#spiritfall

[ayeforscotland]

Spiritfall has just released out of Early Access! This was my first job in the games industry, I've worked super hard on it and it's been an incredible experience. I started with the Marketing and Community management, and I ended up doing a whole bunch of the writing for the game.

If you're looking for a fun Hades-Like Platform Fighter with, in my opinion, really solid accessibility features then consider grabbing a copy. It is available on Steam with a 25% discount at the moment.

[hydragenuine]

little guy with hammer...

[itsbenedict]

Games I Played In 2024 And Whether Or Not I Thought They Were Good (Part 1/4)

1 - [2] - [3] - [4]

It's that time of year again! I wasted far too much time playing videogames, but at least I can tell you which of those videogames were worth playing and which ones weren't. Again!

(2020, 2021, 2022, 2023)

The Roottrees are Dead

It's... the comparisons that leapt to mind immediately were "like Her Story, but also like Return of the Obra Dinn", which it turns out were the two direct inspirations so that makes total sense. Your job is to piece together a huge, sprawling family tree, identifying the names, faces, relationships, and occupations of everyone therein. How? You've got a search engine you can enter search terms into, and bring up various webpages and documents detailing the lives of the Roottrees. As you fill in the blanks and make guesses, the game will confirm them in batches, Obra Dinn-style.

This core gameplay is already really engrossing, but along the way you'll pick up hints of a mystery underlying the Roottree family history, and figure out a bonus objective on top of just filling out the whole tree. It's extremely cool and unique, and The Fluteknees are Bread.

Bounty of One

This one was recommended to me by my kid brother. It's... fairly brainless? It's a roguelike where you're in an infinite empty desert, enemies come in from the sides of the screen to try and kill you, and if you shoot them you get powerups and money for upgrades. The character auto-aims at the nearest enemy while not moving, so all you have to worry about is dodging and selecting upgrades.

It's pretty fun! Lots of different toys with synergies that let you snowball in a few different directions. I find it great for like, putting on to give my hands something to do while I'm watching a show or listening to a podcast or something. Not too much else to say about it.

Misericorde

There's been a murder in a convent in 1400s England. The abbey's anchoress, the only person with an alibi (due to having been locked in a room her entire life), is tasked with covertly investigating by the Mother Superior, who believes the rest of the nuns are keeping secrets from her and covering things up.

She doesn't know the half of it.

Misericorde, currently unfinished, is chapter 1 of an episodic mystery VN, which is the only reason it's not my game of the year. It's got several strengths:

A great sense of atmosphere, with an extensive D&B-infused soundtrack that really gets across the protagonist's unease without being unpleasant to listen to.

Exceptional character designs, which manage to be distinctive and full of personality despite being in black and white and having every character be a nun wearing the exact same outfit the exact same way.

A dedication to historical accuracy, not flinching away from the realities and attitudes that would be present in a medieval English convent. Hedwig, our protagonist, is the stuffiest and most pedantic theology nerd of them all, and is constantly astonished by the irreverent-to-downright-debauched behavior of her "peers", largely forced into this life by circumstance. A really unique, harrowing, and sometimes hilarious perspective.

Despite this, impressively gay.

Good writing. Like good writing good writing. Not just structurally but on the prose level. Very important for a game that's 90% reading.

I'm not entirely sure how well the mystery aspect of it will shake out, since it's still in the setup phase and the whole thing isn't out yet, but all that aside, it's a joy to read anyway. Also Darcy is in it.

Pokemon Scarlet and Violet DLC

Yeah, I know. I shouldn't be rewarding Game Freak for their shitty business model and half-baked games. And you know what? You shouldn't either. These were bad.

Gameplay-wise... total nothingburgers. You know how Paldea was this ugly empty wasteland of airbrushed textures with no rewards for exploration, sprinkled with random pokémon spawns and trainer battles? They did another one of those. Two of those, kinda. The second one's Blueberry Academy map had a little more visual variety but ultimately was exactly as empty and unrewarding to explore as before. Zero-effort design as always.

The base game of SV had, I think, the best story a mainline pokémon game has ever had. They broke out the "dramatic legendary stuff", "fight an evil Team", and "do a Pokémon League journey" components into their own parallel things, and managed to make all of them more compelling than they've ever been.

The DLC... uh, doesn't, really. There's a couple fun new characters- Carmine and Kieran are entertainingly fucked-up- but Carmine gets sidelined almost immediately, and Kieran is the only thing the game has going for it storywise through the whole DLC. His story's kind of effective, but it can't carry the whole thing, and all the stuff about Ogerpon and Terapagos is underbaked and disjointed and anticlimactic. You're not really missing anything if you skip it. So skip it.

Cluefinders series

Did anyone else play these edutainment point-and-click adventure games as a kid? Sort of... Indiana Jones by way of Scooby-Doo? These were my jam back in the day, and I went back to them to see how they held up. And the answer is... uh, there's a surprising range of quality!

I ended up having way more to say about these than I thought I would, so here's a separate post about them. Overall, I don't know that I'd recommend any of them, unless you're an actual elementary schooler who needs to learn math and stuff.

And if you are- hey! You should not be reading my blog! This is not a website for children! I say swear words on here! Kind of a lot of them, actually! Your mom's gonna be mad at me, and neither of us want that!

Project Killdance

This was a... kind of cool tactics/action game? It's kind of Superhot but a deckbuilder, and that's... not really to its benefit. Copy-pasting my review from itch.io:

This is really polished and has some super cool moments, but I'm kind of hung up on... the core mechanic of it being at odds with the rest of the design. The tense action where you have to decide moment-by-moment how to not die that turn is great, and the action economy is a good abstraction for it... but ultimately, success or failure hinges almost entirely on Did You Have Enough Basic Moves In Hand. The overriding concern is always "is a bullet about to hit me?", and the answer is almost always "yes", and the solution is always "play a move"- which means, if you don't have one, all the rest of your planning doesn't matter, and you're dead.  Other deckbuilders have this core problem, of course, but they usually smooth over it with a health system that gives you a certain tolerance for failure. When it's an iterative system, building your deck properly you can lower the chance of being forced to take hits on your turn, and the outer game loop is about managing that risk. But... in a game like this, where a single failure means death, any significant random failure rate is a feel-bad. And the failure rate varies with the level design: the less cover, the more movement you need to be doing, but the incremental deckbuilder thing locks you into a certain proportion of offense to defense, forcing you to mulligan over and over to find viable hands. I do like the action economy aspect- keeping an eye on your AP and moves-in-hand to ensure you don't get stuck taking a breath at the wrong time is a good tactical challenge. The question is how to preserve that core challenge- making the most of limited and unpredictable options- without creating as many situations where all roads lead to dead. Maybe... separate decks for moves and attacks? Or the ability to slash enemy projectiles out of the air? More cover options in the level design? I'm not sure exactly what the right solution is, but I think you want something to cut down on "a big guy with a machine gun is immediately firing at you turn one and your opening hand doesn't let you move, RIP" moments. (Also- is there any significance to those Corrupted cards that sometimes show up in longer levels? I thought maybe relying on them gave you a bad ending, but I played through twice without using Corrupted cards the second time, and got the same outcome. Just a catchup mechanic for if you find yourself in a stalemate, or is there something else going on there?)

It's very short and manageable (and free), though- I think this is like, a prototype of something larger they're working on? Its length mean its flaws don't really get too annoying, and it's very stylish and fun when it works.

Pokémon Infinite Fusion

This was fantastic. This is the best Pokémon game, I think. The concept: You can take any two pokémon, and fuse them. Into one of two new fused pokémon, depending on which is the base and which is the head. It gets extremely wild extremely fast.

But more importantly, the game is very good. It's got so many QoL features! They've got HMs, but every HM in the game has a sidequest associated with it that earns you an item that substitutes for the HM- so you get the sort of teambuilding and moveset tradeoffs, but they're temporary, encouraging you to try out new stuff instead of locking you into the stuff that runs the HMs you need. And there's a proper speedup function, and there's these sidequests with really nice rewards in every town...

It's also hard to overstate how many custom fusion sprites there are. There's a huge community filling out a dex of the things, and more often than not there'll be a custom graphic for whichever unholy combo you come up with. The odds have presumably only risen over time, as the game's been continually updating since I played it. The stuff you can make is crazy cool.

My favorite is Honchvire. He is going to kill you to death.

Spiritfall

It's sort of... Hades meets Super Smash Bros. It's hard to come up with anything more to say than that, mechanically- that's exactly what it is. The combat system is a Smash-style platform fighter, but it's a roguelike where you acquire synergistic boons from different gods over the course of the run, and unlock different weapons with different movesets (and slight upgrades to said weapons) through the metaprogression.

And it works! If that concept sounds fun to you, then hey: it is! It's gorgeously animated, well-balanced, and has lots of optional challenges. It didn't really need to innovate- it smashed two known formulas for success together, executed with care and polish, and bam, the result is successful. Fun Video Game.

(Story's kinda nothing- a few months later, I literally can't remember if it had one. Some vague thing about souls and a sealed blight and you have to save the world or something? Didn't seem to be trying too hard, and didn't really need to.)

-

I got, um... 23 more games on this list, so I'll talk about the rest later.

1 - [2] - [3] - [4]

[chibiveneficus]

shout out to Sharbora for keeping my dash-into-all-the-projectiles-ass alive long enough to beat back the Blight!! I love you

[knightowl-studios]

Kasai doodles from the last few days, trying to get the hang of his wild facial expressions. He has his serious moments, but his usual style is real balls-to-the-wall, which doesn't come as naturally to me haha.

[citytrialost]

random game superlatives for 2023

I just wanted a space to talk about the games that were special to me. I'll be updating it now and then, and even when finished will not be removing my Geocities Under Construction gifs.

game of the year - Pizza Tower, and it's not even close. I can't believe we got just a blisteringly fast platformer with this level of animation and such an incredible soundtrack. It is one of the best handling platformers I've ever played and it just lends itself to wanting to master the gameplay like nothing else.

mod of the year - Archipelago! Archipelago hosts cross-game randomizers for you and your friends. Want to play Pokemon Emerald while your friend plays Kingdom Hearts 2? Great! Instead of a gym badge, Norman gives Donald the ability to shoot lightning out of his ass (I don't play KH2) while your Surf HM is in some random treasure chest in their game. It really is incredible being able to play your favorite single player games with the goal of helping your friends progress. The game list is still growing, too, so definitely worth keeping tabs on.

weird game that heals my soul in the way that only something like Katamari could manage of the year - HUMANITY. Not a surprise coming from the devs of Tetris Effect, HUMANITY is just a fun, surreal experience where you play a shiba that tries to guide a crowd of people that at best behave like liquid and have a propensity for running off cliffs. I haven't finished the game yet, but it's been a beautiful experience that I've been saving for whenever life gets too stressful.

genre twist of the year - Your Only Move is Hustle (FKA YOMI Hustle). A turn-based fighting game experience that emulates fighting games so well I still panic at the exact same spots in the neutral whether it is YOMI or a traditional fighter. It's a time consuming and stressful experience, but still very rewarding when you have a good friend to play with. Also a decent Discord scene from what I hear. Also fuck it, YOMI gets fighting game of the year.

Spiritfall gets honorable mention here as a platform fighter roguelike. Honestly feels like a decent blend of floaty platform fighting and Hades. A lot of fun, and the dev team have been both openly communicating and updating the game frequently.

best character of the year - AKI (Street Fighter 6). Fighting games have such little room to add personality, but Capcom stepped their game up with SF6. AKI is just as weird and quirky as FANG (SFV), but a lot more sadistic. The added quirk of idolizing FANG goes a long way to giving her some fun flavor. I'm already biased towards characters with a poison archetype, but AKI is just fun in a "this character is delusional beyond saving" sort of way.

best game released from early access of the year - 30XX. It is a great roguelike that builds on 20XX in just about every way possible. It's improved graphically, in terms of gameplay, challenge, overall design. If 20XX asks "what if Mega Man was a roguelike?" then 30XX confidently tells you "Mega Man works as a roguelike." Fun solo, way better with co-op.

best 7/10 of the year - Exoprimal. Saw this concept trending and I think it's a great way to highlight an overlooked title this year. Among huge Capcom news like SF6 and a newly announced Monster Hunter, "what if Dino Crisis but it's a co-op hero shooter with muddled PvPvE and PvP modes" really doesn't stand out. Maybe it would have as a budget title, given how much it popped off on Game Pass. Regardless, the game was a lot of fun. I finished it's campaign, did a few of the challenge maps, found characters and archetypes I liked, and even had the familiar/classic TF2 "our team has four snipers, would somebody like to play a different class" conundrum. I'm glad I spent as much time on it as I did, and I hope I feel motivated to give it another run while it's still active.

best return to form - Armored Core VI. I honestly never thought we'd get another one of these. Waited a decade, and after the runaway success of the Souls series I never thought I'd get a new one. Some things have changed, but from the first mission I felt like I was a kid with a PS2 playing Silent Line all over again. Honestly got emotional from the nostalgia. Still need to finish the game, but I waited eleven years to play it so the game can wait a few months for me to get through it.

game that refuses to die award - Grim Dawn. Normally this game has a fixed statue of Terraria in its place, but after a huge community patch and the reveal of an entire expansion one or two years after claiming the game was dead, Crate Entertainment have given a seven year old game something new to look forward to.

Runner up goes to Killer Instinct. So happy for the sickos in the community that wouldn't let it stay dead, and even a balance patch is more than I expected. Had so much fun getting to see it at Evo. Fuck Rash lmao

[pi-the-unbreakable]

First run I beat without going maximum survivability, super fun

[belghast]

AggroChat #470 - The Impact of Epoch

AggroChat #470 - The Impact of Epoch - This week we talk about the impact of Last Epoch on ARPG genre, Dwarven Realms, Spiritfall, Astral Ascent, Balatro, and FFVII Remake series.

Hey Folks we’re back! Sorry for the week off but we return with a full docket of topics.  We start off with some more discussion of Last Epoch and how everyone is still enjoying the game.  Bel dinged 100 for the first time and we talked a bit about buildcraft and approachability.  From there Bel talks about Dwarven Realms an ARPG of a sort that has gained traction this week amongst some of the…

[g4zdtechtv]

Cinematech's Trailer Park - Spiritfall (PC)

You got the spirit!

[linuxgamenews]

Herald of Nightfall Update: Unlock the Power of Zalvoon in Spiritfall

Spiritfall action roguelite game releases Herald of Nightfall update on Linux and Steam Deck via Proton with Windows PC. Thanks to Gentle Giant for their amazing dedication and hard work. Available now via Steam Early Access. If you're into fast-paced action, unexpected challenges, and unique characters, there's some exciting news in the world of Spiritfall. There's a brand-new update "Herald of Nightfall," and trust me, it's a game-changer. Meet Zalvoon - he's not your average raccoon. Imagine a raccoon, but with divine powers and an entire bag of tricks to make opponents second-guess their every move. That's Zalvoon. He's the latest spirit to be added to Spiritfall, and does he bring a fresh twist. When you partner up with this cunning creature, you can dodge attacks with ease. You also throw off enemies by creating a mirror image of yourself and rule the battlefield. And of course, as with every major upgrade, there's a bunch of unique new features to check out. Now, let's take a moment to dive into what makes Spiritfall stand out. It's a 2D Action Roguelike. So you can expect fast-paced action where every run is different, thanks to randomized challenges. Now, blend that with Platform Fighters. This means epic battles, incredible jumps, and a sense of flow that keeps you glued to the screen. The visuals? They're hand-drawn, and every frame looks like a work of art. And the music? Let's just say it sets the perfect mood.

Herald of Nightfall Update - Spiritfall

But what's the whole deal about? Well, you play as the Omenforged, a warrior with a mysterious past. There's this darkness, a blight, spreading far and wide, and the Divine Spirits believe you're the one to stop it. Sounds heavy, but don't worry, these spirits are on your side. Due to granting you amazing powers to help in your quest. As you embark on your Spiritfall adventure, you'll come across diverse terrains, each with its unique threats. So there's never a dull moment. The challenges are tough, but here's the twist: even if you face defeat, it's not the end. You'll find yourself at the Sanctum, a sort of hub. Here, you can use the resources you've gathered to enhance your abilities. Due to make you even stronger for the next round on on Linux and Steam Deck. And the journey won't be lonely. You'll meet intriguing characters. Some might be allies, offering assistance in various ways. Others? Well, not everyone's a friend in Spiritfall. But figuring out who's who is part of the thrill. In short, if you're looking for a fresh action roguelite game with a dash of strategy, mystery, and pure fun, Spiritfall. Its latest update is worth checking out. Just remember - every decision counts, and with Zalvoon by your side, the sky's the limit. Priced at $14.39 USD / £11.99 / 13,99€ with the 20% discount on Steam. Along with support for Spiritfall on Linux and Steam Deck (Verified) via Proton.

[skye-blacke]

Spiritfall gave me the best moment of gaming in 2023

[ayeforscotland]

GAMERS

Spiritfall is now out in Early Access and there's a 10% discount for launch week. This is my first game launch - very emotional.

[drakamut]

from ruins to rumbling

Had an awful night last night of tossing and turning and all, so instead of turning my brain inside out with more la-mulana today lets toss enemies around in spiritfall! ive been meaning to try out the new update more anyway stream will be at the normal time of 2pm est

[pcgamer]

Unlock the Secrets of Spiritfall - Now Available in Early Access! Gameplay

[chibiveneficus]

him and his laser lance that goes across the whole screen and deals 24 points of damage when I don't dash in time

[knightowl-studios]

"Ride now, ride now, ride! Ride for ruin and the world's ending!" -King Théoden; The Return of the King

One of nine once-celestial siblings, Kasai is a godlike spirit known as a Deike'tha who guards the land alongside his brethren. Personifying the element of fire and closely associated with the concept of inspiration, he makes his home in a volcanic "waste" that is anything but devoid of life.

While unconventional by both nature and preference and sporting an impish, cunning demeanor that's easy to judge, he's seen as a patron spirit of artists of all kinds (including less mainstream mediums like glassblowing and scrap art), and is held in heroic regard for his ability to almost magically turn the tide of a bleak situation with his presence alone. He feels fiercely and his characteristic toothy smirk burns on unquenchable conviction and passion. Like all Deike'tha, the denizens of his home are as close to him as family and he would happily sacrifice himself for their sake. To the people, he represents the heights and joy that imagination and resolve can bring us, in is purest form - without the arrogance and callousness that often accompanies rampant success.

In his service are the two spirits of spring and summer, and Kasai also possesses a unique connection to the legendary phoenix - whom he can call upon as needed and often serves as a symbol of hope, resurgence, and imminent victory.

His "twin" Deike'tha is Oshirik, the spirit of ice and brotherhood (or valor, depending on who you ask). Together they are colloquially known as "the two wolves", and are notable for being the most physically similar of all the Deike'tha twin pairs.

----

Kasai's core design concept has always been "hellhound" and has had consistent elements since its inception (such as sharp claws, heat-conductive spikes, long fangs, etc.), but the specifics have varied wildly. Roughly five or six years ago they began to settle, however, and eventually circled around consistently to what's shown here. His color scheme and certain elements of his design also now align with the Fire Sprites: small salamander-like busybodies of his own creation, who are also the primary denizens of his volcanic home. While I don't have a recent reference for them, their look has been finalized for a long time and I may make a new design sheet for them soon.

Though I've never gotten around to designing it, I also like to think he's got a set of armor specially forged from some kind of tungsten alloy! The material was chosen because of it's extremely high melting point; nothing else would be able to retain a form during the times he goes full tilt. (On a related note, he often likes to set himself on fire just for funsies.) Tungsten's alternate name, wolfram, also works as a nice pun :)