pretty stupid problem, of course), streamer mode replaces the licensed music with original compositions that match the relevant rhythm for gameplay purposes. All the original music is so good anyways that it’s really no loss to turn streamer mode on, which I find very impressive.

By now, the reason I needed to make up for my prior negligence on the music is surely clear; I actually think video game music is extremely cool, even if I’m not the number-one guy to talk about it. I’m constantly impressed by everything from basic platformer stage music to crazy boss themes to an amazing transition that matches my onscreen actions perfectly. There are so many moments in almost every game I play that just wouldn’t hit right without their soundtracks. Games are one of the most unique and innovative musical contexts out there right now. I’m more inclined - and better-equipped - to speak on other aspects of games, but I don’t want that to diminish the importance of music to these experiences. I’ll make an effort to give it more attention in my future articles (something my readers may have already noticed a little bit in my latest works), but if it slips the mind again, I guess I’ll just have to dedicate another article to it. I can get behind that.

The indie gaming scene has no shortage of “boomer shooter” revivals - games inspired by Doom, Quake, and the like emphasizing high action, quick movement, and quicker reflexes. It’s not hard to understand why; for a while in the 2000s, boomer shooters fell by the wayside as developers and audiences were more interested in narratives like Half-Life or more realistic multiplayer shooters like Call of Duty and Battlefield. Eventually, enough folks with programming knowledge decided they missed the old way of doing things and were going to bring it back themselves, spurred on by the groundbreaking 2016 reboot of Doom. As with any deluge of retro genre throwbacks (cough, Metroidvanias, cough), real success takes more than just imitating what made the classics great. There is perhaps no game that understood this better than David Szymanski’s Dusk, a game which masterfully weaves the genre’s classic look and feel together with wholly unique atmosphere and creative execution.

Like the classics, Dusk tosses players right into the action. No backstory, no cutscenes - just you, your sickles, and your wits against an evil cult in rural Pennsylvania. Quake-style strafe jumping and a snappy slide mechanic make movement fast and buttery-smooth. Szymanski’s clever level designs have a clear sense of momentum and direction while also hiding tons of useful secrets to fit every player’s approach. Dusk’s weapons include well-executed staples like the super shotgun and the machine gun and creative additions like the crossbow which can shoot straight through enemies and walls. The graphics match Quake’s early-3D vibe perfectly, leaning into other visual influences from the time like Blood and Redneck Rampage. With an impressive variety of enemies, punchy and satisfying shooting across a well-balanced arsenal, and quick and precise movement, everything about the gameplay meets the mark and then some. Boomer shooter fans will settle into the rhythm effortlessly, and new players can hardly ask for a better introduction to the genre’s classic tempo.

Dusk’s gameplay hits all the right notes, but that’s only a part of what makes this game special. Though boomer shooters have a reputation for paper-thin story, Dusk takes some lessons from the modern age of environmental storytelling to let the levels do the narrative work without distracting from the action. There’s clear continuity from one level to the next, and Szymanski leverages the traditional episodic structure of the classics to further establish thematic progression. The game’s first episode in the rural outskirts pits you against such enemies as hooded cultists, chainsaw-wielding leathernecks, and shotgun-toting scarecrows. Levels resemble real places like farms and lumber yards more than they did in games like Quake, and you can see evidence of how the cult’s influence has affected this place everywhere. There’s some clear slasher inspiration here but, like most boomer shooters, the horror influences don’t manifest in particularly scary moments. Everything seems cut and dry, especially to fans of the genre, but that’s exactly what Dusk wants you to think.

Eventually, you take a trip through a dark, claustrophobic mine where tricks and traps abound. You realize there might be a reason this game, like so many horror games, gives you a flashlight to narrowly light pitch-dark spaces. As you begin your journey into the factory in episode two, you descend to a suspiciously-empty dig site littered with corpses. The music has cut out entirely in favor of foreboding ambience. Descend a little further towards the red key, and your flashlight flickers as you hear heavy, bestial breathing slowly getting closer. The wall, scrawled in blood, reads “Don’t trust your eyes.” After your panicked shots reveal the invisible wendigo and you’ve managed to take it down, you’ll have realized that one of this game’s major innovations in the boomer shooter space is that it is actually trying to be scary sometimes - and it works.

Among the most impressive aspects of Dusk is its ability to switch in moments from ridiculously fast and bombastic action to skin-crawling tension. All of it is attributable to the continuity and pacing I mentioned earlier. The whole first episode gets you comfortable with the boomer shooter essentials before it’s ready to give you a scare. Each episode uses every aspect, from the aesthetics to the enemies to the order you find your weapons, as a chance to distinguish itself from the last. An action-packed level will cap itself off with the reveal of a horrible meat-grinding machine, leading straight into a mission where your flashlight breaks as you navigate the dark insides of the contraption surrounded by an unimaginable amount of emulsified flesh. A laboratory’s rooms flip and turn upon themselves when you backtrack, and a teleporter takes you inside of some horrible ribcage with a droning hiss that masks the sound of two wendigos within. A lot of credit has to go to Andrew Hulshult here, too. Nailing his characteristic action music with most tracks and demonstrating some excellent understanding of ambience with others, Dusk’s soundtrack and sound effect design are among the best of Hulshult’s entire career. Szymanski’s levels find their perfect complement in his work, and it’s hard to imagine Dusk without it.

Dusk’s action and its familiar sights are gradually encroached upon by horror moments and mind-bending landscapes as you go further and further. The continuity the game has established so strongly - even including a back door near the start of every level which displays “No turning back now” when interacted with - enhances the disjointed feeling as your quest to uncover the cult’s machinations becomes more and more incomprehensible. It all comes to a head spectacularly in episode three, easily the highlight of the game which I don’t want to spoil much. I’ve already said too much about episode two, honestly, but I didn’t think I could paint a picture of how precise and effective this game’s level design and pacing are without it. It feels like you’re being toyed with in the best way possible. Although I don’t have the stomach for horror - I even chickened out of this game for a little while from one level in episode three - I think Dusk nails its action and its horror in equal parts. After all, the shooting was so good that I toughed out the scares, and it makes the game so much more unique on the whole.

If anything about this review has sounded cool to you, just go ahead and play Dusk. It’s cheap, it runs on anything, and it’s a bona-fide modern classic. It’s right near the top of the pile of indie games that inspire me, these massive accomplishments that show how creativity and steady design can crop up from anyone, anywhere. With a strong command of the fundamentals, David Szymanski created this masterfully-paced, artistic adventure that still feels right in line with the classics that inspired it. Simple as boomer shooters are on the surface, there’s nothing about this game that really came easy. Though it doesn’t make as much noise as some other new-age boomer shooters like Ultrakill, I and many others appreciate the subtle touches that put Dusk at the front of the pack.

I do my best to approach criticism with deliberation and care for the art form. Unlike many other critics, I never review a game I haven’t finished or, in the case of multiplayer-only experiences, played thoroughly. I tend to be a little behind the curve when I release my reviews because of this, but I’m confident that it makes my work more informative and trustworthy for you, dear reader. All of this is to say that the fact that I was only able to tolerate three matches of Highguard for this article is, in some ways, a review all its own. I’m not just here to write about Highguard; I’m also here to discuss what it says about our gaming landscape and what players really want to see.

Highguard, the newest game from some of the people who made Titanfall and Apex Legends, is blatantly unfinished. Shipping with a paltry eight characters, fourteen weapons, and one play mode with ranked matches “coming soon,” there is simply not enough substance to support the gameplay loop. What’s included generally lacks personality anyways, hovering in this uncertain hodge-podge of medieval and sci-fi aesthetics that never feels like an effective blend. Nothing sells me on this world or its characters, and the lack of meaningful variety amongst them means lots of players won’t find a good fit. Moreover, the game has absolutely terrible optimization. I can’t get it to look as good on Medium as last year’s Doom: The Dark Ages looks on low even with DLSS and my 8GB Nvidia 4060, which really shouldn’t be feeling that weak in 2026. The few times where things actually happened during a match were all marred by the game dropping frames due to particle effects and the like. Dark Ages is also vastly more fun while nailing the blend of fantasy and sci-fi elements… it honestly embarrasses Highguard on every front, but I digress.

Matches take place on huge maps with chests to loot and resources to mine like some weird combination of battle royale shooters and MOBAs, but both teams only have three players. The vast majority of a Highguard match is spent wandering around looking for arbitrarily-improved varieties of your gear and wondering when the hell you’re going to shoot something. The map is easily large enough to support Battlefield-style team sizes and squads and I’m left scratching my head as to why it simply doesn’t. After running around to gear up for a while, teams are encouraged to fight for the Shieldbreaker and use it to open up their enemy’s base, which does force at least some confrontations. Once a base is open, the fighting shifts rapidly to close quarters as the attackers attempt to plant bombs in the base’s small rooms. Efforts at reinforcing base walls largely felt pointless as everyone ran inside to scrap, and this isn’t the type of game where scrapping in close range feels good.

When encounters do start, the shooting feels sort of clunky and weak. Highguard tended to feel best in mid to long range encounters where there was room to use character abilities and take aim, but the disappointingly slow movement and the reliance on semi-random gear upgrades made the majority of fights feel mediocre. I’ll admit that this game takes after the kinds of shooters I’ve never enjoyed or been good at, but even outside of that bias, I struggled to find a moment where I wouldn’t have rather been playing something faster or less restrictive. Even my friends who are more accustomed to mainstream shooters didn’t find much fun in it. There’s really just nothing about the guns or character abilities that feels inspired. Even though the phases of a match are structurally unique, nothing around it really works in service of what it’s trying to do.

Ultimately, whatever inspiration lies within Highguard - and there is something in there somewhere - is buried under its half-baked design and visual malaise. As the title of this article indicates, my conclusion is that this should simply not have released like this. Given another year or two, the designers may have been able to tease out a lot more potential from this game. More characters and guns, larger player counts, more interesting base features like defensive weapons, and removing pointless weapon tiers in favor of more interesting map objectives could have turned Highguard into something genuinely unique and fun. That’s way too much to wait for in post-launch updates; the game needs to come out feeling complete to have that chance. The best thing I can really say about Highguard’s current state is that it didn’t cost me any money to be disappointed by it.

The fact that Highguard is a free-to-play, live service model is truly the root of its problems. If this was a beta test, players would be much more willing to give it the benefit of the doubt and let the devs have time to refine it. As it is now, it feels like something we see all too often these days - an utterly shameless cash grab rushed out of the door to make money off of whatever rubes they can convince to spend real money on cosmetics. Sure, there’s some clot of gamers that spends an absurd amount of money on copy-pasted Call of Duty games every year and Fortnite is still going strong as some kind of consumerist frankenstein of a game, but players at large are losing their patience for games which so blatantly feel like trend-chasers made to addict and capitalize rather than entertain or inspire. If Highguard were finished, it may have escaped such damning categorization, but the studio made the choice to release it like this and they will pay the price for it. As indie designers make more impressive games and gamers become more aware of them, this kind of focus-tested approach just isn’t going to work anymore.

If anything about Highguard gives me hope, it’s that gamers might be getting a little wise to what they’re being fed. The reaction to this game has been widely negative since its Game Awards reveal, and the best you can say about its release response has been that it’s “mixed.” The Steam user base’s capacity for drowning any game with poor PC optimization in negative reviews is as strong as ever with Highguard, and this is a case where it is exceptionally well-deserved. Gamers’ widespread rejection of such obvious bait and their acceptance of less competitive co-op experiences like Helldivers II and Peak gives me hope that players are finally starting to look outside of their comfort zones and appreciate games that aren’t just formulaic profit engines. More diversity in our popular landscape can only benefit the players, and I hope for the industry’s sake that the players really are going to start spending their time and money on more genuine experiences.

When I wrote my review for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, I didn’t know what an “immersive sim” was. This is regrettable because Great Circle IS an immersive sim, but also understandable because immersive sims are quite niche. Looking Glass Studios is credited with creating the genre in the early ‘90s with series like System Shock and Thief, now widely regarded as cult classics which inspired their own celebrated successors like Deus Ex and Bioshock. Despite the acclaim of these games, the ‘90s - early ‘00s heyday of immersive sims is long past; aside from some exceptions like the aforementioned Great Circle and the in-development early access title Fallen Aces, you don’t see them much anymore. Why is that? Well, maybe this screenshot from the original version of System Shock can shed some light on that.

Yeah, the controls and interface for System Shock were extremely obtuse. Later immersive sims would smooth that out, but all of the impressive programming, worldbuilding, and interactivity inherent to the genre do inevitably complicate the experience. With a long history as PC-based games, these titles are typically for enthusiasts. Like many things for enthusiasts, their lack of widespread appeal is counterbalanced by a thoroughly dedicated fanbase. These are the types of people who make up Nightdive Studios, a company largely dedicated to remastering and re-releasing ‘90s and early ‘00s games with modern hardware and console compatibility. Their remasters of everything from niche titles whose original source code had been lost like Strife to iconic classics like Quake are always made with care for the original experience, and the same could doubtless be said for their 2015 remaster of the original System Shock. For that game, though, it was obvious that the core experience could use more of a facelift than a remaster could provide. Thus Nightdive stepped out of their comfort zone and actually developed a game from the ground up, even if it was a remake of an existing one. Curious about the origin of this niche genre and a fan of its cyberpunk aesthetic, I thought it would be interesting to see how they updated this important title for the modern day.

Unsurprisingly, System Shock (2023) takes a lot of cues from the much more popular and influential System Shock 2. It uses a more traditional first-person aiming interface, obliterating much of the obnoxious or outright useless screen clutter as seen in the original interface. System Shock 2’s inventory system is also directly implemented, elegantly reducing the ridiculous amount of things you could carry in the original game and introducing an element of strategy as larger items detract potential space for smaller ones. The number of weapons in the game has also been cut down, making them easier to manage in the face of the new inventory system. It’s not like anyone’s really going to miss the tranquilizer dart gun anyways. Various consumables like snack bars have been added alongside the original game’s medipatches, providing the setting with a more lived-in texture.

The most notable change is in the aesthetic. Although System Shock 2 was quite gritty and realistic for its time, System Shock (2023) elects for a more impressionistic style that calls back to its roots in the early days of cyberpunk. Dark settings contrast well with bright LEDs and computers, and the graphics have an intentional pixelated edge to them that lends a ‘90s roughness to otherwise-modern visuals. The original title’s bright and simple textures are brought forward surprisingly well; things such as the orange walls of the maintenance level don’t come across as ridiculous the way one might expect. Much of the game’s look - especially in the cyberspace sections - feel close to a visualization of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, a seminal work in the early history of cyberpunk. In true Nightdive fashion, it’s like a remarkably respectful modernization of everything that had merit about the original System Shock’s aesthetic.

It was important for Nightdive to nail that aesthetic, as it’s crucial to the sense of immersion in this immersive sim. You play as a hacker captured by Edward Diego, a corrupt TriOptimum Corporation executive, and promised a military-grade implant in return for disabling the security protocols for SHODAN, the AI which helps run the Citadel space station. Awakening on Citadel Station months after the procedure, you emerge from the medical bay to find that SHODAN has (unsurprisingly) taken over the station with an army of robots, cyborgs, and even mutants and is now running a variety of schemes to destroy humanity from the station. Thus begins Space Die Hard as you crawl through every nook and cranny of Citadel Station to foil SHODAN’s plans. The odds are against you, hacker… That’s just the way you like it.

SHODAN, already a highlight of the 1994 original, steals the show once again as the centerpiece of the game’s tense atmosphere. Terri Brosius reprises her role from the previous System Shock games and remains a standout, thanks in no small part to the chilling distortion effects put on her voice by the audio designers. Referring to herself as a god with her cyborgs and mutants as her “children” and Citadel Station itself as her “body,” you understand that she sees herself as master over a new kind of life, however twisted it may seem to a human. You also come to understand why she calls you an “insect” as you crawl through the veins of the station, her robots and cyborgs referring to their “mother” with religious reverence as they act as her immune system. You really do feel like a cockroach running through the inner workings of one of those room-sized NASA computers from the sixties, except every possible aspect of that computer is also trying to kill you. The carnage left around the station and the chilling musings of the cyborgs - some of whom even broadcast the terrified thoughts of the dead humans whose brains they’ve hijacked - make the world feel suitably horrifying and hostile.

Truly, every inch of Citadel Station feels deliberate. Items, enemies, and corpses often wordlessly tell a story of the station disaster. The game approaches it all with a slick, sardonic sense of dark humor typical to the cyberpunk genre. Bubbly elevator music contrasts with a crowd of mutant zombies as the door opens into the research level, and you might hear a vending machine say “You’ve encountered Snacktron! How fortunate for your hunger and/or thirst!” right after violently fighting for your life. Various logs tell the story of an investigation into Edward Diego’s corruption, the questionable ethics of TriOptimum designing the research station like a maze to do psychological studies, and a social stratification existing between the workers and the executives who literally lived on different tiers of the station. As you play, you naturally come to the conclusion that all of this suffering was really the result of the greed encouraged by this hyper-capitalist environment. Any question you could have about the setting is answered, and all of it adds relevant, engaging texture to the narrative.

The level of care in System Shock (2023)’s worldbuilding extends to your gameplay interactions with the station. Elements like switches, keypads, and circuit puzzles are all used seamlessly by looking at the thing and hitting the “use” key; no extra menus or breaks from real-time gameplay required. Codes to unlock doors and the steps needed to properly foil SHODAN’s schemes simply exist either as part of the level or in the many audio logs left behind by the late TriOptimum employees and SHODAN’s minions. It’s a naturalistic style of puzzle solving that feels better and, yes, more immersive than the type of rigid segmentation between modes of play that often exists in AAA games. To this end, the game really expects you to be paying attention to everything; you can even trigger a game over by hitting the switch to activate the mining laser SHODAN aimed at Earth before doing the steps to destroy it. Fortunately, the world is designed with such deliberate care that you’ll always be rewarded no matter where you look. Everything from the experiments that allowed SHODAN to mutate or cyborg-ify the whole station to the reason a space station workplace is so labyrinthine in the first place is explained. This is a great example of how immersion isn’t about realistic gameplay mechanics so much as it is about a world with thorough internal consistency.

Dealing with combat in System Shock (2023) is as varied as all the other problem solving the game presents you with. A wide variety of melee weapons, guns, and explosives give players a lot of different toys to play around with. Inventory space, ammunition types, and enemy variety mean combat always comes with a lot to think about. Some weapons use your energy, which is also used by various helpful items like boots that increase speed and let you hover or a radiation shield. Health stations are rare, and consumable items to restore health can be too. Early on, ammo is scarce and the decision to use it at all feels important. Later on, as you find a wider variety of powerful guns and face down bigger enemies, it becomes about knowing when to best use your arsenal.

Though the original System Shock was Doom’s contemporary, this is not the type of game where you can just outrun and outshoot your problems. All the same, the shooting isn’t so bogged down in realism that it doesn’t feel good. Weapons all the way from your staple minipistol to the devastating railgun are satisfying to use, and big fights against a lot of enemies can be exciting and challenging. Quicksaving and the restoration bays on most floors make it easy to try new approaches to your problems. It’s a nice middle ground where the tension between the pressure enemies place on you and your need to manage your resources work together, at least on the normal difficulty settings. High difficulty should probably be reserved for players who are familiar enough with the game to manage their resources with foresight.

Finally, to really make you feel like a hacker, System Shock (2023) sees you jacking into cyberspace to help open the way in realspace. If there was any part of the original System Shock which needed a facelift, it was this one. You fly through cyberspace freely in all directions, able to roll your view while moving around like some kind of weightless drone as you shoot an endless stream of slow projectiles towards security countermeasures. In the original game, cyberspace’s boundaries and enemies were defined only by empty wireframes in a largely-black environment. It was extremely disorienting. Nightdive has solidified the environments in cyberspace by filling in the simple geometry, allowing the bright colors to be a more effective guide. Some level of otherworldly, simulation-like confusion is maintained by having the surfaces fade out past a certain distance from the player, preserving the intended strangeness of cyberspace. Though it’s not as involved or fun as realspace, Nightdive’s updates have made cyberspace feel like a more valuable and interesting inclusion for the overall experience. Plus, if you still find it confusing, its difficulty can be adjusted separately from the puzzle complexity, mission difficulty, and combat difficulty. For such a multifaceted genre as the immersive sim, adding this many tuning knobs to the difficulty feels appropriate.

For all of its scale, detail, and interactivity, System Shock (2023) is the kind of game that you can lose yourself inside of for a while. Nightdive has done an exceptional job bringing forward all the most timeless aspects of the original while cutting out its most dated systems, resulting in an experience with enough complexity to engage you long term that is nonetheless intuitive to learn and experiment within. Even when I stalled out in search of a puzzle’s solution, I never tired of the tense, heavy atmosphere and the careful decisions I needed to make to survive it. Every step of the way, SHODAN’s threatening presence and chilling, hateful messages to the player motivate you to be one insect she just can’t swat. It’s one of those games that I almost wanted to jump right back into after my first finish, as it always gave back what I put into it. It’ll probably be a little complex for some people, but if you’re willing to take it on its terms, System Shock (2023) is a lovingly-made cyberpunk staple that I recommend to any fan of single-player adventures, cyberpunk, or - of course - immersive sims.

Well, 2025 is finally behind us. Good riddance. One of the bright spots in a year like that, though, ended up being the many exciting new releases in gaming. Metroid Prime and Hollow Knight fans got their new games, which some doubted would ever release, within four months of each other. Nintendo killed two birds with one Donkey Kong Bananza by releasing the first original standalone Donkey Kong title since 2014 and raising the bar for 3D platformers again. Everybody lost their collective minds over Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 for a while, but that was so early in this ridiculously long year that I often forget it happened… especially since I didn’t play it. Sorry, RPG fans! It’s just not for me.

So, now the time has come, of course, to decide what was the best of the bunch. The end of the year brings along with it a sense of finality, and this manifests in art criticism as award season. No matter how many subcategories you make - and there’s never a shortage of them - there must always be the game of the year. A game that was simply better than all the rest. Of course, it’s not a competition; it’s an honor even just to be nominated for such a lofty title. One of them still has to win, though. How else would we know what was really THE best? Without that knowledge, we would surely be rudderless. Well then, it’s time I made my contribution. Without further ado, here are my best games of 2025, conveniently sorted into categories of varying precision and implied value.

Best Action: Doom: The Dark Ages

Read my full review of Doom: The Dark Ages here.

I remember my first time watching the reveal trailer for this game with the kind of crisp precision with which most people seem to only remember weddings or the births of their children. Just when it was starting to feel like a while since Doom Eternal came out, in comes id software with a preliminary dose of their brand-new theater of violence. Their commitment to the guts of a game - the stuff that really matters - shone through in the amount of honest-to-goodness gameplay on display right from the first trailer. I immediately wanted the game in my hands yesterday, and every visceral bit of destruction and power from that trailer survived to the final product and then some. You effortlessly occupy the heavy boots of the Doom Slayer, mowing down hordes and mercilessly chopping up the big guys with the brutal Shield Saw. No gun is too small to blow chunks of gore off of every demon, and the demons are strong enough to make every moment spent eviscerating them cathartic. It’s not as focused and slick as Eternal, sure, but Dark Ages compensates with pure scale and impact. id not only proved that they could stay at the front of the pack, but do it in an original way that nonetheless provided the familiar comforts Doom has been known for since ‘93.

In terms of action, Dark Ages just couldn’t be beat this year. Sure, it had an uninteresting story, and the sections spent riding dragons or boxing in a mech suit weren’t the game’s most inspired moments, but nothing else could provide an adrenaline rush on the same level as Dark Ages’ core brutality. Oddly, Dark Ages repeated the trend of Eternal by releasing the same year as a Hades game and losing the title of “Best Action Game” from The Game Awards to that game. I regrettably haven’t gotten around to Hades or its sequel, but the repeated snubs do make me wonder just what decides the title of best action game.

Does either Hades have better action than their respective Doom counterparts? I wouldn’t be surprised if they have better stories and characters - that’s not really what Doom has ever been about. If we’re choosing the best action game, how much are we looking at those qualities? Where do we even draw the line for action games when so many games include action? Is single-player, or at least player-versus-enemy, assumed in a world where the majority of multiplayer games have action? Is it about some kind of raw quantity of combat and explosions, or is it about the game’s attitude towards the action within? Monster Hunter Wilds was another “nominee” of sorts for this category, but that game puts a wider emphasis on multiplayer and exploration. Perhaps it would be better-suited for an action-adventure category… but then, what defines adventure? How much of a blend between action and adventure is expected? That’s why I decided to call this category “Best Action” for my review. I can say without a doubt that the action in Dark Ages was better than the action in any other new release I played this year; now I am no longer challenged to define an “action game” on the whole before I can proceed.

Best Racing Game: Kirby Air Riders

Read my full review of Kirby Air Riders here.

2025 was an oddly-busy year in the world of kart racers, from the first new Mario Kart in eleven years to the Earth-shattering release of the avant-garde, postmodern masterpiece that was Garfield Kart 2 - All You Can Drift. Ok, maybe it wasn’t that good. Anyways, Mario, Sonic, and - for the first time since 2003 - Kirby all decided to hit the track this year, and there’s someone out there who thinks all three of those outings was the best one. Regardless of who “loses” this proverbial competition, it’s fair to say racing fans won. Anyways, time to choose the winner; somebody’s gotta do it.

It was Kirby Air Riders which truly took the lead for me this year. Sure, I’m a sucker for Kirby, but I think it’s hard to deny that this was a game with the kind of careful craftsmanship we just don’t see as often anymore. Mario Kart World made some great additions to the racing experience, but it also never really made the most of its open-world emphasis. Sonic Racing Crossworlds was, frankly, one $70 purchase too many for me this year and, in true Sonic fashion, may have been more about style than substance. Kirby Air Riders harkened back to the old days of AAA gaming as a full-price release that felt like it really had a full price’s worth of content. The racing is effortlessly simple and fine-tuned. Courses are packed with detail and engaging routes. Top Ride and City Trial offer so many different ways to experience the same fundamental gameplay that I doubt the lack of planned DLC is going to bother anyone. God, I wish more games just did it like this these days. I’m so tired of live service.

Thankfully, there’s not much need for me to go into the weeds of what defines a racing game. Racing has to be a primary aspect, and that’s not the sort of thing you can say about any game. That said, racing is so specific that one might wonder why it’s actually its own category. A “big year” for racing games, by my count, was defined by three (maybe four if you actually want to count Garfield Kart) games. Would it simply be difficult for me to give Air Riders its just desserts if it didn’t have its own category to win? Most years, I don’t even play a new racing game. I played two this year, though, and I sure liked ‘em both. Is that a good enough reason to give something a category?

Best Family Game: Donkey Kong Bananza

Read my full review of Donkey Kong Bananza here.

Nintendo’s long-awaited return to Donkey Kong was also their latest reminder that they will always rule the 3D platformer scene. Donkey Kong Bananza crafts whimsical worlds for DK to smash his way through, somehow feeling both laser-focused and highly malleable in their design. The innovative destruction mechanics come as naturally as instinct, and it’s easy for anyone to start carving their own trail. Like all of the best collect-a-thons, the pure fun of moving around pushes you from collectible to collectible with an irresistible momentum. It’s the kind of game anyone can enjoy, assuming they like having fun or that sort of thing.

Of course, it’s a great game for the family thanks to its extremely superfluous co-op mechanics where a second player can shoot some extra rocks around while player one does all the important stuff on DK. Fun for the whole family! Wait, that doesn’t make sense. What exactly makes this a family game? Is it because it’s rated E10+ (or PEGI 7 for my European readers)? Is it because it’s colorful and cartoonish? Do those qualities relegate this game, an extremely well-made single-player adventure, into a diminished all-ages categorization that is implicitly less artistically relevant than more mature games? Or, get this, is it just because this game - amazing as it was - wasn’t game of the year, or even the best platformer of the year, and I still just wanted to highlight it anyways? Perhaps one day, we’ll know the answer.

Anyways, that’s the last of the consolation categories. Now, it’s finally time for the moment you’ve all been waiting for: the best one. The one that wins. Without further ado…

Game of the Year: Hollow Knight: Silksong

Read my review of Hollow Knight: Silksong here.

As someone with well-honed tastes and a penchant for games that won’t always appeal to the masses, some part of me kind of wanted to be a contrarian and give Game of the Year to something else just to make a statement. I even said that Silksong “may not have quite been my favorite thing this year” in my original review, but this is a game that grew on me in every sense. I think the original Hollow Knight, while solid, was a little overrated, and I was one of the few to jump into Silksong after the long wait without sky-high expectations. When the dust settled, I just couldn’t deny the artistry of what Team Cherry had accomplished with this game. The gameplay had been expanded upon and honed. The world was beautifully rendered with every area coalescing into a deeply textured setting. Encounters of all kinds were memorable from start to finish even as the game continued far beyond the usual bounds of metroidvanias, thanks in no small part to the beautiful soundtrack. There are parts of the other games I’ve highlighted here which I may have liked more in a vacuum, but Silksong is special for how thoroughly it succeeds on every front and how unrelentingly memorable it is. There are simply so many moments in this game that I will never forget, and that’s how it defines the year for me.

Now it might become clear to some of you why I did not include categories such as “best platformer,” “best adventure game,” or “best indie game.” Silksong was great, but there’s no reason for me to pat it on the back over and over again. Besides, doesn’t giving indie games their own category seem pointless if they’ve proved time and again that they can hang with the best work of AAA studios? Although, I guess that highlights why we really have all these increasingly niche and subjective categories to hand out awards for. On some level, we just want to acknowledge as many of the year’s highlights as possible. It’s especially good to have awards for production roles like sound design and art direction to highlight the many individual talents that go into our favorite games. Unfortunately, I’m not as well-equipped as a whole committee is to dole out accolades on an individual level like that. I also don’t have the clout to put a bunch of brand-new game reveals in my awards show; why even read it? Hey, who else is excited for Mega Man: Dual Override?

Anyways, if the question is “why do we always need to give out awards?”, then the answer may be different for everyone. I’m giving out my awards for the same reason I write anything on this blog: I believe games are a sophisticated and unique art form, and I want to celebrate the games that prove that thesis in all kinds of different ways. The awards format seems to lend a lot of people to an impression of criticism as a competition, though, and I can’t really blame them. We are giving someone a trophy and sending four or five other groups home without one. What does that really say about why we create games? Is art about “winning?” Everything has to have a number score so people online can say their game has a bigger number than yours. When people are panicking over a six out of ten, one has to wonder what a truly bad score even is! Every time someone calls a game “objectively” better or worse than another one, an angel loses their wings.

So, what do I want you to take away from my awards? It’s about the same thing you should be taking away from any review: here’s what the critic thinks and why. Critique is about new perspectives and discussion, not correct answers. I’m just here to share what made these games special to me. Maybe you’ll enjoy an expression that captures your own thoughts about these games, a new perspective on something you were interested in, or an example of what works about these games which you might carry into your own work. To me, critique’s about working together to always raise the bar for the art we love, not strict, black-and-white judgment. These are just four of the past year’s many great games that made me excited to keep playing - and writing - in the new year. Feel free to join me for the ride.

For some reason, I have a very clear memory of the first time I heard that Metroid Prime 4 had been delayed. During my high school art class, I was watching the Nintendo Direct while I worked. Nintendo announced that they weren’t getting anywhere with the game in-house and had returned the project to Retro Studios, where they would be starting again from the ground up. That was two years after the game was announced with no other news in between. In the time since that announcement, I graduated high school, graduated college, had three different jobs, started this blog, and actually played through the previous Metroid Prime games. Metroid Prime Remastered came out while we were waiting for Prime 4, later revealed to be practice for much of Retro’s new staff. To say that Metroid fans have had a lot of time to get their hopes up about this project is an understatement.

I’m always partial to devs taking their time to make sure something is good, even if it means I have to wait the better part of a decade to get my hands on it. Waiting is temporary; art is forever. However, lengthy developments can put a ton of stress on a project. This year’s Hollow Knight: Silksong was another long-awaited release where the delays mostly came from the small dev team’s own passion for the project. For most studios, the causes of such delays are much worse; creative blocks, technical issues, poor or inconsistent direction, etc. The point is that Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, as it changed studio hands and started from scratch again at least once, could have easily been a horror story. Luckily, it seems that Retro’s steady hand has molded Prime 4 into a release that feels like it picks up right where Metroid Prime 3: Corruption left off, but is that enough? Is that what a fanbase relishing their memories of the original Gamecube classic for eighteen years really wanted? Let’s find out.

Playing through Metroid Prime 4’s first moments immediately felt right. As I blasted through Space Pirates in a raid on a Galactic Federation facility, scanned all kinds of environmental details, and morph-balled my way through tunnels, I was struck by how much I really was playing a bona-fide, brand-new Metroid Prime game. After getting teleported to the alien world of Viewros and being sent on a quest to preserve the Lamorn people’s legacy as the “chosen one,” it only felt more like I’d settled right back in. Fury Green, the game’s first real area, is absolutely beautiful. It effortlessly maintains Retro’s penchant for designing alien worlds that feel at once strange and sublime, punctuated by a massive tree which stores the psychic energy of the Lamorn. Prime 4 makes a strong case not only for being the best-looking game on the Switch, but also the Switch 2. I normally feel like I’m not taking enough screenshots for my reviews, but here, I couldn’t help but take too many.

Later areas like the stormy, industrial Volt Forge and the frigid, unforgiving peaks of Ice Belt don’t miss a beat. Volt Forge guides you along an entire manufacturing line, seeing every step of the process in building the Vi-O-La motorcycle. If Metroid Prime’s Phendrana Drifts emphasized the calm of snow-covered landscapes, Prime 4’s Ice Belt embodies the brutal experience of extreme cold both inside and out of its abandoned medical complex. Once again, you can scan everything to learn what to do next, how to fight enemies, or just how the ecosystem of Viewros works. The music returns in full force as well to maintain an ambient, mysterious atmosphere. The sound uses electric guitars and warbly synth to great effect, conveying that alien tone perfectly in a way entirely distinct from the previous Prime outings.

If there’s one critique to have about the world design, it’s more in the layout than the visuals. It bears repeating that Prime 4 is very much a sequel to Prime 3, despite how much time has passed; like that game, areas feel somewhat more linear and condensed than they should. Backtracking is still necessary, and there’s no real shortage of upgrades to scrounge for in old areas, but your first trip through an area is always quite straightforward. It’s noticeable right from the start, but my disappointment with this structure came when the game largely failed to open up as it progressed.

The Prime series’ level design has come to more closely resemble The Legend of Zelda than Metroid ever since Prime 2, insofar as new items allow you to clear a current area and then move to the next rather than constantly revisiting existing areas. It doesn’t feel entirely out of line for Prime 4 to be structured like this, especially since you do need to dip back into previous areas more than a few times to progress, but I miss the fully-interconnected world of the original Prime. Retro proved they could build an intricate and holistic world in full 3D all those years ago; why have they been so insistent on simplifying a core part of the Metroid series?

Also like Prime 3 is a separate connecting structure between the main areas. In Prime 3, it was interplanetary travel with your gunship. In Prime 4, it’s the massive desert of Sol Valley that stands squarely in the middle of each area. Crossing the desert is best done on Vi-O-La, which I’m convinced exists solely because someone on Retro’s design team thought it looked too cool to leave out. The desert contains a heaping of Green Energy crystals to collect for upgrades among other finds, but gameplay here largely feels like padding. The bike controls pretty well, but there’s no part of riding it which is genuinely engaging. It’s solely used to cross a massive desert that feels like it was included just to make you use the bike. It gets pretty tedious near the end if you’re going for completion, as you need to seek out and run over every crystal on the massive desert with no real tension or intrigue. Fans were concerned that this would be all the bike was when it was revealed, but I trusted Retro to do more with it. Unfortunately, they really didn’t. It’s a head-scratcher, but it’s also not the kind of thing that ruins the whole experience.

Fortunately, the bike isn’t the only thing about Prime 4 that controls well. I can say with confidence that this game has the single best controls and moment-to-moment gameplay of the whole series. As with the visuals, it feels like Retro has actually made full use of the time between releases here. Basic dual-stick controls and the Wii-style pointer controls both exist, with options for lock-on free aim and gyro controls. Want the reticle to stick to the center? Prefer to move it around the screen a bit? This game will meet your preferences, combining the best of the previous games’ control schemes and doing away with the horrible classic scheme completely. Good riddance. Switch 2 users are also treated to the first Prime game with official mouse control support. Holding the Joycon as a mouse isn’t very ergonomic (it helps to hold it a little diagonally), but it still feels great to play a Prime game with the control scheme shooters were made for. Mouse controls are equally supported between dual-stick and pointer control modes. Switching to mouse even adds a more precise reticle!

Beyond aiming, other aspects of Prime 4’s control have been touched up. Switching to and from the Morph Ball is smoother than ever. You actually have full control of Samus’ movements as soon as you unfurl now; no need to wait for the camera to get back behind her helmet. Though there wasn’t room to put dodging on its own button, it’s been changed to a double-tap of jump. This not only prevents most of my accidental dodges when trying to jump and vice-versa, but also enables new forward and backward dodges that make movement during fights a lot more flexible. Because no Prime game can use the same beam upgrade system twice, this game also changes beams to replace your missiles instead of your standard fire when you switch to them. It makes it easy to combine the various elemental beams with your standard shots, and ammo for your beams is in more than enough supply to experiment with them. Beams could stand to be more powerful - there’s a feeling that your attacks stay about the same strength for the whole game - but they definitely have their uses. The super charge shot for the Thunder Shot is especially satisfying, pumping lightning into a single target and watching it bounce between all surrounding enemies.

The result of all these control changes is the absolute best action in the Prime series. Previous games felt a little slow and clunky in this regard; Prime 4 is no Doom, but the action is a lot quicker and smoother here than usual. Though enemy variety is a little scant, they are consistently fun to fight with a decent mix of attacks and weaknesses. Bosses especially are a new highlight, combining the puzzle-style structure of weak points and item usage with a generally higher tempo. Sylux makes his long-awaited return from Metroid Prime Hunters here; while his inclusion in the story is a little uneven, his fights are consistently great. He makes a much more interesting rival than Dark Samus ever was while providing similar battles. The improved combat helps soften the blow of the stripped-down exploration, and your first run through an area will often consist of a lot of unique combat encounters.

There’s only one last thing about Prime 4 to mention here, and it’s the story. Normally, Metroid games don’t have a ton of story: there’s a problem, Samus shows up, she solves the problem, a planet probably explodes, see you next mission. Metroid has always thrived instead on its atmosphere, which I’ve already established that Prime 4 still nails. However, the Prime series’ obsession with the Galactic Federation simply must continue in Prime 4; I say again that this truly is a sequel to Prime 3. Throughout Samus’ mission, she’ll meet a variety of Federation stragglers caught in the event that teleported her to Viewros. The first of these, Myles MacKenzie, is a Federation engineer who sets up a base camp and communicates with Samus via radio for much of the game.

The response to these characters has been largely negative, and it’s not entirely unwarranted. I actually think that there’s a lot to talk about with them, though. If the goal is to flesh the Federation out and give Samus some contrast, then I would say it works a hell of a lot better than it ever did in Prime 3. There wasn’t a single Federation character in that game that felt like anything but a droll exposition dump. Though these characters occasionally fall into action movie stereotypes - indeed, Retro’s Western sensibilities in this Eastern franchise are most obvious here - they are at least occasionally interesting and endearing. Young recruit Nora Armstrong falls over herself to meet her idol, Samus, and is pushed to better herself by her example. Myles, though often dominated by annoying nerd tropes, does have some enjoyable quirks. The best of the bunch was Reger Tokabi, a black-ops sniper with a spiritual side. Retro must’ve known they’d found something good with him, since he has about four unique encounters in Sol Valley explaining his upbringing in a tribe of hunters and his conflict between his faith and the work he now does to support his family.

Though I think the internet was way too quick to throw Prime 4 under the bus after a few minutes of Myles, there are definitely some valid problems with how these characters are executed. For one, Samus never speaks a word herself. I get she’s a woman of few words, but it’s not like she’s mute. She spent pretty much all of Metroid Fusion talking to ADAM, and seeing her respond to a Chozo in their language in Metroid Dread was a really cool moment. Watching her interact with all these characters solely through nods and head shakes undercuts anything Retro wants us to feel for her. She could’ve still spoken every now and then in concise, purposeful ways without uncharacteristically coming off as a chatterbox.

I digress, though. The larger problems reside in how the characters affect gameplay. Multiple areas are bogged down at least slightly by the need to wait for these guys to open up obstacles for you, and much of what they have to say boils down to patronizing hints and pats on the back for solving basic puzzles. Myles is absolutely the worst offender here. Even if you just take a brief detour to collect items - a Metroid series staple - he will call in to give you blatant directions to the next thing you need to do. Not only was the next step never confusing, but the massive growth of the metroidvania genre has proven that players enjoy having to look around and open the world up on their own. It was really quite frustrating that Prime 4 treated me like an idiot just because I was actually bothering to take my damn time. Of course, every Prime game has had a hint system, but this and Prime 3 (big surprise) are the only ones where you can’t turn it off. There is literally a button to call Myles whenever you want, and the game still feels the need for him to butt in unprompted so he can hold my hand.

Metroid Prime 4: Beyond was the return of everything that was great about Retro’s Prime series, but also much of what was frustrating about it. Its setting and visuals are impressive even amongst the series’ proud history. Its gameplay is so far improved that I’m begging them to update Metroid Prime Remastered with those mouse controls. All the same, it feels shackled by utterly pointless inclusions and the kind of dated hand-holding that feels like some kind of soulless producer mandate. Everything good it does with its characters is held back by their need to patronize. I’m willing to give the game some grace and look beyond its annoyances - I stress that it is, on the whole, a fun and largely faithful Metroid Prime experience - but gamers are profoundly exhausted with the exact mistakes this game makes. It’s the frustrating kind of game where you can just see how much better it would have been with certain parts entirely removed, a problem that becomes all the more disappointing in light of how long this game took to make.

Regardless, it’s important that we don’t cry doom and gloom or sweep our problems under the rug. We all want another Prime game that can make us feel the way the first one did, and the only way that’s going to happen is if we approach Prime 4 holistically. It is beyond clear to me that Retro still has what it takes to make compelling worlds and exploration that feels good. The conclusion to draw from this game is that we want to explore more and be told how and where to explore less. This game may not have been everything everyone wanted it to be, but it’s far from irredeemable or even bad. If you’re a Metroid Prime fan, I definitely still recommend Prime 4, though it’s not quite as good as the first two Prime games. With the right takeaways from this game, I think Retro could be in the right position to make a truly excellent Prime 5. For now, I’ve had my fun with this game, and I’m happy it made it out of development hell in the shape it did. Not all games are so lucky.

Though best-known for their comics and movies, it’s no overstatement to say that Marvel has had a profound impact on every medium of pop culture. While Marvel vs. Capcom is a key pillar of fighting game history, video games are perhaps the area where their influence has been least significant. In recent years, Marvel has been doing everything in their power to change that with the Marvel Games label. Insomniac’s successful slate of Spider-Man narrative action games has inspired successors with other characters such as Insomniac’s own take on Wolverine, Motive’s Iron Man (if it still exists…), and Skydance’s Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra. NetEase’s Marvel Rivals has made its mark on the online shooter landscape, and Arc System Works’ Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls is looking to bring the franchise back into fighting games.

It’s clear that Marvel wants to approach their gaming initiatives from a variety of angles. Marvel Games publishes titles from all manner of studios in all kinds of different genres. Perhaps none of their projects exemplify this quite as well as Marvel Cosmic Invasion. Designed by Dotemu, a studio best known for bringing back Sega’s Streets of Rage series, it is an inside-and-out retro throwback. Everything from the beat-em-up genre to the classic character designs and pixelated visuals makes it seem like it’s trying to trick you into thinking it came out in the ‘90s. Moreover, it’s not some big, AAA event; it’s a smaller game designed for couch co-op in a genre which has always been pretty simple. One might think that Marvel would be looking to do with games what they have done with movies by releasing big-budget projects to modernize their characters, but Marvel Cosmic Invasion shows that they don’t want to leave simpler sensibilities behind. It’s their tribute to a simpler time, acknowledging what made it all fun in a tongue-in-cheek way with some modern refinement.

To this end, Cosmic Invasion’s visual design is quite a deliberate throwback to ‘90s-era Marvel Comics. Most of the character designs and even many of their attacks directly reference the legendary Marvel vs. Capcom 2, which itself immortalized many of the characters’ then-contemporary looks better than their comics did. The heroes, enemies, and environments are all rendered with some of the cleanest and most fluid pixel art animations around. The style is vibrant and simple, evoking classic comic art without strictly mimicking it. Though ingrained in retro sensibilities, the game also does a good job integrating more modern Marvel aspects and making them feel classic. Characters like Phyla-Vell, Cosmic Ghost Rider, and Knull all blend in well with classic staples like Wolverine and Captain America. Classic characters take some modern aspects with them; Iron Man still maintains his identity as Tony Stark’s bodyguard from the classic comics, but he also refers to the Arc Reactor which was not a concept until the 2008 Iron Man film. Overall, the presentation is bound to satisfy all kinds of Marvel fans. I, for one, enjoyed the characters’ palette swaps, frequently switching from Iron Man’s iconic red and gold to looks inspired by his Silver Centurion and Model 42 armors.

Cosmic Invasion’s gameplay is similarly solid and simple. Like any beat-em-up, most problems can be solved with your four-punch mash or the midair dive kick. To keep things from getting repetitive, though, each of the 15 playable characters have their own nuances. Some characters can fly to fight on an extra plane. Attack while running to knock enemies around. Unique actions differ by character and usually function as a way to fight distant foes, ranging from Spider-Man’s web clusters to Rocket Raccoon’s random-effect grenades. Pressing attack and jump together allows for rising attacks or instant dive kicks depending on the character, and holding down attack produces another wholly-unique strike for different characters. Using the same button, some characters block and others dodge; enemies are aggressive enough that you’ll need to pay attention to defense. Of course, everyone has their own special attack, ranging from piercing beams to sweeping attacks in a wide arc.

My favorite hero, Iron Man, has a satisfying suite of attacks. His held attack fires an energy ball that hovers in place, creating fun opportunities to knock enemies into it or set it up where they’ll land. Guarding enemy projectiles at the right time also gives him unlimited energy for repulsor shots for a few moments, letting him fire away in response. Of course, it wouldn’t be Iron Man without his big beam; in true Marvel vs. Capcom fashion, he whips out the Proton Cannon for this one. Every hero I tried had a lot of fun ways to combo enemies and keep things interesting, with Spidey nimbly swinging through foes across the whole screen and Phyla-Vell teleporting to enemies hit by her thrown swords.

More fun still are the ways to combine your heroes; each player picks two characters and can tag between them at any time. Tagging after attacks which knock enemies back brings the second character in with an automatic follow-up, while tagging during basic combos brings the second character in free to act while the first character’s combo finishes automatically. You can even tag in the middle of a special attack to use the second character while the first’s special finishes! I enjoyed launching enemies with Captain America’s special attack and meeting them in the air with Iron Man’s flight.

Beat-em-ups have a reputation for being mindless button-mashers, and I think that reputation wasn’t entirely unwarranted back in the early days of the genre. Dotemu has smartly applied a little more to consider in this game, taking cues from its sister genre of fighting games. Levels have various hazards like bottomless pits or falling debris to consider, and enemies can always smack flying characters right out of the sky if you hover near them too carelessly. The blocking and dodging functions become pretty important, especially against the many bosses who won’t flinch as easily as your standard mooks. Nonetheless, Dotemu understands the simple catharsis of punching away at the hordes, providing enough health and healing items that fighting doesn’t ever feel overly complicated. It’s satisfying to dodge around something or block a projectile just in time instead of getting laid out, but it still generally abides by beat-em-up simplicity.

I guess all that’s left to talk about is the story, huh? Well, there’s not much to say. Annihilus has invaded from the Negative Zone to subjugate the world, somehow with help from A.I.M., Sentinels, Galactus, and more. Heroes band together from New York to Asgard, trouncing the forces of evil across the cosmos until they set things right. It’s a classic-style tour of Marvel friends and foes that’s never trying to be anything but simple fun, much like the rest of the game. Some hammy voice work with comic-style one-liners really sends it all home. In some games, I’d be disappointed with such little effort attached to the plot. For a retro throwback like this with no real investment in narrative innovation, it does all it needs to do.

Marvel Cosmic Invasion delivers as an affordable, short-but-sweet romp through iconic Marvel scenarios. If you like Marvel, beat-em-ups, or both, it’s an easy recommend, especially at its fairly low price. I had my fair share of fun beating down the waves of enemies, and the various modifiers for Arcade Mode give you a lot of different ways to come back and experience the stages all over again. It’s not the sort of game lined up to win an award or a genre-defining masterpiece, but it is solid and it is fun. That’s all it really needs to be. People have developed a penchant for all-or-nothing, grandiose thinking these days; it’s either “peak” or “mid.” There’s still a place for modest, entertaining treats like Cosmic Invasion, though, and I can’t wait to scrounge up some friends for couch co-op one of these days.

I’m kind of a massive Kirby fan, and I have been since I was but a young lad. I had plenty of time to plumb the depths of series history as a kid, looking for all the Kirby I could eat in what was my general introduction to retro games. 2003’s Kirby Air Ride naturally became the main reason I had a GameCube controller and memory card for my Wii growing up. Though I haven’t played that original game in a long time, I have fond memories of hours spent honing my cornering skills and checking off boxes to unlock everything that I could. Mario Kart has always been the standard bearer in kart racing, but I and other dedicated Kirby fans knew there was something special in that one-off spinoff. The driving was so simple, but the vehicles made it so varied. The racing was no slouch, but City Trial delivered a chaotic experience unlike anything else around. Alas, in the age before online multiplayer was commonplace, I had no one to play this game with.

Now, Masahiro Sakurai has returned to his original creation to direct a blockbuster sequel to the cult classic racer. As the years have passed, our standards for game design have changed. Live service has commercialized the online gaming landscape, with whole games orbiting around how many cosmetics they can jam into their monthly battlepasses. “Earning” has been replaced with “buying,” and the growth of e-sports has left most games focusing less on content and more on a repeatable, competitive experience. Sakurai has always been one to put the fun first - and to put his all into anything he works on. Kirby Air Riders is a game made the old-fashioned way, confidently eschewing the trends of modern multiplayer gaming to provide an ultimate smorgasbord of racing fun for players of all stripes.

The mantra of the Kirby series has always been “easy to learn, hard to master.” Air Riders is no different, featuring such effortlessly simple driving controls that anyone can pick up quickly. Acceleration is automatic, and you can press a button to slow down and charge up a boost to bring around the turn with you. Distinct from traditional drifting, there’s a lot of nuance in how and when to charge up that boost and just as much satisfaction in letting it loose at the perfect time for that ideal line through the track. Sliding off a ramp starts a glide, letting you soar over obstacles and get a little boost if you land smoothly. Flicking the stick lets you spin to attack nearby racers, making those neck-and-neck moments decisive. The standard mode, Air Ride, shows all these systems off in the racing style you expect.

The most satisfying addition in this game is the star slide, a speed boost gained by following another player’s trail that intuitively makes taking the lead back engaging. Press the boost button near an enemy to inhale them, spitting them out or copying their ability. Abilities either attack automatically or trigger when you hit boost, with the overlap having interesting implications on how you use them. Some abilities, like Fighter or Needle, specialize in hitting your opponents. Others, like Jet and the brand-new Flash, improve your boost and help you soar ahead.

The major difference from the previous game is in the variety of characters to choose from. Every player in Air Ride used Kirby unless you selected Dedede or Meta Knight, who were essentially vehicles as far as the game was concerned. Now you can combine a range of fun Kirby characters with all of the original vehicles from Air Ride and then some. Every character comes with different stats and their own special that charges up during the races, and most have some other perks as well. Though Sakurai lamented the need to add even one extra button to this impressively lean racing system, the specials give every character satisfying ways to power through and fight. Attacking provides the attacker a boost more than it slows players down, avoiding those awful Mario Kart situations where you get pelted by items helplessly. The only thing about the new characters which I don’t like is that it feels like good ol’ Kirby doesn’t have much to offer compared to their unique traits, especially since every character was given a way to use Kirby’s signature copy abilities.

Of course, the vehicles already provided the bulk of the variety, and that doesn’t change here. Your choice of vehicle can mean as little as statistical differences and as much as comprehensive changes to how the game controls. Some vehicles perform better while gliding, and others ride on wheels and can’t glide at all. The Swerve Star accelerates instantly, but can’t turn unless it comes to a full stop by charging a boost. The Transform Star can shift between a wheelie form and a star form, suiting the needs of the track. The Vampire Star has weak stats, but can attack other racers to power itself up and boost ahead. Vehicles can have such volatile strengths and weaknesses that the result of a race can feel decided ahead of time if the track and vehicles line up a certain way. Luckily, enough generic vehicles like the reliable Warp Star exist that you can round your riding experience out across courses. Just don’t be too disappointed if you end up on a course where one of your rivals’ vehicles is well-suited.

The sum of all these things is a racing experience with a lot of intensity and surprisingly high speed, but one which is nonetheless easy to jump into. The courses provide a lot of variety, both in how their layouts focus on different aspects of the game and in their vibrant settings. Each course feels grand, bringing racers along whole journeys even in their brief length. Cavernous Corners takes you from a jungle into a yawning cave entrance, leading through ancient ruins and a massive underground treasure hoard. Mount Amberfalls starts on a snowy peak, descending through the autumnal forests and waterfalls until the race ends on a beach. These areas are all so distinct that they’re appreciated even as you blast past rivals, snagging every opportunity you can to star slide and attack for a boost. It’s a chaotic kind of action-racer which feels just as unique as it did in 2003, even if it sometimes feels like you’re at the mercy of its craziness. Luckily, limiting the racers on the track to six keeps things a little more focused than they’d be otherwise.

Of course, real Air Ride fans know that it doesn’t stop at the standard racing. Two other modes exist. The second mode is Top Ride, a top-down racing experience built on the same fundamental controls as Air Ride. Courses are much shorter, emphasizing handling as you quickly bounce from hairpin to hairpin. Gliding exists, but it’s quite downplayed. Two control methods allow players to either point their stick in the direction they want to go or always steer left or right relative to the vehicle’s front; I find steer controls make a little more sense to me. This mode lacks specials and instead includes a whole host of items and copy abilities constantly dropping in, making races unpredictable. It ends up being a quicker, more casual mode. A lot of players didn’t expect Top Ride to return from the original game - Sakurai even joked about it being dispensable once - but it’s nice that even a small aside like this got the same kind of face lift as the rest of the game.

Of course, the breakout mode of Air Ride is what most fans are really here for: City Trial. This mode puts all of its players - up to sixteen in Air Riders from the previous four - into the sprawling city of Skyah, tasking them with running around the map for upgrades, new vehicles, and perhaps even the parts to construct one of four legendary air ride machines. Along with searching the map, you can attack your rival riders to steal their upgrades or even destroy their vehicles, forcing them to scramble for a new one while you reap the map’s rewards.

This all culminates in the stadium, where players get to choose between four possible events that lean into certain stats. Events can be as simple as a standard Air Ride race with your upgrades and vehicles, or as specialized as a gliding distance competition or an all-out arena brawl against other players. Without any knowledge of what stadium events will come, players either take a gamble on upgrading into a certain category or try to round themselves out to be decently prepared for whatever comes. You can also try to choose an event you don’t think your rivals will choose to have less competition.

With all of the craziness inherent to City Trial, including periodic map events that can be as catastrophic as falling meteors, it quickly becomes a mad dash for anything you can get your hands on. You can chase down your opponents to steal their legendary machine parts, putting one together for their awesome power. The map will suddenly spawn treasure chests as you quickly make for the key. Somebody will randomly find a crazy laser cannon that shoots a huge beam through the whole map and you might just have to deal with your vehicle exploding. This is easily the most “party game” part of the game. There’s strategy to be had, such as searching for the obscure corners of the map where special upgrades may spawn or gliding for distant, floating islands, but it ultimately feels like there’s so much randomness involved that your chances of winning are totally up in the air. That’s okay, though; games about having crazy, fun times like this are getting increasingly rare, especially in the AAA space. City Trial is nothing if not fun, especially now that I can fill up a game with players online whenever I want.

Every mode keeps you occupied with a huge checklist of unlocks. All kinds of objectives appear here, from simple ones you’ll unlock as you race normally to interesting challenges you can work towards completing. With only a few riders and vehicles by default, you’ll want to work through challenges quickly to try out everything. It’s refreshing these days to be able to get so much just by playing the game. Racing also earns you miles, a currency you can spend for cosmetics. You can put hats on your riders, customize your license card for players online to see, or buy parts for the My Machine customization mode. Using decals, attachments, and more, players can customize every vehicle in the game to their heart’s content. I haven’t managed much more than a simple palette swap myself, but I can guarantee that the machine editor is comprehensive. People have come up with a lot of creative stuff, and you can spend your miles to buy their work and use it yourself if you like it.

All of these aspects come together in the last, single-player focused mode, Road Trip. Telling the game’s story, Road Trip lets players collect upgrades and machines as they choose between a variety of challenges along several stages. The format evokes Classic Mode from the Super Smash Bros. series, being a canned sequence of matches across the game’s many modes. Though it’s fun to use Road Trip as a flight of everything the game has to offer, it does run a bit long for what it is. Running the same variety of stadium challenges and short races invariably gets repetitive, especially when you get enough upgrades that you can start blasting by races without much care for what your CPU opponents are even doing. Boss battles, though also a City Trial stadium option, end up being the coolest thing on offer. The final bosses - including the secret true final boss faced if you collect every machine - are epic, though I wish I didn’t have to play all of Road Trip twice for it.

Kirby Air Riders strikes me as the kind of game they just don’t make anymore. It’s fun, approachable, and engaging without being even remotely concerned with trying to be the next e-sport. The simple modes are supplanted by a huge checklist of things to earn, giving even solo players a ton to do. There’s also just a ridiculous amount of settings for everything from the game’s UI to private online lobbies with friends that help make the game as comfortable and playable as possible for everyone. Kirby has always been the one franchise that I feel successfully designs itself for everyone. Instead of trying to be the game that is all things to all people, it leans into its own identity and just removes as many barriers to that experience as it can. Air Riders is a prime example of this philosophy, with the veteran designer who created that formula at the director’s helm. The goal is to be fun, plain and simple, and Sakurai’s tireless dedication is no less impactful towards that goal than it is towards something major like Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. There’s no Switch 2 owner I can’t recommend Air Riders to, and it makes a strong case for the best racer on the system even in a year with strong competition.

Part of CastleVember 2025!

• Castlevania (1986)

• Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest (1987)

• Castlevania: The Adventure (1989)

Though a flawed entry, Castlevania: The Adventure proved to be the first steps towards a consistent identity for the Castlevania series. It got the ball rolling with concepts like a centuries-long legacy of Belmonts and a return to Castlevania’s original, linear structure, but it couldn’t fully solidify these aspects as a handheld side entry. That honor would go to the next home console sequel, Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse. Made by a separate team from the one that made The Adventure, Dracula’s Curse aimed to be the true Castlevania sequel that Simon’s Quest never was. With a better understanding of the NES’ hardware and of the series’ own strengths, Dracula’s Curse was bigger, better, and - crucially - much more brutal. For the story of the Belmont Clan’s first battle against Dracula, Konami would end up setting the tone for the rest of the entire series.

Raising the Stakes

From the first moments of Dracula’s Curse, you can tell how much grander it wants to be. It opens with a scrolling cutscene with a film-strip effect, leaning into the series’ Hammer horror inspirations. Stages have even richer background detail. Boss battles are much more refined and interesting. If you were playing this game in Japan, the music even got a notable upgrade thanks to Konami’s cartridge addition which Nintendo of America didn’t allow - the VRC6 chip. The compositions are able to make use of more instruments, and they sound richer, too. Sound effects also won’t cut the music out as often thanks to the dedicated audio processing chip. Compare two versions of the classic first level theme, “Beginning.” NES first, Famicom second:

Though it’s worse by comparison, the NES version thankfully still isn’t bad. The point is that Dracula’s Curse leveraged everything its developers had learned about the NES hardware in the years since Castlevania to push its visuals and audio to the fullest. The same can be said of its level design. The game picks up right where Castlevania’s design philosophy left off, quickly reintroducing most of that game’s enemies and hazards before moving on to myriad new ones. Instead of starting right on Dracula’s doorstep, Trevor has to journey all the way across Transylvania to reach him, much to the benefit of the level design. The route to the castle includes trips through haunted forests, sunken cities, and even across the ocean on a ship. Any given playthrough has nine stages - three more than Castlevania - and you can choose different routes as you progress to play different stages. Compared to Castlevania, the level designs maintain that patient, puzzle-like quality, but with so much more variety.

Even more variety comes with the game’s biggest innovation - its three additional characters. The second route split determines which of two characters you can recruit as well as about half of the levels you’ll play through. The upper route gives you Sypha, a witch with powerful spells instead of sub-weapons, but frail constitution. The bottom route gives you Alucard - appearing here eight years before his ever-iconic reintroduction in Symphony of the Night - whose weak combat is balanced out by a handy ability to turn into a bat and fly around obstacles. Before each of them comes Grant, your reward for taking on the optional clock tower level. He can cling to walls, walk faster, jump higher, and even steer his jumps in midair, but he takes extra damage like Sypha. Though you can only have one partner at a time, your choice of route and partner can make every playthrough look a little different even in the structured, linear design of a Castlevania game.

Overall, Dracula’s Curse delivers as a huge next step for that “classic-vania” style. It’s a sharper and smarter game with lots more variety. There is one catch, though. Back in the early days of console gaming, challenge was a huge selling point. Companies goaded their players into taking on the biggest, baddest challenges for bragging rights. If you had a sequel, it couldn’t just be bigger or better - it had to be harder, too. With Simon’s Quest disappointing in this regard, Dracula’s Curse had to pick up the slack, even though Castlevania was already plenty tough. The result?

This Game is Really Damn Hard

With a better understanding of Castlevania’s structure came not only more clever and fun levels, but also a better understanding of how to use all of its mechanics to put players through the meat grinder. The game uses your inability to jump while climbing stairs to bottleneck you against swooping enemies. Crows dive in from just the worst places, sometimes right after you enter a room. Some jumps are so long that you’ll only clear them if you stand as close to the edge as possible. Enemies cover each other’s angles of attack so well in some rooms that you’ll swear you just missed the huddle where they planned it all out. In the grand scheme, it’s all still done in that typical Castlevania way - carefully-placed hazards that give you some time to react and have a clear solution - but the arrangements seriously put your decision-making and planning to the test.

While the more creative levels tend to be a positive too, some of the ideas would have been better off left on the drawing board. While Alucard’s flight is very useful, I rarely ever play on his route because the gimmicks of his levels are just a frustrating waste of time. Multiple levels make you wait for falling acid to melt blocks or for falling blocks to stack up before you can progress. One particularly egregious room forces you to dodge through the same pattern of stacking blocks for over a minute only to change the pattern up on you near the end, potentially knocking you into a pit. The penultimate level - among the hardest of any Castlevania game - finishes with a doppelganger boss that copies the moves of the various characters. Its AI is predictably stupid for this era, so beating it pretty much always requires cheesing it out. Spamming the character switch button lets you get one free hit in per switch, which takes forever since character switching couldn’t be quick in the old days.

Oddly enough, American players also got a significantly harder version of the game in most respects. The Japanese version assigns damage on a per-hazard basis which is consistent throughout the game, but the US version goes back to the system from Castlevania - every hazard’s damage depends on the level. This makes the last few levels of Dracula’s Curse absolutely grueling on the US version by greatly reducing your margin for error. Some bosses also get tougher attack patterns, such as increasing the size of the twin dragons’ fire breath enough that they can potentially be unavoidable if the heads appear in the wrong spots. Some of the changes are good, though. The original twin dragon breath would actually lag the game. Grant gets his knife throw nerfed down to a short-range stab in the US version, but it was kind of ridiculous for him to have the knife throw anyways. The final battle against Dracula is also much improved; the patterns for his movement and flame pillars are better to play around, and his third phase has its angles of attack adjusted so it can properly aim at you anywhere. The Japanese version is my go-to for simply being less stressful, but I’d appreciate a remake that brings the best balance from both together.

A Legacy Established

Castlevania may have laid the groundwork, but Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse set the standard for the franchise going forward. For doubling down on everything about the first game and bringing in so many new ideas that would become series staples, it is truly difficult to imagine how the franchise would look without this game. Koji Igarashi, known for spearheading the franchise’s shift into an easier, more open-ended style, still counts Dracula’s Curse as his favorite Castlevania game. Even as it tries its hardest to break your spirit, there’s just something so undeniably solid about how it’s all put together that it’s hard not to push through to the end. Sometimes it gets so hard that it crosses a line for me - especially in the American version - but it does so much else right that it’s easy to forgive. As I watch Trevor put his arm around Sypha as the sun rises on the crumbling castle, all the resentment pretty much just washes away.

More than just setting the standard for the series, Dracula’s Curse also strikes me as a crucial example of one of the most important things about gaming. As games continue to get easier and more accessible, Dracula’s Curse stands as a constant reminder that the struggle can make the experience more meaningful. It’s not bad that games are less obtuse or that there are more games that newcomers can approach, but the importance of this adversity cannot be understated. Challenge invests us in the world in its own way, aligning the struggles of its characters with a simulated struggle we really face. The modern classics of challenge, like Dark Souls and Hollow Knight, were all looking to games like this in their design. Castlevania taught us that challenge didn’t have to be cheap, using it instead to elevate the experience. Castlevania III is among the greatest examples of this feat in the NES age, and it paved the way for the future of the series to carry on that legacy.

I feel like I don’t talk about (or play) The Legend of Zelda nearly as much as I should. Even though I only rarely revisit even my favorite Zelda titles and games like Majora’s Mask have sat on the backburner for way too long, most of the Zelda games I’ve played hold a special place in my heart. Surprisingly, this sentiment extends to the Hyrule Warriors series, which I’m still kind of surprised to call a series. The reveal trailer for Hyrule Warriors on Wii U was my young self’s first exposure to any kind of Dynasty Warriors, and of course, I was the perfect age to think it was the most amazing thing ever. Repetitive and simplistic as it may become, cutting down enemies by the hundreds was very novel to me, and it maintains a simple catharsis even as an adult. I was surprised to see it get a Breath of the Wild-centric sequel with Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, and even more surprised to see Tears of the Kingdom get its own companion spinoff when Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment was revealed last Spring.

Age of Calamity ended up being divisive because it billed itself as a Breath of the Wild prequel, but used time-travel shenanigans to create an alternate timeline where the heroes stop the Calamity without needing Link to take a second stab at it 100 years later. Because of Zelda’s usual focus on narrative, a lot of series fans come into the spinoffs with oversized expectations about the story, but that is just not an area where Warriors games will ever really deliver. The first Hyrule Warriors had a pretty superfluous story, too. These games are all about the action. In Hyrule Warriors, there was a big emphasis on managing conflict all across the map. Age of Calamity shifted the focus to taking down bigger enemies, but had such well-designed characters and mechanics that doing so was much more fun and technical than it usually is in these games. With this unexpected third entry, I hoped Koei Tecmo could blend the best aspects of both games that came before for the ultimate Hyrule Warriors experience. Was my wish granted? Let’s find out.

The first thing I can absolutely claim Age of Imprisonment does better than its predecessors is the visuals. Founded on Tears of the Kingdom’s wonderful painterly style, Age of Imprisonment also has the benefit of being designed directly for Switch 2. Not only does the game look as good as the already-impressive Zelda entries it draws from, but it runs at a smooth 60fps with remarkable consistency. Hyrule Warriors had reliable performance, but the game already looked dated when it first released eleven years ago. Age of Calamity did a great job matching Breath of the Wild’s visuals, but combining those visuals with huge crowds of enemies and a constant stream of flashy attacks proved too much for the original Switch to handle. Age of Imprisonment combines great graphics with an even smoother framerate than either of its predecessors, and it ends up being among the most impressive-looking Switch 2 exclusives for its effort. It really makes me wish for a Switch 2 upgrade for Age of Calamity, although I’d rather not have to pay for one…

Aside from the visuals, Age of Imprisonment ends up feeling like it is indeed trying to strike a middle ground between the original Hyrule Warriors and Age of Calamity. There’s more side missions and a bit more emphasis on capturing keeps and mowing down mooks, evoking Hyrule Warriors’ adventure modes. Large enemies remain a focus, though, and the game expands on various ways to chip down weak points and exploit elemental weaknesses that appeared in Age of Calamity. Borrowing from Tears of the Kingdom, this game uses Zonai devices and weapon fusions to include a huge amount of system mechanics. Large enemies’ dangerous attacks can be exploited with character-specific Unique Actions, or there’s a Zonai device to match each type of attack for a low cost to your energy reserves. Some characters can use elementally-imbued attacks to better fight certain enemies, but there’s also a Zonai device for each element. Other characters can use monster parts to perform fuse attacks and chip down weak points through brute force.

While these mechanics allow for a wider variety of ways to take down enemies, they come with some costs. Tears of the Kingdom’s building mechanics and weapon fusions made the world even more interactive, but did have the unfortunate downside of cluttering the UI a bit and increasing the amount of time spent navigating menus instead of playing. It’s a similar story here; no character has enough button-mappable shortcuts to have every option you’ll want to use on tap. Moreover, the game is trying so hard to accommodate all of these mechanics that the characters themselves are broadly uninteresting. Hyrule Warriors did a surprisingly good job keeping its characters’ playstyles interesting, and Age of Calamity doubled down by giving nearly every character unique control options that set them apart and made them feel strong. Age of Imprisonment feels like a noticeable step backwards here. The game’s mechanics lean so hard into the Zonai devices which everyone can use that a character’s unique traits rarely feel meaningful. Many characters don’t even have anything unique. Roughly half the roster is padded out by random soldier characters with generic attributes.

The character design downgrade is especially noticeable thanks to how many characters feel analogous to ones from previous entries. The four sages of ancient Hyrule have much in common with their successors from Age of Calamity’s time, and the comparison is almost always negative. Unique mechanics like Urbosa’s charge gauge and Revali’s flight mode aren’t matched in any way, so characters like Ardi and Raphica feel just close enough to their successors to make you wish you were playing as them instead. This is perhaps most obvious with the Mysterious Construct, a Zonai construct powered by a fragment of the Master Sword which the game uses as a proxy for Link. Link’s one-handed weapon moveset in Age of Calamity was a versatile powerhouse. While the Construct’s moveset maintains a lot of what was strong about Link in the last game, it’s still so nerfed in comparison that I can’t help but be a little disappointed.

It’s not to say that this game’s combat doesn’t make any improvements, though. One thing the game does do well with its characters is emphasize teamwork. Sync strikes are a new mechanic which allows two characters to partner up for a variety of devastating attacks. While there are “default” sync strikes where both characters attack in sequence, the majority of important characters have unique sync strikes across pairings which are not only powerful but quite creative. You’ll bring certain characters along to make use of the elemental attributes of their Sync Strikes, or even just because a certain pair has a fun or powerful Sync Strike. Of course, these fun, unique Sync Strikes are yet another reason the generic extra characters in this game mostly collect dust.

Knocking enemies back with powerful attacks now triggers a convenient “follow up” prompt that snaps your character straight towards the enemy, keeping up momentum. Unique Attacks are a more interesting system for countering enemies than Age of Calamity’s Sheikah runes or the items from Hyrule Warriors, and different characters will want to use their unique attacks and Zonai devices in different ways. Ultimately, all these mechanics do eventually come together for a fun rhythm, although the first few levels can feel sluggish as the game labors to introduce everything.

There’s one more aspect of the gameplay to talk about, though, and it’s one which really caught me off-guard. Age of Calamity featured a few absolutely horrible levels where you piloted the Divine Beasts, each with impossibly sluggish controls and absolutely no sense of excitement. Age of Imprisonment decided to make its own new style of gimmick level for this game, and thankfully, it is a massive improvement. The Mysterious Construct can mode-shift into a flying vehicle and enter a shoot-em-up mode that plays like Star Fox. This was the absolute last thing I expected from a Zelda game, but as the Kirby franchise has proven time and again, impromptu shoot-em-up stages in games that are normally a completely different genre can be real winners. The stages aren’t very hard, so you’re mostly free to enjoy letting loose with a variety of special weapons as you dodge through enemy fire. These levels are remarkably well-done for occasional gimmicks, and I honestly found them to be high points of the game at large.

Now I suppose it’s time I went over this game’s story. It’s been a theme this past year for me to chastise games for making me sit through a bunch of long cutscenes without actually building up to an interesting narrative, and this game is not bucking the trend. The voice acting is about as dry as it’s been since Breath of the Wild, which is a shame since I know a lot of the performers can do well with better material. I’ve played Fire Emblem: Three Houses; I know Chris Hackney can do a great performance. King Rauru is just not drawing much of that out of him. Credit where it’s due, though; I think Zelda’s voice actress, Patricia Summerset, has gotten a little sharper with every entry. Anyways, the story unfortunately doesn’t tease out much of the potential of taking a closer look at Hyrule’s founding days. Most of the important beats were represented just as well or better in Tears of the Kingdom’s memory scenes, and characters we do learn more about - like the sages - don’t have a whole lot to them.

Ultimately, the best moments in the story come down to what Zelda narratives have always done best: overarching themes and music. Tears of the Kingdom’s plot already had some surprisingly powerful themes of legacy and trust that really resonated with me, and I think this game actually does a decent job capitalizing on that idea by the end. Oddly, it does its best work with original characters. The Mysterious Construct is something that, on paper, shouldn’t work; it’s just an emotionless robot meant to proxy for a character who is currently in a different era. It should be a lazy cop-out in the face of the possibility that a Hyrule Warriors game may just have to go without Link for once. In practice, though, the Construct ends up being pretty cool.

The Construct is so automatically motivated to fight any and all evil that it ends up instilling courage in Calamo, the Korok explorer who discovered the Construct. Ganondorf even uses his own evil construct to create a rival, leading to a final battle between the two constructs filled with a ridiculous amount of hype moments right out of shonen anime. The final battles for both Zelda and the Construct create an interesting parallel, and the music for these moments charges them with emotion. As we know from Tears of the Kingdom, Zelda and Rauru make major sacrifices because of their trust in Link to finish the fight. The Construct ends up reciprocating this, acting as a vessel for just enough of Link’s dauntless devotion to turn the tides in the past. Just like the game got more fun to play as it went on, the story moments got more fun to watch, too.

So, did Age of Imprisonment meet my expectations? On some level, I can’t say that it did. I think Koei could have done a better job nailing down what was most fun about both of their prior entries to bring into this game. Ultimately, it seems like it was more concerned with translating mechanics from Tears of the Kingdom than it was with building on Hyrule Warriors’ own mechanical legacy. Narratively, it also didn’t explore Hyrule’s history quite as much as I and many others hoped it would. On the whole, though, it wasn’t a bad time. Once the game hit its stride, a lot of my gripes from the first few hours started to feel minor. It’s not quite everything I hoped it would be, but it’s still good enough to satisfy fans of the Warriors structure. Without a clear basis for another Hyrule Warriors game, the future of this spinoff franchise is hard to predict. It’s surprised me before, though; on some level, I’m more curious about the next step for Hyrule Warriors than I’ve ever been.

Part of CastleVember 2025!

• Castlevania (1986)

• Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest (1987)

• Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse (1989)

Castlevania’s success was quickly capitalized on with its 1987 sequel, but 1989 introduced another obligatory step for every major gaming success - the portable version. Nintendo’s Game Boy was the first proper handheld gaming console, far outperforming the primitive LCD-based games of their prior Game and Watch series. It was the first time audiences had anything on the go close to the sorts of games they could play at home and in arcades, even if it had a barf-green screen, no backlight for playing at night, and needed four AA batteries. The brick sure seems funny in a post-Nintendo Switch era, but it was a pretty serious innovation back in the day. Most every major NES developer was excited to bring their games to this revolutionary new market, but it wasn’t exactly a smooth transition. The Game Boy was an understandably limited piece of hardware. Its raw capabilities weren’t that bad, but in the early days of the system, developers struggled to make the most of it.

Remember that. It’s going to be a bit of a theme.

Hunting on the Go

As far as NES games to translate to Game Boy go, Castlevania seems like one of the easier ones. The pace of the game was already fairly slow, making it easier for the portable hardware to keep up. The style of gameplay was also pretty simple; you didn’t have a whole mess of projectiles flying eight different ways or anything like that. What Castlevania did have, though - and what often goes unnoticed about it, in my experience - was really good visuals for the time. The halls of Dracula’s Castle had such fine details as tattered drapes, statuary, and aging stonework. Backgrounds were always quite detailed, bucking the typical NES trend of leaving backgrounds as one solid color, usually black. Castlevania: The Adventure was a full-fledged attempt to bring all of this to the Game Boy in its inaugural year. In that respect, Konami’s eyes were a bit too big for their stomachs.

The first stage of The Adventure feels much like a Castlevania level should. Christopher Belmont marches through a haunted forest, smacking slime-men and birds out of the sky on his way. The background contains details like gnarled trees, distant mountains, and a variety of gravestones that do a very effective job evoking scenery for such a tiny screen. Moving and swinging your whip feel as they should, but there’s a certain sluggishness to the proceedings. What one finds out quickly about this game is that it’s simply pushing its hardware too far. For brief moments, you may experience the lagless state of this game, but as soon as anything other than Christopher and the basic walls and floors shows up, there will be lag. A small amount of lag is so ever-present that you eventually take it to be the basic state of the game, shocked to experience the rare moments of smoothness. At its worst, the game chugs along so laboriously that the screen actually tears. Maybe limit-breaking emulators help, but the emulation in the handy Castlevania Anniversary Collection is too accurate for that sort of thing.

Besides, the lag isn’t the only way in which this game feels like it was crammed into itself. Christopher’s jumps cover an extremely meager distance, barely clearing one body length where previous games offered about two and a half. Sub-weapons are removed entirely, cutting a level of strategy out and making it less important and satisfying to hit the candles around the level. The diagonal stairs are replaced with vertical ropes to keep the levels within the small screen. Climbing ropes is dreadfully slow, and for some reason, you can’t attack while you climb one. Finally, the game has only four stages, each more gimmicky than the last with odd, punishing level designs. Spikes aren’t usually one-hit kills in Castlevania, but they are here - and their hitboxes are larger than they look, too. Certain platforms fall like a rock the second you step on them, so good luck jumping off of them in time with this game’s pitiful jump. Bats return from previous games, but have a new, erratic flight pattern and annoying placement that makes them a pain to hit. While it’s fun that the third-tier whip upgrade lets you shoot fireballs, it’s not fun that getting hit drops your whip level by one.

You can’t really blame the Game Boy for everything that’s rough about The Adventure, though. The third level requires you to move quickly against spiked ceilings, floors, and walls, giving you just barely enough time to destroy the mechanisms moving them or reach certain choke points in time to avoid getting gored. Move too quickly, and you might jump a hair too close to a ceiling spike or hit the top of the screen, cutting your jump off. The fourth level relies on navigating floors which pop out of spikes attached to the wall. There’s no way to know when they’ll eject in advance, and some rooms force you to start jumping through them before you have any idea where they’ll emerge. Finally, the bosses are mostly pathetic, with one of them just being a series of bouncing enemies spawned one after the other. Here’s an example:

With how much health I had, I hardly had to do anything. If I’d had less health, I’m not sure how I would’ve had to dodge it to win. It’s just not great.

Setting In

So, yeah, Castlevania: The Adventure is mostly a downsized take on Castlevania suffering not only from the limitations of its hardware, but a number of other questionable design decisions which cannot be so easily excused. It’s bad, but unlike Simon’s Quest, it’s not bad in particularly interesting or informative ways. If anything, it just serves as a time capsule for the early days of handheld gaming when compromises were necessary, but the hardware was novel enough to justify them. It doesn’t seem like a particularly interesting game to revisit on the surface. Dig a little deeper, and The Adventure becomes an intruiging indicator for the Castlevania series as a whole.

Possibly the most important thing about The Adventure in the grand scheme of Castlevania’s history is that it’s the first game to star a different Belmont than Simon. For the first two titles, Castlevania was shaping up much like the other early classics; its hero would battle their nemesis over and over across the years. Mario had Bowser, Link had Ganon, Mega Man had Dr. Wily, and Simon Belmont would, of course, have Dracula. The Adventure bucks the trend by positioning itself as a sort of origin story. Christopher Belmont would journey to face down Dracula, still a human sorcerer performing evil rituals to earn his eternal, vampiric life, long before Simon would be born. Though later games in the series would force some retcons to this backstory, The Adventure remains the origin of Castlevania’s most unique narrative aspect - the generations-long rivalry between the Belmont bloodline and Dracula’s perennial evil. More than just setting Castlevania apart from the standard, this dynamic has something to say about the nature of good versus evil; humanity always returns to the same pitfalls and evils that plagued it before, but every generation finds its own way to fight back.

Besides that great innovation, The Adventure is also notable for the trends which it continued. While Simon’s Quest was a hard shift for the format, The Adventure returned to the original, linear format of the first game. While this was likely done mostly to make the translation to Game Boy easier, it did serve to establish that devilishly tough march through carefully-designed levels as the series’ identity. Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse came out later in the same year for NES, fully establishing the distinctive “Classicvania” format as the standard. Though the series would later return to the more open-ended style Simon’s Quest had experimented with when the time was right, I’ll always appreciate that the classic style had its time to shine. It’s my preferred flavor of Castlevania, and there’s not much else out there that quite matches that measured sense of genuine challenge.

The gameplay trends of the Classicvania format also came with some aesthetic touches. The Adventure is honestly a pretty weird-looking Castlevania game. Everything has a sort of knotted, decaying look to it, and most of the typical series monsters are replaced with bizarre choices like rolling eyeballs and huge pill bugs. Nonetheless, the general shape remains how we now expect it. A trip through the spooky forests and caves outside the castle transitions into the haunted halls themselves, and once it’s all over, our hero gazes out upon the crumbling ruins of the fortress they have conquered.

Flawed as it may be, Castlevania: The Adventure represents the franchise broadly coming into its own. From here on out, it was ahead of the curve in throwing aside arcade-style gimmicks or a reliance on guidebooks to succeed. For any franchise to become something great, it has to know what it wants to be. Castlevania figured that out a lot quicker than many of its contemporaries. Even in the series’ future follies with trendy genres and strange ideas, it would make sure to exist alongside a main series foundation which was grounded in reliable designs. Playing The Adventure is a real pain, but I can at least appreciate that it helped the series find its footing.

Part of CastleVember 2025!

• Castlevania (1986)

• Castlevania: The Adventure (1989)

• Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse (1989)

Oh, we’re in “the shadows of the Hell House,” alright.

Castlevania was one of the first classics on the NES, especially outside of Nintendo’s own output. Warts and all, it was a game that clearly had a lot of thought put into it. While other publishers were feeling things out and tripping over themselves in the pioneer days of modern game design, Konami had put the time and effort in to craft something deliberate, strategic, and even (mostly) fair. It was an instant hit, and Konami knew they needed to follow it up as soon as they could. Surely these developers had a good grasp of what made Castlevania great. They would certainly stick to their guns, putting out a new title that leaned into the original’s strengths and introduced some new options and interesting challenges.

Nah, I’m just messing with you. Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest throws just about everything that was good about Castlevania right out the window. You probably know that already; after all, Simon’s Quest is the topic of The Angry Video Game Nerd’s first ever video, and he’s pretty much the starting point for online game critique as we know it. This game has been whacked so hard by just about every game critic by now that it probably doesn’t have any candy left in it anymore. You probably don’t need me to tell you it’s bad (not that that’ll stop me), so why talk about it at all? Well, being a bad game doesn’t stop Simon’s Quest from being a fascinating sort of phenomenon. It’s representative of a wider design sensibility so grounded in the unique landscape of ‘80s gaming that most modern gamers can’t make heads or tails of it. Moreover, this game remains an inspiration to longtime Castlevania fans and independent developers, having the kind of legacy usually reserved for things that are fun.

Understanding the confluence of all of these things is no mean feat. Fortunately, I am exactly the kind of nerd to lay it all out for you. First, I’ll get a few more whacks in on the dead horse so everyone understands just what’s wrong with this game. Then, I’ll dive into the conditions of the time that made all of this game’s weirdness acceptable. Finally, I’ll parse out just what about this game continues to inspire new creators. So, let’s do what we always do and begin at the beginning.

Maybe I Should Have Packed A Map

Few games have ever produced such a visceral sense of being dropped into the middle of it as Simon’s Quest has. Sure, I could just read the manual if I want to know that I’m hunting down Dracula’s remains to kill him again and break his curse, but there’s still something about hitting start and just appearing in the middle of the first town. Should I go right or left? Let’s talk to the townspeople. Oh, wait, the townspeople are useless. I can buy a white crystal, I guess? Oh, it just turned to night and I have to wait a solid ten seconds for this transition to finish now. Also, now that it’s night, all I can do is smack zombies in the village until it becomes day again and I get to finish my business. All the simplicity and clarity of purpose which defined Castlevania is utterly obliterated in this game, replaced with aimless wandering on a wide-open map.

Well, wandering wide-open maps is pretty popular these days, thanks in no small part to the much later Castlevania title, Symphony of the Night. The problem with Simon’s Quest isn’t so much that it’s open-ended, but that it isn’t fun to navigate. The map is essentially a really long straight line with a few short detours up or down. Travel consists of marching through forests, caves, and bridges until you end up at the next town. Whereas Castlevania’s linear structure allowed its levels to have carefully-placed and engaging obstacles, Simon’s Quest’s need for each route to be navigable both backwards and forwards takes all the fun out of the level design. Skeletons sit on wide straightaways just waiting to get whacked. Mermen jump out of the water as if they’re trying to be right in the perfect spot for you to hit them. The only reason to fight is to build up enough hearts for the various purchases this game asks of you, but fighting is not fun in and of itself. The only challenge comes from how bulky enemies in certain areas arbitrarily become, making whip upgrades a must.

Of course, you have to find those whip upgrades first. Merchants in the world of Simon’s Quest are strangely reclusive; nearly all of them reside behind hidden walls and floors which require the holy water to be broken. You better hope you bought holy water as soon as possible in the first village, or you’re going to be doing some backtracking. You also better buy that white crystal, because you need it to enter the first mansion and find Dracula’s rib. You definitely knew that the only way to get into that mansion was by equipping the crystal to reveal the invisible platform that carries you past the water, right? Don’t forget you need to trade that crystal up to a blue one and, even later, a red one, too. Where do you do this? The villagers say you have “a friend waiting for you” in certain towns… not that the towns are labeled in this game that has no map. What do you need the blue crystal for, you might ask? Well, this, of course:

To be fair, the game does offer a decent hint for that - if you can find it in a breakable wall. “To replenish earth, kneel by the lake with the blue crystal,” reads a clue found in the Aljiba woods. Later, you have to do that same thing by crouching at a cliff with the red crystal - y’know, so you can get whisked away by a tornado to a completely foreign part of the map. Intuitive stuff. Wanna know how the game clues you in on that?

“Wait for a soul?” Is the tornado a soul? There’s also still no labels for places in this game. It certainly doesn’t tell you that you need to crouch for five whole seconds while facing the cliff wall. Seriously, good luck.

Esoteric nonsense is the whole name of the game in Simon’s Quest. You’re going to want to turn up every inch of the map that you can, but the real evil of this game is that the vast majority of what you find will be dead ends. There are whole rooms and areas of the map with nothing to find but walls and enemies. Even when you finally get past the directionless confusion, the gameplay simply isn’t fun. Enemies in this game are nowhere near as interesting and fun to deal with. So many of them just slowly float in your direction or walk along the ground with an occasional fireball if they’re feeling frisky. They’re placed in such stupid positions, too. There are multiple areas where the transition between screens will place you almost right on top of a skeleton that immediately knocks you back to the previous screen. Simon’s attacks and movements are still limited like they were in Castlevania, but the level design and enemies fail to engage with those limitations. He just ends up feeling slow and clunky in such a clumsily-made world.

One might think that the mansions could be an opportunity for levels more like the original. Walk in, fight through the mansion, beat a boss, grab Dracula’s relic, and back to exploring. Unfortunately, they just dial the bullshit up to 11. Mansions are filled with fake blocks, forcing you to throw holy water constantly just to make sure the floor in front of you is real. Each mansion has a vendor who is, for some reason, selling oak stakes which you need to break the orb surrounding Dracula’s relics, so you might be wasting time smacking enemies for a while to get the hearts you need for that. Once you get the relic, you have to backtrack through the whole mansion again. Every mansion is filled with long, slow stair climbs and weird level geometry that makes some jumps needlessly precise and frustrating. Finally, only two mansions actually have bosses. Want to see what a boss fight is like in this game?

Look, Death was a pain in the ass last time around, but I certainly wouldn’t call this an improvement. You do have to kill the other two bosses, though, including Dracula. Fighting Dracula is always fun in this series! There’s no way they messed that up…

Man, he doesn’t even look like Dracula.

So, to put a little bow on all of this, Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest is a game defined by tedium and confusion. Knowing is much more than half the battle in this game, and even with a guide right in front of you, no part of this game is as engaging as its predecessor. Exploration is so obtuse and mechanically boring that the sense of adventure is totally smothered by a feeling that your time is being deliberately wasted. This is a frankly disgraceful sequel, but as I’ve already suggested, it didn’t do poorly for itself in its time and many have a soft spot for it. It’s time to look at the bigger picture.

Why are NES Games So Weird?

Behold the cover to the second ever issue of Nintendo Power magazine, featuring 14 entire pages of “gory details” on Simon’s Quest. It’s pretty cool, in a mid-80s marketing kind of way. Back in the day, some artistic license was always necessary when companies were translating the somewhat-vague pixel art into traditional art or marketing. You could certainly do a lot worse than this. I digress, though. One of the major criticisms about Simon’s Quest is that it’s almost impossible to beat without a walkthrough. Well, before you could look one up online whenever you wanted, you needed to get the power - Nintendo Power.

People today often think of walkthroughs as cheating, wanting instead to figure things out for themselves. I agree that it is more satisfying to solve things on my own, but that’s because games these days understand that too and do their best to make it feasible. In the NES era, that was not the case, as Simon’s Quest plainly demonstrates. I mentioned in my Castlevania retrospective that devs had to make the most of the very limited amount of space on an NES cartridge. Games like Castlevania, Mega Man, and Ninja Gaiden solved that problem by making their few levels tough as nails, but that takes some design prowess. The much more popular answer in the era was to make games confusing, forcing players to turn up every inch of the game world in a wild goose chase that would test their sanity. Sometimes this was on purpose, and other times it was because there just wasn’t enough room to explain everything in a natural way within the game. The Legend of Zelda and Metroid were tough to navigate without a guide, but they still felt a lot fairer than something like Simon’s Quest or even Zelda’s own bizarre sequel, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. Plus, the translation and text editing in these games was often shoddy. Case in point:

Regardless of just why a given game didn’t make sense, enter the strategy guide. If the game couldn’t be solved without a guide, then players need guides. To the countless enterprising capitalists stateside and abroad, that smelled like an unfilled niche. Of course, Nintendo was smart to fill it themselves, selling Nintendo Power to their biggest fans who would unquestionably need the guides within. They even offered the Nintendo Power Line, a phone service where players could call and ask for guidance on any part of the ever-confusing NES library. It was helpful stuff, too - the Simon’s Quest guide in the second issue of Nintendo Power is comprehensive, right down to pointing out the fake blocks in the mansions. This is a time in gaming before tech came to dominate every part of our lives, when a printed paper magazine could be an essential peripheral to the most advanced games of the time.

The expectation nowadays is for us to solve games on our own. It’s so easy and cheap to find guidance that it seems so much more like a cop-out, especially since games are much fairer on the whole. The ecosystem of gaming in the ‘80s was, essentially, one where you were expected to ask for help. Maybe your neighbor knew how to solve something you didn’t. Failing that, you knew someone at school who gets Nintendo Power every month even though your parents aren’t budging on it. You could even call the line if the magazine doesn’t mention what you’re struggling with, etc. This local, social aspect of gaming is one I’m sure a lot of people from the time are nostalgic for. Nowadays, you either solve it all yourself or learn everything imaginable about a game from the internet in no time at all. The social dynamic where piecing a game together could feel like a group effort that took time doesn’t really exist anymore; though that’s mostly for the better, it was a unique approach in light of existing limitations.

Endearing Quirks

It’s about time we circled back to the topic of this game’s legacy. I think nostalgia factors into its reputation quite heavily; I’m sure a lot of people who played it as kids have pretty fond memories of piecing this cryptic game together with help from their favorite magazine. In a world where I’m seeing people call the damn Star Wars prequels “Shakespearean,” I think it’s fair to say nostalgia carries a lot of weight these days. Most people are oddly ashamed to say they liked something that isn’t great when they were kids, though it’s a near-universal experience. That, or they just aren’t critically-minded enough to reevaluate something that they used to love.

Nostalgia’s not the only thing at play for Simon’s Quest, though. This is an undeniably weird game. The weirdness is largely what’s wrong with it: it applies systems from the original game’s linear context that don’t work in a more open world, basic progression is extremely unintuitive, lots of secrets are accessed by doing dumb stuff like dropping garlic on the floor in a graveyard, etc. However, it is also what’s funny about the game. Janky NPC dialogue ranges from a woman saying “I’ve been waiting for a good looking guy like you” with no follow-up to a completely normal guy walking around town who says “Don’t make me stay. I’ll die.” Apparently, some NPCs are scared or intentionally unhelpful because they don’t understand why Simon is trying to resurrect Dracula; filter that through a language barrier in the ‘80s, and it gets pretty weird. An essential item in the game is the laurel, a shrubbery which somehow has the power to make Simon completely immune to damage. The absurdity of the red crystal cliff tornado secret is enough to make someone laugh even if they spent the last few hours pulling their hair out over where to go next. For better or for worse, the game is just plain silly.

The weirdness also comes across as more endearing than off-putting because of just where in gaming history this game lands. This is seen as a pioneer of the “metroidvania” subgenre which, as the name implies, the Castlevania series would later help popularize. To be clear, it’s far from the first game to attempt this structure; Metroid proper beat Simon’s Quest by two years in Japan and one in the States. Though it had more direction than Simon’s Quest, it certainly didn’t get it all right on the first try, either. Space limitations made it difficult to have a large map without repeating the same room layouts over multiple areas, and built-in maps wouldn’t become a standard game feature until the next console generation. Metroid did combine upgrades and progression, though, which Simon’s Quest doesn’t really do. The things that open the way forward are different from the things that make you more powerful, whereas metroidvanias are about combining the two.

The point is that games of the NES era were largely experimental, whether they wanted to be or not. Nobody had written the book on game design by this point, and it was inevitable for even the better developers to bumble around a bit while they tried to fill out the pages in real time. Seen today, Simon’s Quest is messy and unsatisfying. It certainly doesn’t help that its predecessor was way ahead of the curve. Viewed retrospectively - especially in light of Castlevania’s later pivot back to more open-ended worlds - it becomes a valiant, if misguided, attempt at something greater. It is perhaps a game with eyes bigger than its stomach, even if you can’t pin all of its problems on the limitations of the time. I can’t exactly excuse what Simon’s Quest is, for anyone interested in playing it today, but I can at least respect that it took a risk. It just goes to show that you can’t just have the right idea; you need the right execution, too. Today, games like Infernax and the upcoming The Transylvania Adventure of Simon Quest pay their tribute to Simon’s Quest by attempting to tease out the genuine inspiration they see under the surface of this flawed game. I think that’s really what’s beautiful about art; even when it’s not perfect, it can still inspire us just for trying.

Part of CastleVember 2025!

• Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest (1987)

• Castlevania: The Adventure (1989)

• Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse (1989)

Our modern gaming landscape is a very different thing to the world of gaming in the ‘80s. Games at this point were still mostly arcade-style score attacks unconcerned with telling stories or having much of a real beginning or end. The idea that a game could be scary or even just atmospheric was pretty laughable to people who were most accustomed to Atari 2600-level visuals. The NES was only beginning to make it seem like video games had a future after Atari’s non-stop output of low-effort slop led to a massive market crash. Regardless, the reinvigorated home console market meant games had to change. Endless, looping quarter-munchers weren’t nearly as novel when you were playing them at home without your pocket change on the line. Games were expensive and people wanted their money’s worth, even if the amount of space on a given NES cartridge averaged well under a megabyte. How did you get the most playtime out of the least content? Simple. You made the content really damn hard.

You may be asking “But how do you keep it fair?” or “But how do you keep it satisfying?” or the like. All reasonable questions, but not ones that designers of the era often knew the answer to - or even cared about. Ideas we throw around casually today like “level design” and “difficulty curve” were little more than nascent concepts in the brand-new world of games that were also stories. Even Nintendo, whose ever-careful developers remain the masters of the fundamentals, wasn’t above a few cheap tricks and unclear puzzles in these times. This is where Castlevania comes in. Konami is trying to do so many things that haven’t been done before with this game. The hunt for Dracula was going to feel tense and spooky, inspired by the Hammer horror films of the fifties. The game was going to be tough as nails, but not because you ran out of continues on a falling rock you could never have reacted to. Its challenges would be set out in front of you every time. You would always have the tools you needed at your disposal. Perhaps most surprisingly of all, you wouldn’t get sent all the way back to the start for anything.

Sound familiar? Maybe this reminds you of Dark Souls, Hollow Knight, Resident Evil, or any number of beloved games. These things are all the hallmarks of the best kinds of challenging games we have today. Castlevania embodies the first steps towards challenging game design that was meant to satisfy rather than frustrate. Castlevania was the future.

Breaking Down the Gates

Crucial to everything Castlevania aimed to do was its unique control scheme. While Super Mario Bros. set the standard for platformers as a fast, nimble genre, Castlevania wanted to slow things down. Simon Belmont walks at a moderate pace. Jumps don’t go too high or far, and you can’t change direction once you’re in midair. Navigating the levels often requires slowly climbing stairs, which you can’t jump on or off of. Attacking with the whip takes a moment, but it’s a powerful attack with long range. Finally, you can only carry one of the five helpful sub-weapons - each of which serve valuable niches - at a time. To some, this might sound like making your character deliberately weak, but Simon doesn’t really feel weak in practice. He just feels human.

Castlevania’s control scheme serves two primary purposes. The gameplay purposes are most obvious: Simon’s movements and attacks are all designed to force players to think ahead and play carefully, and the levels and enemies are structured deliberately around your options. The zombies which infest the first level are just tall enough to be jumped over if you’re not quick enough in whipping them. The fleamen hop quickly along the ground, but take a bigger leap when they’re near you, catching the immediate impulse to try and jump over them. Pitfalls and stairs are placed precariously near bone-throwing skeletons or swooping bats and medusa heads. Face these challenges long enough, and one almost invariably finds that the answer to any threat is patience. The infamously annoying medusa heads catch careless players just trying to charge forward, bumping them into pits and seeming impossible to avoid. A cautious player sees them, stops, and reads their predictable parabolic flight pattern to jump over them, crouch under them, or just hit them out of the sky before they keep moving. By carefully using the whole range of the whip, knowing when to jump, and saving up hearts for the right occasion, all of Castlevania’s challenge can be understood and overcome.

The second, less obvious purpose of the controls is to make the game feel grounded and tense. Castlevania oozes atmosphere for its era, using a moody but nonetheless vibrant color scheme that truly evokes a crumbling castle with monsters behind every shadow. The game demands a constant focus as your limitations force every threat to be taken seriously. Death comes quickly - only eight hits early on, but down to four by the end of the game - and the only way to heal is to break open walls for food; mistakes add up. The end result is that you truly feel, as much as anyone could back in the ‘80s, like a lone warrior facing down mortal dangers in the home of his supernatural enemy. I wouldn’t call this game “horror” insofar as it doesn’t really aim to scare you, but the challenge made every moment tense. Games today continue to limit what the player can do in genres like horror and action to raise the tension and keep players on edge. Though Castlevania remains a game of legendary difficulty, it’s the kind of challenge that gets you invested. It’s not a game you clear once just to say you could; it keeps you coming back to do it all again and get better and better every time.

The style of gameplay in Castlevania would go on to be known as “classicvania” in the wake of the series’ genre shift with 1997’s Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Castlevania did a remarkably good job laying the groundwork for that style; many of its enemy and level design hallmarks would remain series staples, with every game putting its own spin on an increasingly recognizable design identity. However, Castlevania is admittedly not a perfect execution. Boss fights in this game are pretty bad, with most bosses simply meandering and firing projectiles here and there without much consideration for where the player can stand or move. Death, the penultimate boss, is a particularly miserable affair, covering nearly every inch of the screen with either his own swooping body or the sets of four floating sickles he releases periodically. Luckily, he’s got the same weakness nearly every other boss has: the holy water. By getting the holy water and collecting an upgrade that allows you to throw more than one on the screen at once, the continuous flame left where the water lands can trap bosses in place before they get a chance to do anything. It’s a cheesy tactic that doesn’t feel satisfying, but the later bosses basically demand it. The hallway leading up to Death ends up feeling more like the boss of the level than Death.

Every now and again, the level design can sort of trip over itself with antiquated, arcade-esque bullshit. Though the final level before Dracula is short, it’s filled with annoyances. It starts as you try to avoid about five giant bats - previously met as the game’s first boss - while you navigate a broken bridge to the clock tower. Once you’re inside, birds start swooping in and dropping fleamen everywhere, filling the screen in a way the game just doesn’t equip you to handle. Beating the game automatically starts a second, harder run where rooms can get arbitrarily filled with bats and medusa heads swooping in constantly. You basically need the time-stopping stopwatch sub-weapon to get any kind of break from the onslaught - I don’t recommend bothering with this mode. The game keeps track of score and hides secrets that only boost your score, still believing that score was something that actually mattered. At least certain score thresholds can occasionally give you an extra life. Still, for not limiting continues and being as generally fair as it is, Castlevania was well ahead of its time and a deeply important game in the early days of level design, difficulty, and atmosphere.

First of its Lineage

I mentioned before that Castlevania established a design identity which the rest of the series would continually build upon. That statement alone doesn’t cover just how often the series refers to this first game. Just about the only good boss battle in this game is the final one against Dracula; he has an actual attack pattern that you can strategize around, and he feels good to figure out. His moveset of teleporting, releasing fireballs, and transforming into a beastly form for his second phase would return in nearly every one of his many final boss appearances in the series, with most games adding little quirks or extra attacks to keep it fresh. Castlevania’s first level is recreated in almost exact detail multiple times throughout the series in both the classicvania style entries and some of the later metroidvanias. The level themes within Dracula’s Castle, from the aforementioned entry hall to the torture chambers and gear-covered clock tower, are staple settings as the Castle is revisited again and again. The iconic staircase leading to Dracula’s vaunted quarters, with the clock tower and moon sharing the background, always makes for an epic build-up to the final confrontation.

One can point to many directly-recurring elements from this original game, but aspects of production also set the standard for the rest of the series in more general ways. No self-respecting critic could ever write a whole article about Castlevania without mentioning its music. Coming right out of the gate with the ever-iconic “Vampire Killer,” Castlevania’s music always fits the tone perfectly. The game opens with a championing anthem, moves into skulking tension with tracks like “Stalker” and “Wicked Child,” and gives you the motivation you need to power through its toughest challenges in the end with “Heart of Fire.” Castlevania was right at the top when it came to NES music, but it wasn’t just the music that pumped up the atmosphere. Castlevania’s vibrant color scheme emphasized high contrast between dark shadows and clear, distinguishable level elements like platforms and enemies. It looks almost like a game lit by torchlight - fitting for all the candelabras you break to collect hearts, points, and sub-weapons.

Castlevania’s strong command of the fundamentals throughout its visuals, sound, and gameplay makes it an NES game that has stood the test of time much better than the grand majority of its peers. It may not be the best of its kind anymore, and it shows its age in some places, but it’s all the more impressive for the simple fact that it was the first in the series. Many other classic franchises from the time, such as Mega Man, Metroid, and Street Fighter, wouldn’t really finding their footing until their second or even third entries. Even other classics of the time like The Legend of Zelda are obtuse and difficult to revisit by today’s standards, but Castlevania continues to be a valuable experience in its own right almost 40 years later. It goes to show that, even in the frontier days of game design, patience and care could result in something that could truly be called art.

Hello, everyone! Some may think that spooky season is over now that Halloween has passed, but here at Game Sense, we aren’t done just yet! Welcome to the first CastleVember, a month focused on the history of one of the most influential and historic series in gaming: Castlevania! Each year, I’ll be delving into a different part of this storied series’ history; this year, I’ll of course be starting at the beginning with a focus on the franchise’s NES beginnings. I’ll still be keeping up with a few timely releases, like the fast-approaching Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment and, of course, Kirby Air Riders. Make no mistake, though; the spotlight is going to be firmly on Castlevania for the next month!

Many know Castlevania today for helping to define the “metroidvania” genre, one of the most popular and prolific genres in the modern gaming landscape. This month, we’re going back to the series’ roots. Long before Castlevania was defined by a sprawling map and countless weapons and spells to wield, it made a name for itself with grueling treks through linear, carefully-crafted stages. Though they aren’t what most fans point to today, the earliest titles in Castlevania’s history are no less important and influential. Coming out of an era where gaming was defined by quarter-munching scam machines, Castlevania was crucial in redefining how games made difficulty feel fun and satisfying. Each of the four titles I’ll be covering this CastleVember represents a searching step in this process, and I hope you’ll all join me for the ride.

Check out each of the CastleVember articles here!

• Castlevania (1986)

• Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest (1987)

• Castlevania: The Adventure (1989)

• Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse (1989)

Team Cherry’s announcement of Hollow Knight: Silksong’s release date back in August hit the indie gaming scene like the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs. With only two weeks between the announcement and the September 4th release, many other indie titles pushed their own early September launches back, directly citing Silksong as the cause of the delay. Since Silksong was - without exaggeration - one of the most hotly anticipated games in recent memory, this was a smart move by these studios made with respect for both Team Cherry’s accomplishments and their own developers and fans. This left something of a void early in the month, but not every game listened to the evacuation orders before Silksong made impact. In fact, one of them had the unmitigated courage to not only launch on the exact same day as Silksong, but directly compete with it as a fellow metroidvania for the same price. That game has its own storied history, but it’s a fine line between courage and stupidity - did it ever have a chance against Silksong? Would it have had a chance regardless? Let’s find out.

Begin at the Beginning

The game in question is Adventure of Samsara, and it’s actually a reboot of the 1980 Atari 2600 game Adventure. Now, the young’ns might not know this, but Adventure is very important. It’s the original basis for fantasy, open-world, and, well, adventuring in video games in general. Franchises like The Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy, and even The Elder Scrolls are all built upon the groundwork of Adventure. In the days of the Atari 2600, games were usually still about high scores and endurance challenges. They didn’t typically “end,” much less focus on navigating believable settings or telling stories of any kind. Adventure changed all that. The player explores to return the Enchanted Chalice to the Golden Castle, beset by ferocious dragons and kleptomaniac bats while they use a variety of items to open the way. It was an impressive world for the time, made all the more true by the fact that programmer Warren Robinett made the entire game on his own. Regardless, it was still a game of its time, best exemplified by how it looks:

Yeah, the manual can tell you that you’re exploring castles and facing down dragons and bats, but you definitely have to use your imagination to get into it. At least the key definitely looks like a key! The Atari 2600 was not a powerful enough system to create visuals that were much more than abstract symbolic representations of things. While gaming is thankfully no longer bound by such strict limitations, it turns out that those limitations had some interesting stylistic implications. The less you can definitively say an image represents, the more its representation changes depending on the observer. Maybe our main square in Adventure is supposed to be a knight, but other players might have seen them more like a wizard or some kind of barbaric outlander. Anyone playing the game, regardless of their race or gender, can basically project themselves upon the square. Maybe the dragon’s just really fat, or maybe it’s a serpentine beast coiling around itself. Though it wasn’t intentional back in the Atari days, abstraction leans into the postmodern understanding that the same stories can be transformed by their audience’s perspectives.

Now, one video game market crash and over four decades later, how does Adventure of Samsara come back around to this? Well, it didn’t start as a return to Adventure. Brazilian indie studio Ilex Games - who, in their own words, “deliver games with deeply psychological and/or esoteric content" - had been unsuccessfully shopping around a metroidvania called Tower of Samsara since 2016. In comes Atari SA, the current owner of the Atari brand and many of their IPs, to buy the publishing rights for Tower of Samsara so they can essentially rework it into an Adventure reboot. According to Atari SA, the game wasn’t going to be fundamentally changed for this purpose, but elements of Adventure would be tied into their original vision. In line with Ilex’s mission statement, this ends up going back to the whole postmodern abstraction bit from last paragraph. Adventure, in its barebones nature, is almost like Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey; it’s a foundational framework for stories (and especially fantasy) upon which many of our stories are built. Adventure of Samsara leans into the cyclical nature of our constant experiences making and playing through new adventures in the gaming world.

Full Circle

So, how does Adventure of Samsara carry forward the legacy of Adventure? Well, unsurprisingly for a game retrofitted into being a reboot, the connections aren’t too major. Throughout your adventure, four dragons (a blue one in addition to the original three) will randomly attack you in various rooms; beating them yields rewards inspired by the original Adventure’s items. Swooping bats will steal your money if they hit you. A major side character named Kosmonauto tells you that he and the dragons you face are from a different world that nonetheless feels similar to yours. Kosmonauto’s weirdly wide jetpack gives him a square silhouette, and his connection to the dragons also implies that he very well could have been the square from Adventure. The most interesting thing about this is the idea that Adventure was really a sci-fi world under the Atari-age graphics; after all, how would we really know any better? This leans into the interpretive aspects of abstraction I mentioned earlier.

Many aspects of the presentation also lean into the game’s Atari roots. This is most obvious in the user interface, which uses fonts and simple shapes that resemble symbols frequently used in Atari games. Like so many indie games today, it also means the game renders everything with classic pixel art. This is where it gets a little harder to tell what’s a stylistic choice and what simply doesn’t measure up to the competition in an industry filled with great-looking pixel art revivals. The game leans into solid blocks of color and sharp, rough edges. In some cases, this looks like a way of trying to bring Atari-style visuals forward. In others, it just seems like the art’s a little sloppy. Referencing the Atari age’s visuals while still trying to impress artistically is a fine line. Compare these screenshots:

This fast travel menu’s two fonts feel very familiar to me even in my fairly limited 2600 experience.The areas are each represented with simple shape renderings in single, solid colors. The Atari influence is obvious here. Now for some gameplay:

Things like the environment and the player use those simple shapes and colors only for the enemies to have more detailed shading and a clashing palette. The contrast between the walls and the point where the eyeball enemies stick to it is particularly noticeable.

It might seem a little uncharitable of me to assume sloppy execution from these indie devs, but unfortunately, it wouldn’t be out of place compared to the rest of the game. It’s true that I like quite a few of the ideas on display in this game. Its more self-referential aspects are interesting, and the game seeks to craft a more deliberate and slow-paced combat style than most platformers have these days. However, Ilex’s execution on all of these aspects is uneven at best and untested at worst. I’ll get it out of the way and say there were multiple bugs that ended up being constant parts of the game, whether it be something as simple as the animation for landing from a long fall playing after I’d already jumped again or something as baffling as an enemy that would consistently walk through walls and fall through the screen. Observe:

There were also a fair number of typos, grammar mistakes, and outright weird syntax. Sometimes I think I could make a killing proofreading for indie studios.

“A insane blow?” Even if they used the right article, describing it as an “insane blow” seems like oddly casual phrasing for the game’s UI. That’s probably more than enough English Literature degree holder complaints, though. Point is, the game feels a little sloppy.

It extends to the gameplay and story in ways that I don’t think anyone can handwave as technical errors or artistic tribute. I understand the combat is supposed to be slow and strategic, but the problem is that it feels stiff. Jumping has this heavy, inflexible sense of momentum to it. Attacks are slow to start and end, feeling more committal than they should. The quick dash is invincible and much more responsive than everything else in the game, making it feel like an overpowered aspect of the combat that actively goes against what the rest of the system is trying to achieve. The throwing sickles attached to the hammer moveset are so huge that they usually hit a wall before they can hit an enemy. The sword and shield parry just arbitrarily doesn’t activate on certain melee attacks. The game limits your healing and has you replenish at checkpoints like a soulslike, but you can nearly always teleport back to checkpoints and enemies hardly damage you anyways. They definitely had some ideas here, but it absolutely needed more time and testing.

The story is in a similar boat. I was interested when characters started talking about things like “the cycle” and memory. There’s a lot of philosophical-style talk going on that ultimately feels like it has to do with why we constantly retell and replay these adventures. Unfortunately, it goes - as far as I can tell - pretty much nowhere. Even by killing every dragon and getting every item from Kosmonauto for doing it, which would appear to be the requirement for getting the true ending, I got an ending that felt like the game just patting me on the back and rolling the credits. I’m all for deep talk about why we make and play games, but it has to go somewhere. What is Ilex’s verdict here? Do they have one? Is the ending just a cop-out or is it meant to be open-ended so we can just decide what it means for ourselves? I’ll admit, as much as I like many aspects of postmodernism, unsatisfying endings seem a hallmark of the movement.

All told, Adventure of Samsara has some good ideas, but the execution isn’t up to snuff. It was a slow game which didn’t really impress me with map design, combat, or its story. I honestly went into it expecting a bit of a hidden gem, something that was unfairly obscured behind Silksong’s shadow. I wish I could be enthusiastically recommending that everyone try out this awesome game that got dealt a bad hand. Releasing at the same time as Silksong sure didn’t do it any favors, but I can’t honestly say this game was destined for success even in a less eventful season. For a game with a backstory almost as long as Silksong’s, it doesn’t even have a fraction of that game’s polish and gameplay feel. Even without the high watermark of Silksong to compare it to, it doesn’t impress. Just goes to show that a real indie success is a rarity among the sea of devs trying to make their mark. Steam gets tons of new games every day that never go anywhere. I just think this game could have gone somewhere, and frankly, Adventure deserved to go somewhere.

So many games have health that most players don’t think twice about it. Get hit enough that it drops to zero, and you die. Try not to do that. Message received. The more I think about it, though, strategy in all kinds of games is increasingly concerned with resource management. Basic attacks and movement which you can do on demand have their limits - beyond that, it’s all about what you spend, how you get it, and when to spend it. This holds true from action games to platformers to RPGs and everything in between. The resources may differ, but there’s one that’s almost ubiquitous to these games - health. Though most think about health as more of a win condition than anything else, games have been treating it just like your other resources - as something to be dynamically managed and spent - for a long time.

Health, as the last thing between victory and defeat, is always among your most important resources. Thus, the most common way for games to play with this resource is in how you get it back. For action genres in particular, this is a crucial way for the game to dictate the tempo of play by conditioning a certain response to taking damage. Games like the Monster Hunter series and those in the “soulslike” tradition are popular for their punishing difficulty. One way they achieve this is by limiting how often the player can heal, only allowing them to replenish their healing items by searching for resources to make more or resting at a checkpoint. Healing itself also takes some time, meaning players have to be careful when they choose to do it lest it leave them vulnerable. With hard limits on second chances and plenty of risk to taking them, players are more inclined to play carefully. The rewarding feeling of victory in these games comes from observing the attack patterns of enemies and bosses carefully and learning how to take on every challenge with as few mistakes as possible. Limited healing provides enough breathing room to make this process fun, but not enough to brute-force through your problems before you can appreciate what’s fun about them.

On the opposite side of the spectrum are fast-paced action games. These titles are all about staying in the fight non-stop, and their methods of healing are a huge component of that rhythm. The first example to point to is Doom (2016). This game introduced the Glory Kill system, where enemies on low health would stagger for melee takedowns that drop health. The lower your own health, the more a Glory Kill would drop for you. Though most arenas in this game have health packs here and there in case you need to lick your wounds, this system encouraged players to respond to mistakes by simply fighting back even harder. The sequel, Doom Eternal, upped the ante by adding more ways for your weapons and equipment to give you health and armor, and Doom: The Dark Ages streamlined these takedowns to interrupt the action less often. Though death can come in just a few hits in these games, using combat to stay in control of your own health can make you feel indestructible with efficient play. For example:

Remove head, get health. Simple and satisfying.

Other action games do similar things to keep you in the fight that give them their own flair. The Devil May Cry series allows you to heal and power up by activating Devil Trigger. The gauge fills by attacking or even taunting enemies, rewarding stylish play. Classic platformers like Mega Man and Metroid drop health from defeated enemies on a random basis, encouraging players to keep moving forward without providing enough consistency that they can be careless. In some games such as Hollow Knight: Silksong and Marvel’s Spider-Man, attacking fuels a resource which can be spent either to heal or to execute more powerful attacks. This creates an interesting tension between saving resources to cover your mistakes and spending them to end fights faster and more easily. Factors such as the types of attacks you can spend for and other aspects of healing, such as when you can do it and how long it takes, further tip the scales.

Spending a secondary resource to attack instead of healing can be risky enough, but some games go even further by letting you directly spend your health for other actions. This can create some really cool feelings: going for an all-or-nothing gambit, riding that knife edge between victory and defeat, etc. However, step one of making this system work is in making the sacrifice feel worthwhile. Most players are understandably averse to bringing themselves to death’s door, so the risk/reward can be difficult to balance. Make dumping health too powerful and reckless, thoughtless aggression may prevail over more careful use. Make it too weak and most will simply prefer to keep the health unless they’re in such a good position that the benefits of spending it hardly matter. One interesting example of this is in rocket-jumping, a staple of fast-paced shooters popularized by Quake. Players can shoot themselves with a rocket to use the explosive force for higher jumps or bursts of speed. In Quake especially, this tradeoff can be valuable to help players reach power-ups before their enemies can collect them, but it’s never without risk.

Fighting games provide many good examples of spending health. Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising alone has two characters that can spend health with vastly opposite balancing. Siegfried’s unique action, Manigance, allows him to sacrifice a small portion of his health for stacking damage bonuses on all attacks. It goes from a 10% boost to a 20% boost on second usage and then 50% on third usage. Because Manigance can be used to end his combos and put him in a position to keep up offense on his opponent, there’s rarely any reason not to use it at least once or twice. The boost’s duration goes from a generous 40 seconds at first level down to six and a half at third level. The shorter the boost, the less chance you’ll be able to capitalize on it, further encouraging him to sacrifice as little health as possible to provide a long-lasting, consistent boost to his already-high damage. The problem with Manigance isn’t that it’s bad, but that it plays it too safe. Such little health is on the line for a useful, but fairly bland benefit that the excitement of spending it isn’t really there.

In contrast, Avatar Belial is a whole character themed around spending his own health for overwhelming power. He can burn health to boost any of his specials and cancel directly into two tricky followups from any attack on hit or block. Going all-out provides tons of ways to mix opponents up and punish them with powerful combos, but the constant health expenditure adds up quickly. Though Avatar Belial has all the hallmarks of a strong character, the tables can turn on him absurdly quickly if his opponent can find just one decent opening. Avatar Belial’s health spending has the opposite problem of Siegfried’s in that the benefits are quite unique and powerful, but the unavoidable drawback is so severe that it makes him too risky to play. This is much closer to the exciting kind of risk-taking which makes spending health fun, but is so dangerous as to make Avatar Belial a hard character to justify using at more serious levels of play.

One thing that’s also worth noting about these two characters is that they have very different amounts of health to spend. Siegfried has 17,000 health - tied for the second-highest value among the roster - and Avatar Belial has 14,000 - the lowest amount possible, tied with only one other character. Indeed, all possible uses of health eventually come down to how much of it the player can spend to begin with. In fact, this is often the main way in which health must be managed. We can once again look to fighting games for an iconic example. The Street Fighter series’ Akuma is framed as a dark counterpart to Ryu. Like Ryu, his moveset is a well-rounded suite of everything the player might need, but cranked up to eleven. He’s overall faster, stronger, and more versatile than Ryu in most appearances, but with one consistent caveat: lower health. Even in Street Fighter 6, where the vast majority of characters have the exact same health, he is currently the only character to have less than the standard amount. Though he’s not actively draining his own life for benefits, he still has to play without as much wiggle room as other characters.

On the opposite end of the scale is Zangief, a burly Russian wrestler who usually has the most health in any given Street Fighter he appears in. Though he’s slow and inflexible outside of very close range, he can afford to make more mistakes while he works his way closer to his opponent. He even has attacks that are “armored,” which is to say that he can get hit while he’s using them without flinching. He’ll still take the damage, but with all of his health, he can afford to do it. With massive damage output at his disposal once he gets close, he’s likely to even out all the damage he took working his way in with just a few interactions.

What’s happening here is that taking damage is essentially being thought of as a way to spend health. After all, a win with full health and a win with one last, magic pixel of health left count the same at the end of the day; might as well use it! Designing health around the expectation that it will be lost is most common in team-based games and RPGs. These games often include “tank” characters designed to draw the majority of their enemies’ offense to them and “support” characters who help their team stay alive. Tanks always have more health than characters in any other role, often by a factor of two or even three. Though tanks tend to have shields, damage reduction, or other ways to actively block or redirect damage, the fundamental way they accomplish their task is by occupying the front line and just being so tough that they probably won’t go down without a concerted effort. In RPGs or cooperative games, they may even accomplish this with abilities that directly force enemies into attacking them instead of their allies - especially helpful in games where players can’t just avoid attacks. Some tanks even eschew actual shields in favor of constantly loading themselves up with temporary bonus health.

In short, health is a lot more interesting than it seems at first glance. On the surface, it’s just the line between victory and defeat, but decades of game design have made it something much more than that. In fact, how health management works in any given game is often crucial to how it feels to play. The moment-to-moment action and long-term strategy are both constantly shaped by this staple win condition. It’s the bedrock of how long fights can last, how many mistakes players can make, and what types of risks they can take. If you’re designing a game, know that health touches on every aspect so thoroughly that it absolutely cannot be an afterthought in the design process. If you’re just playing games with health bars, think about the ways you make use of it all, whether simple or complex. It could help you improve at and appreciate the game all the more.