Inside: Crash Bandicoot: Back In Time, Eldritchvania, Mirrored Soul, Cuphead

Crash Bandicoot: Back In Time
Platformer

I haven’t reviewed any of the Crash Bandicoot games here, but they were some of my favorite games from my childhood. This is a fangame that emulates the formula quite well with 15 original levels, plus a Mario Maker-esque level editor for you to create your own. (And there’s none of the finicky vehicle segments that so plagued the third game.) If you like Crash, give this a try!

Eldritchvania
Metroidvania

This is La-Mulana if La-Mulana was fair. The puzzles are simpler, but that also means they’re less reliant on moon logic and one-off “I didn’t know I could do that” mechanics. You also start with the equivalent of the hand scanner, so you can jump straight into the ruins without needing to grind money for half an hour first. About the only thing I felt was unfair was the method to reveal the Armor of Protection, but that’s an optional item.

I felt the boss fights were probably the weakest point; your attack range is very limited and most bosses fly all over the place, so often the fight comes down to whether they end up in a convenient position and whether or not their randomly-generated projectiles box you in. I’m also not a fan of the art style and some of the hitboxes are wonky. But overall, this definitely feels like what La-Mulana advertised itself to be, and I had a good time.

Mirrored Soul
RPG

Found this in a list of creature collectors. It’s blatantly SMT-inspired, with you recruiting new monsters through negotiations in battle, but with a Pokemon-esque type system instead of every monster having unique resistances. It does a slightly interesting thing where monster types and attack types are separate, which simplifies what you have to keep track of a bit. But gameplay-wise, it’s about as shallow and empty as the SNES SMT games. Regular encounters can all be beaten by spamming regular attacks, and the strategy for boss fights tops out at “buff yourself then exploit their weakness”. I beat every boss on my first try. Despite that, the game has a really weird difficulty curve: The beginning, where you’re fighting with only one character, is a brick wall where you have to burn healing items every fight and still only survive by the skin of your teeth. Most SMT games give you a freebie demon after the negotiation tutorial, but this one decided to mix things up by having the tutorial demon laugh in your face if you ask for that, so instead you’re thrown straight into 2- or even 3-on-1 fights with no support. If you can’t figure out how to recruit one of the enemies on the first turn, you will die. But after that, the game is trivial, especially since unlike in SMT there’s no level requirement for recruitment so it’s entirely possible to recruit monsters who are way higher level than you. What is game balance?

Another odd choice is that they seemingly removed the random elements from monster negotiation; the same dialogue choices always produced the same result in my experience. This makes the game even more trivial, because once you figure out how to pacify a monster you can always do so with no risk. While removing randomness is less frustrating, it doesn’t interact well with the jRPG model of fighting the same monsters over and over again. Once you’ve solved a puzzle once, there’s no challenge in doing so again.

Storywise, the writing feels like if the absurdist comedy tone of SMT demon negotiations were carried into the overall tone of the game. Some people might enjoy that, but I just found it offputting and cringey. Everyone talks like comedy skit characters rather than actual people. They’re also dickish and vulgar for no reason, with such “jokes” as implying the villain is into bestiality based on absolutely nothing. Given there’s a crack about pro-gun-control politicians brainwashing children, I assume this was written by a conservative, and the out-of-nowhere accusations of sexual deviancy definitely track with that. At least there are no sexy lady monsters (in the demo at least).

Cuphead
Platformer / Shoot’em Up

A run-and-gun platformer animated in the style of old 50’s cartoons. The art style is the game’s most notable feature, and it does it incredibly well; everything is constantly moving, incredibly expressive, and gorgeously animated. They really captured the manic energy of the cartoons they’re homaging — all of the areas and enemies feel incredibly unique and have tons of personality. The game is also fiendishly difficult; people have compared its difficulty to Dark Souls, but having played it immediately after Dark Souls 2 I found it significantly easier, and much more on the side of “fun” than “frustrating”. A big part of this is that it does the same thing as Titan Souls: Every boss is in its own self-contained level, so if you fail you can dive right back in instead of having to slog through a several-minute-long boss run every time like in Dark Souls. I probably died about the same number of times as I did in Dark Souls, but I beat the whole game in a fraction of the time (about 11 hours). All of the bosses are incredibly detailed, fun, and unique, and I particularly liked that they had so many phases, as it kept the fights feeling dynamic as they progress, like the boss is a level unto itself. (It also alleviates the lack of a health bar, which other reviewers have complained about but I didn’t mind so much, since the visible progression in boss phases lets you guage your progress in a similar way.) The only one I didn’t really like was Rumor Honeybottoms, which is an opinion most players seem to share.

The elements other than the bosses are probably the game’s weakest parts, I’d say. There are a few more standard platforming levels, which are okay (and I particularly appreciated that bottomless pits weren’t instant kills), but they were honestly the hardest and least favorite parts for me. The hidden overworld coins were also a bit too hidden, as I had no idea they even existed until I looked up a guide.