Dungeon Trawler

Games As a lapsed Doomer, I check the Cacowards  each year, go 'oh, that looks neat' at a few entries, download one of them, and get a few maps in before remembering I'm pretty sick of Doom  maps at this point. This year was slightly better; I saw When Them Demons Cry  in the runners-up and couldn't resist checking it out, and while I thought the very Higurashi -y opening and ending sequences (featuring The Junkyard From Higurashi and a very appropriate climax) sandwiched a somewhat generic middle (underground temple, Hell, demons, zzz: not much to do with Higurashi  beyond the Japanese aesthetic), it had me hungry for more. A finalist, In the Doghouse , quickly got too hard for me. A previous year's finalist, Doom 2 in City Only , suffered from the usual community project problem of every map being ridiculously huge. (Modern maps in general are too long for my tastes—I prefer shorter 3~10-minute maps in the style of the original duology—but community projects take ...

I'm going to be real: I spent most of the week playing Arc Raiders . Sorry.  Games I beat the hardest version of every stage currently available in Megabonk,  and I intend to stop there until more are released, despite having barely touched the roster and still being missing about a third of the unlocks. The trouble is that it's simply monotonous; it's better than Vampire Survivor  and most of its clones, but with Risk of Rain's  ability rotations replaced with a bunch of autofire weapons, the gameplay never really changes; you're just zooming around the map as your character kills things. It doesn't help that all the bosses feel the same: they draw from the same small pool of MMO raid-esque attacks, and, infuriatingly, all of the final bosses have the same annoying clear-pylons-to-progress gimmick. It doesn't help that the unlocks have been a slow drip: rather than unlocking items by meeting specific requirements or buying them from a store, you must do BOT...

Happy new year! Games Arisha to Kagami no Arisa popped up on my Twitter feed; it's a VN/spot-the-difference webgame in the vein of those spot-the-impostor games sweeping the market, with the big gimmicks being that (1) the impostor is a friendly mirror doppelganger who's pretending to be you; (2) you can only see your own appearance between  rounds, so it's more like remember-the-difference; and (3) missed differences persist between rounds, so it doubles as a(n increasingly creepy) dress-up game. There are multiple endings; unfortunately, these are a bit predictable, and you'll most likely get the least interesting one on your first playthrough, but it's an enjoyable time and the art is very good. If you can read Japanese, you should check this out. I underestimated Ninja Gaiden ; the last two stages are brutal, and I'm currently stuck on the final boss. What's the deal with dying to a boss sending you back to the start of the subact at best and the start ...