Leon's Microblog – October 2023

Germ (https://www.shortboxcomicsfair.com/shop/p/germ-by-liz-chee) – Fascinatingly structured psychological horror short with simple but very effective imagery and symbolism.

Pearl Hunting (https://www.shortboxcomicsfair.com/shop/p/pearl-hunting-by-hana-chatani) – A very slow-burning story that does manage to build up to a satisfying, ironic conclusion. A solid work from a comics veteran.

Pinball Wizard (https://www.shortboxcomicsfair.com/shop/p/pinball-wizard-by-pavina) – A wacky and quite expressive dark comedy with some legitimately hilarious moments. The hyper-anxious, constantly hyperventilating protagonist is a great foil for the schemers all around her.

Marrow (https://www.shortboxcomicsfair.com/shop/p/marrow-by-sloane-hong) – Cute little body-horror scenario. The ending is maybe a little too dramatic for its own good, but the main characters are pretty likeable and keep the story warm.

Morana Until Death (https://www.shortboxcomicsfair.com/shop/p/morana-until-death-by-les-piggies-kari-lynch-bailie-rosenlund) – Interestingly tense horror vignette… Despite an outwardly simple story, tries hard not to be obvious or to play familiar tropes, keeping the reader as distrusting as the protagonist to the very end.

Miss Mouse and the Crumbling Catacombs (https://www.shortboxcomicsfair.com/shop/p/miss-mouse-and-the-crumbling-catacombs-by-rachel-cherry) – Rather standard 25-page fantasy story held up by above-average dialogue. Artwork is kind of sketchy, but composition and posing is good.

Galatean Girlfriend (https://www.shortboxcomicsfair.com/shop/p/galatean-girlfriend-by-imogen-mangle) – Nice little bad-relationship horror story that plays with the physicality of the two main characters a lot.

The characters in this game are so charismatic

They quickly drop a solid rec for some PC98 game called Flame Zapper Kotsujin, so I went and booted it up… Damn, how come I've heard of ChoRenSha but not this??

What the Metroidvania elements add to Void Stranger function like that – they change the meaning and relevance of individual puzzles, encouraging the player to look "beyond" them and start seeing them as just paths to a goal, against the traditions of the genre.

The addition of the map screen isn't just to contextualise the levels and add a sense of place and progression – it also wordlessly reveals to the player ideas like "you can just skip specific levels" and "this level opens a shortcut you can use after a Game Over".

I'm reminded, funnily enough, of Super Mario Bros. 3, and how its one "big thing" (which it probably didn't invent but did popularise) was taking the arcade-like platformer and adding an RPG-like map screen with "inventory" and multiple paths, becoming an "adventure-platformer".

More saliently: having a certain density of missable interactions or secrets, or hidden alternative ways to manipulate the game, is really not the domain of any one title, but something any game could potentially aspire to.

OK, sure, there are some very specific Undertale-like ways the different routes' plots "make sense" that even I would point out, but other stuff like the way NPCs work, the NPCs' personalities, and how "runs" work, reminds me a lot more of a Souls-like game or a dungeon RPG.

I will say… maybe the most shocking thing about ZeroRanger is how much of Void Stranger you CAN'T see in it. Like, there are dozens of obvious surface-level features, but the two games' philosophies about narrative design, tone, genre, and player agency are still worlds apart.

3) The understated pun that the mechas are "ZeroRangers" because they are melee-only (i.e. "zero range") is just barely tolerable enough that I can live with it. *I am informed via Blackberry (in keeping with the fruit theme) that this isn't really a compliment at all* Well,

OK, time to say something good about this game. 1) I like that the main shot manages to still be the optimal choice for large parts of the later stages. 2) The little "beginner QOL" things, like not having terrain damage, or letting you survive collisions with enemies, do add up.

ZeroRanger's later stages' music uses that one famously cheesy MIDI synth choir sample that's common in mid-00's PC shmups such as Genetos. Unfortunately, hearing it simply makes me wish I was playing Genetos instead.

ZeroRanger review: ☑️Gradius references ☑R-Type references ☑️Radiant Silvergun references ☑️Gunstar Heroes references ☑RayForce references ☑Recca references ☑Xevious references ☑Undertale references 🔳Darius references RESULT: 1/10

God I HAAAAAAATE being exactly the target audience for this game

This absolutely smells like the kind of shmup where you have to fly into the core of a boss immediately after you destroy it to warp to a secret area, just like in Nemesis 2 for MSX… or something equivalent.

Void Stranger also has a tiny fraction of the number of cause-and-effect puzzles of a La Mulana 1 or 2. You know what a more fitting comparison would be? Cave Story's Sacred Grounds. And even then, Void Stranger's puzzles are much clearer than what that game asked for.

Void Stranger's cause-and-effect puzzles are dramatically more tamed in comparison: the objects that are capable of hidden or edge-case manipulation are limited in number and (usually) visually obvious. Only one or two true "leaps of faith" are ever really asked of you.

The latter category is the true meat of La Mulana: basically every memorably difficult puzzle involves an obscured or invisible cause-and-effect. The game teaches you to scrutinise everything, to consider that any inert object in any room could be revealed as manipulable somehow.

La Mulana puzzles to me fall in two overlapping categories: code puzzles (gather the code, then input it) and cause-and-effect puzzles, where the puzzle is realising, or being told, a relationship between disconnected objects, or an edge case in how an object can be manipulated.

……OK, look, let's extract the elephant from the room here: I think everyone saying Void Stranger is "like La Mulana" is doing it a significant disservice, even though it has plenty of obvious references. Its puzzle design is significantly different and more "regular" than that.

Music opinion: I remain unchanged that the first area's music is the floating cream of the crop, but the 6-minute-long(!) dark jazz music for area six is a decently close second place. Everything else is far below those two.

OK everyone, I got the sixth and most conclusive-feeling ending. Hmm……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………good videogame.

…………FIFTH ENDING………… ……I can't freaking believe the game really did make you the exact same stuff all over again except with basically one thing different……

FORTUNATELY, this time I actually wrote down solves for an extremely large amount of rooms using a series of arcane diagrams, so the sting isn't too harsh. Still… current motivation to continue is pretty close to rock bottom.

By the way… I ACCEPT ALL CHALLENGERS (for specifically Pochi & Nyaa, the exact-opposite-of-a-hit 2003 falling block game by Puyo Puyo designer Moo Niitani, and no other game) !!

This game (Void Stranger) has a LOT of very obvious 90s Nintendo visual references, but unlike most such games, it has enough pride and maturity to keep them barely below the line of "cloying". It doesn't make you see them or wait for your applause.

Putting it out here for all to see: if it turns out there's a puzzle where the solution hinges, pun intended, on the fact that opening a chest causes you to face south without moving, I'm gonna be ready for it.

Reaching the point where I'm considering just brute-force-entering things into the name entry screen to see if something will happen : (

AWOOOOO HAD A BRILLIANT IDEA FOR A SOLUTION AND TRIED IT AND IT DIDN'T FRICKING WORK -- Leon ._. changed their mood to RANCOROUS

Volcanically sighting as I finally give up all pretense of dignity and open the Wikipedia page for "Dante's Inferno" in search of ideas

Feeling very disheartened right now… a huge number of my leads have turned out to not have enough information, or just become seeming dead ends (sometimes literally Game Overs). That said, I'm still liking the game, and am very astonished it isn't WAY more popular than it is.

Having 72 grasshoppers and still refusing to burn one unnecessarily is this game's 99 Megalixers.

When you retweet yourself

I dunno, I think there's just something inherently dorky about Ars Goetia, even more so than, say, Norse mythology in La Mulana 2 et al. At least mythology has some implicit, often tragic narrative to play off of, whereas Ars Goetia is mostly just a bunch of names and vibes.

THIRD ending found… I also found a fourth """ending""" which doesn't have credits but does return you to the "name entry screen" when you get it, but it's probably just an Easter egg (←clueless)

I managed to get another, different ending!!……… but… it seems The True Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove begins here…

That being said… I will add that the sheer amount of unique one-off cutscene music (along with other aspects of the cutscenes) makes me wonder what on Earth this $10 game's budget really was (compliment).

Music opinions… First area's theme is breathtakingly good, about as great at instilling reverence and awe as both La Mulanas or both Deltarune chapters. However, the subsequent area themes only range from mildly interesting to slightly annoying.

The one big feeling I'm taking away from the story is that, despite all its surprisingly varied cutscenes, it would basically be garbage if the protagonist was a man. "Leon, I notice that sentence doesn't actually state that it isn't garbage" OK, look right here, YOU,

Adding to the problem (insofar as I can call it that) is that the powerups are extremely inconsistent at how well they make past puzzles easier. In particular, by far the most tedious puzzle type (switches) is usually mostly unaffected by the powerups.

I mean, am I really supposed to just screen-record every solution as I make it, and punch it back in every time?? This goes a bit above and beyond typical puzzle game notetaking.

Really big pain point identified: for a game with a decent amount of backtracking and returning to the start, having to constantly re-solve the late-game rooms is extremely tedious. Like, some of the rooms' solutions are like 40 moves deep, or otherwise extremely dense.

Rapidly developing a new and never-before-seen game design theory that difficult Metroidvanias like this and La Mulana are "hurt/comfort fic", instantly incinerating all my intellectual credibility.

A bone has been thrown in my direction.

I kind of hate to knock a game that does so much that I like, but the individual room puzzle difficulty is SOOOO all over the place. It feels almost random how long any individual room will take to beat, even long after the normal route's areas.

It is a little funny that this heavily references the classic Zelda animation of fairies restoring you to full health, but because the protagonist is so down-on-their-luck, they have to resort to using grasshoppers instead.

Well, time for some more Void Stranger. *opens Paint Dot Net and starts dragging screenshot after screenshot into it*

Found a dungeon area with the ghost from Bubble Bobble. (Thought I was going to say "The ghost from Spelunky"? Hahaha… Make your next move with a scant more hesitation, I think.)

Examining the game's opening a bit more… I do like that the way you choose between the permadeath "difficulty" and the easy "difficulty" (they're not really that, but bear with me) is to simply die to select the latter.

The boss fights are reminding me a lot of the original "MSX" La Mulana… mainly because of how step-by-step the animations are, and, in contrast, how elaborate the sprites are.

I like how, after you get to each of the Shovel Knight-esque dream cutscenes, the game unceremoniously saves and quits, subtly inviting you to end the session there and play again tomorrow. Feels like a very "mindful" thing you'd normally see in a life-sim, or Sword & Sworcery.

WE HAVE. LIFDOFF