Some of these (Goobies, Keeper’s Toll) were “meh” while the others (Gacha Fever, Scarlet Tower, Cozy Space Survivors) ranged from baffling to awful.

Goobies
(Höganäs Spel, 2023)

A small bullet heaven with a great look but not much else.

So I actually think this would be a really good game to introduce kids to the genre — there’s no violence, just inky blobs, and the simplicity and smallness that made it boring for me is actually a good thing to not overwhelm someone new to this kind of strategy.

Buuuut for me it was just too uninteresting. Which sucks, as I wanted to like it — I loved the look, and liked how it played and the choice to have kind of discrete levels and such. There was enough good about it that I’ll probably keep my eye on the sequel (though they seem to be going in a Megabonk over-the-shoulder camera direction, which I don’t really like; I’m a top-down person). But it just wasn’t complex enough for me. Simple aesthetic is great; simple strategy not so much.

Also, weirdly, it made me motion sick, which was another reason I stopped playing (more 3D for no reason!). The movement patterns of the bouncy guy and wobbly guys really bothered me, and it was actually kind of odd, since I don’t think there was camera shake involved, I think it was just messing with my eye to have the PC moving around the centerpoint of the screen so much. I wish there’d been an option to turn protag movement off.

Scarlet Tower
(Pyxeralia, 2024)

I have never have so little idea wtf was happening in a game.

This is theoretically a bullet heaven. You open the game and there’s no intro, no explanations, nothing, you’re just catapulted into this series of menus with increasingly elaborate skilltrees some of which already have points applied and no explanation for anything. There’s not even normal stats, there’s Faith, Occult, and something else I don’t remember, and those cover random arrays of normal stats, like 6 each. All the skill trees and menus require different currency to interact with — there’s at least 4 difference currencies — and no tooltips, quest list, or tutorial.

So eventually I just started a game to see what would happen, and you get what looks like a tutorial screen, but reading it is so unhelpful that it actually makes things more confusing.

But that’s the entire tutorial, so off we go!

I wish I could say it’s basic VS gameplay, but there’s pickups that don’t clearly do anything (and no tooltips, so who knows!), I keep getting messages that I’d completed quests I didn’t know I was on (a personal favorite was “You’ve found the Egg for the Alchemists!” ok buddy sure), and the map was full of enormous trees both enemies and I would get stuck in. I had summons that were identical to enemies that I kept thinking were attacking me, and every now and then I’d just take random damage even though I was standing alone in a clearing. I had two runs end because my character just suddenly exploded for no reason; in one case the postgame screen said “Victory!” even though I’d apparently spontaneously combusted. There’s also apparently a gacha-style equipment system in play, because sure there is, which I didn’t have the wherewithal to interact with.

The Steam forums are full of threads of people going, “Hey would you guys consider explaining what the fuck is going on at the beginning?”, the answer to which is apparently “lolno.”

I did know going in to this that the reviews were not great, but I nonetheless wasn’t prepared for just how bizarre the experience was. I can’t imagine opening this having not played a VSlike before. Surreal.

Also… why is the game called ‘Scarlet Tower’? What is the Scarlet Tower? Where is it? What does it have to do with anything? Why are any of us here?

Cozy Space Survivors
(simonschreibt, 2024)

This game was so low-effort I would have refunded it if I hadn’t gotten it in a bundle. I suspected as much, considering “Cozy Survivors” is a confluence of buzzwords that screams “hey, I bet this will make money”, but I was unprepared both for how little actual content there was — one ten-minute map you’re expected to play repeatedly, no HUD or pause menu, no weapon upgrades, no quest tracker — and I was extremely unprepared for… I can only describe it as baby talk? Like, the whole game is written in baby talk. Like “Bring the moo-moos to earthy” is an actual quest. Thought weirdly, there are moo-moos instead of cows but sheep are just sheep, so it was even lazy about committing to whatever the heck that’s all about.

There’s a lot to criticize about “cozy” as a buzzword and one day I’ll write an essay about it, but one of the things that really bothers me is just how condescending and cynical devs are about the “cozy” audience — an audience that is EXTREMELY gendered — and this seems like such a great example of that to me. Like, if I bought this because the idea of a “cozy” VS game actually actually appealed to me,* I would find this genuinely insulting. Is this how the dev conceptualizes their audience, as morons who want to be spoken to like babies? Who are content to shell out money for a game with no content that is missing basic features?

If this had been posted as freeware with a note it was made in a month for a game jam, I would have glossed over it being bad (I have a don’t-kick-newbies rule for reviews, and I don’t typically post negative reviews of student projects and such on Steam, even when I write them here, as it’s just unkind to discourage new devs, and most are free anyway, so no loss). But between this being offered as a commercial product, no caveats (even being bundled!), and its deeply weird (to put it mildly) tone, this left a bad taste in my mouth.

*(As opposed to my actual reasons, which boil down to “I wonder how bad all the VS clones can get, better buy them all to find out.”)

Gacha Fever
(Milkshake Games, 2024)

Why are so many of these games struggling so much with basic comprehensibility?

That thing I said in the Twilight Survivors review, about how “HEY LOOK TIDDIES” on Steam pages always instatranslates to “this game sucks and we, the dev, know it” in my head, really holds up here. All flash, baffling substance.

The game really banks on its aesthetic and it’s… okay? It’s Too Much, clearly on purpose, but also in a really bland and derivative way — compare to something like Juicy Realm, which has an over-the-top look that immediately distinguishes it. And, of course, like too many of the games trying to cash in on the Survivorlike boom, it throws away parseability in order to achieve its ‘look.’

But don’t worry, the game design choices are also bad. At first I thought there was no levelling, but there actually is, it just doesn’t apply until you clear a wave, at which point you’re catapulted to a huge menu with no explanations and allows to pick buffs — it took me a while to figure this out, but the number of buffs you get is based on how many times you levelled up. Your weapon selection seems (?) completely disvorced from your level, though, and is entirely based on your ability to collect currency, which is insane. This means bad RNG can prevent you from getting or levelling up weapons, and further, they make the baffling decision of not removing weapons from the roll selection when your inventory is full, meaning it’s possible and, if my experience is an indicator, even likely, to not be able to upgrade anything because you only roll weapons you aren’t using and can’t purchase. I’ve played a dozen or more of these now, and this is the first time I’ve seen anyone make this insane decision. And to top it all off the game is constantly shouting “ROLL FOR X” and “TIME TO PULL FOR Y” and not explaining what any of it means. Also they don’t quite seem to know what “gacha” means? Though that may be the inexplicable gameplay obscuring it.

I would call this “baffling from top to bottom” but I actually understand it perfectly in a “hop on trends and appeal to dudebros and gambling addicts = $$$$” sense. I know why it exists, I just don’t want to play it.

Keeper’s Toll
(Stingbot Games, 2024)

The aura of this game was that it stumbled backward into being a survivorslike. It seems like it was trying to be a combo of like, a diablo-ish wrpg and an action roguelike, only to realize that you kind of end up VS-adjacent at that point and then doing that, and the result was that it just didn’t feel like it was sure what it was doing.

Unlike in most VS games, characters don’t have a starting weapon and unique stats, but their own entire weapon and skill set. This means, first, that they end up wildly unbalanced and there’s not much you can do about it. It also means that some of them just… aren’t fun, and that’s that. It also means you can’t really combine skills in interesting ways.

While there is general metaprogression, it’s extremely limited, and most of your progression happens in individual skilltrees, which means it’s not particularly easy to bulk up the crappier characters and once you move from one character to the next you also have to loop back and start the maps over until that character catches up, which was annoying.

Additionally, the game only has left/right aiming, which is a really weird choice for a genre where enemies come at you from all sides.

The end result is just kind of boring and clunky. There are only 4 maps, so if you want to see the lategame bosses and such you end up having to grind the same maps over and over with each character and it’s just super uninteresting.

Apparently the game feels disjointed and unsure about what it wants to be because, well, it is. According to a comment from the dev, it “used to be actually closer to a class system based elden-ring inspired action-rpg lite […]  It ended up not being what we wanted but what we needed to do to make the game not a complete failure.” So, what’s here is the salvaged version of the project. Which, you know, it happens, but all the same isn’t particularly compelling as a buyer.