Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £7.19
Where To Get It: Steam

Agent A is, some Simon puzzles and a couple of brute forcers aside, a fairly good puzzle game where I’ve never felt the need for a walkthrough (the urge, yes. But not the need.) So that’s quite a pleasant start, both to the review and the game itself. But hot-damn, it also has some moments in the game that make this review really hard to write, because I have to avoid spoilers that I really want to talk about.

Still, let’s give this a go. Agent A is, as you might have guessed from the subheader, a Myst style “Explore a place, solving puzzles as you go.” Except it’s not uninhabited, and it is, in fact, the home of the antagonist, enemy spy Ruby LaRouge, who has a reputation for “dismissing” enemy agents, a reputation you witness the truth of just a few hours before you trail her to her hideout.

And ohhh, she’s a good antagonist. Vaudevillainous as a James Bond villain, confident, sadistic… It feels like she’s taunting you a lot more than she actually is, because her presence lingers. So… What about the puzzles?

Well, the good news is that with most of them, the clues are there if you know where to look for them, and the item puzzles only take a little bit of wandering and futzing before you work them out. The colour ones appear to be colour blind friendly (As always, corrections on this from folks with colourblindness appreciated, but it does seem to be holding to the “Difference in both hue and light value” rule that works best), and there are only a few Simon style or brute force puzzles (of which the piano, in Chapter 1, is the worst to my mind. As soon as I saw a pianola roll, I audibly groaned.)

The controls are also pretty simple, although there’s some slowness to the movement that may not be appreciated: Left click does a thing, left drag moves a thing or drags a thing from inventory to be used, right click is “Go back a bit.” And that last one works because the tree of rooms and zones is kept relatively tight. But it should be noted that the perceptive player, who has their screenshot button handy, is rewarded (not just in puzzle clues, but… Other information), whereas the one not looking at everything they humanly can will have a much tougher time. It’s that sort of game. Heck, there are even secret things to do, ones I’ve definitely missed on this review playthrough.

Still… The game looks good. The music is good. The voice acting is solid, especially the antagonist who comprises the majority of the game, and its clarity works for it. It’s also an experience that feels longer than it is (in a good way), and has some replay value if you’re a perfectionist. But mostly, it does what it says on the tin, tightly, and with a little panache, and I can quite easily recommend this one for the puzzlers out there. But remember, Ruby is mean, and that is all the warning I can give you!

The Mad Welshman sometimes chafes under the need to hide spoilers, as many people do. Although… He does like hearing the shocked cries of “The hell?” as people get to certain plot points too… Decisions, decisions…

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £2.89
Where To Get It: Steam

Singers, and indeed musicians of all kinds, get groupies. People who fan over them so much that they want to be inappropriate with their adored musician. But in Kawaii Deathu Desu, the handsy fans have invaded perhaps the last stage they should have… The stage of various supernatural Idol Singers, starting with… Death herself.

Yes, Death is an Idol Singer now. And her fans appear to love being reaped.

More accurately, Kawaii Deathu Desu is an extremely twitchy version of One Finger Death Punch, in which you use the left and right mouse buttons or arrow keys to murderise fans, levelling up idols, unlocking idols and their costumes, using their special ability with either space or both arrow keys at once, a thing you can accidentally do if you’re having to really lash out (and you are. Often.) And, funnily enough, it’s that levelling up and unlocking that’s precisely the problem. But we’ll get back to that in a moment.

Aesthetically, it’s an interesting mix of cutesy pixels… And grim pixels, moving seamlessly between both. The Idols are cute, swaying, headbanging, playing to their hearts’ content… Until they strike, whereupon they become horrific weapons of destruction, their fans vanishing into ash, being sliced in two…

And then their ghosts pop up, and most of them have heart eyes, with hearts flashing down from their ruined bodies as they vanish. The music is good, reminiscent of various styles from kitschy J-Pop, to harder tracks, and everything is pretty clear, even down to showing the keyboard controls for the menu only when you’re using the keyboard. I enjoy that. Oh, and the developer splash screen UwU’s you. Shouldn’t forget that.

But gameplay wise, while the core, basic gameplay is mostly alright, the difficulty ramps up way more quickly than the souls you need to level up and buy things does. I have, through sheer bloody mindedness, managed to unlock the second level of China, and Emmy, the second character (A zombie rocker who summons a handsy graveyard of their own as their special), but it feels, right now, as if I have a longer road ahead of me than is enjoyable. While the earlier stages, themselves, still feel enjoyable.

So, overall, I’m conflicted about Kawaii Deathu Desu. I love its mix of cutesy and not-cute-at-all, and its core mechanic works just fine, but it gets twitchy as hell quickly for too little reward, generally speaking, with farming of the earlier levels a must to progress, and that… That annoys me. Maybe it’ll be changed. But right now, it hasn’t, so… Only get this if you’ve read all this, and still want to give it a go.

OwO, what’s this? The Mad Welshman appreciates cutesy death deities.

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £11.39
Where To Get It: Steam
Other Reviews: Early Access

Last time I looked at Wayward Souls, at least a year ago now, I felt it was a game of no in between. It was soft, until it was very hard. It was hellishly dark, except for when it was brightly lit. Overall, it felt oddly arbitrary. Well, it’s been over a year, how does it shape up on release?

Not… Really. A lot of my criticisms remain completely unchanged. The dark levels are super dark, and then… Oh look, lots of brightness. Bosses remain, on the whole, easier than the actual enemy encounters, incremental abilities remain… Frankly unimpressive, and the procedural level design… Well, it appears to be using some pretty loose rules, which make the difficulty even more variable than it usually would be.

Sometimes, you will find the exit right away. And, apart from gathering coins, maybe some items, there’s no real reason you can’t just take those stairs, with most characters. And there is always a teleporter near the exit. Teleporters, as an aside, apparently work in some sort of sequence, perhaps discovery? But it’s not “select a place to go”, it’s the somewhat tedious “Teleport, nope, teleport, nope” until you hit the “Yep” you were aiming to go.

Which, considering teleporters can generate right next to each other, not just in the example given… Well, that makes it more annoying. Speaking of that, there can be big ol’ branches in the dungeons which… Don’t lead anywhere, or at least, don’t lead anywhere that’s useful to you. Oh, a healing fountain. Very close to… Two healing wells. After two fights I’d aced. Huh.Well, er… Thanks for having no confidence in me, level generation?

Each class, as you’d expect, has their own quirks, their own abilities. The mage is… Well, to call her a glass cannon is somewhat disingenuous. More a glass .22, if anything, because everything in her arsenal is either reliant on mana, or spell inventory. Whee. The rogue, meanwhile, has the backstabbing you’d expect, and a dodge that passes through enemies that… Honestly, seems too fiddly to do just right for the gains. Oh dear, you overshot, just a little? Enemy turns around. Of the four I’ve unlocked so far, Warrior has been, of course, the safest, vanilla bet, and the one I’ve gotten farthest with, but…

Overall, I feel like the buy in, in terms of skills, how long you play to get abilities, what you find in levels… It’s frustration versus reward, and, for me at least, frustration wins. The first area is dark and drab, and it’s going to be a lot of what you see for the first few hours of the game, and… It wears.

The Mad Welshman appreciates an adventurer’s life is a hard one. But he mostly plays games to get away from that.

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Source: Review Copy
Price: £15 (Game has a free demo)
Where To Get It: Steam

Space is big… But it does seem like, whenever there’s a horde of aliens, mindless or otherwise, infesting somewhere, it’s somewhere we are. This time, in Blast Axis, it’s interdimensional, pink and purple beasties, who just seem… Well, aggressive overall.

At first, I have to admit I wasn’t enamoured of the 6-degrees-of-freedom shooty spaceship-in-a-space-station funtimes of Blast Axis. I enjoyed some things, like the bio-luminescent, odd entities that infested the station, and even found that bright green nightvision mode more tolerable than other games I’d seen it in (I’m just not the biggest fan of bright green night goggles overall, sad to say.) But the map, at first, confused me, and as I wandered through its first (zeroeth) level, I felt… Somewhat of a lack of cohesion. Wait, why is this tunnels and junk, tunnels and ju-

And then I hit the second level, and I started seeing a little bit of the scale. An avenue of buildings, big honkin’ walkways, doors… This used to be a place where a lot of people lived, and seemingly, in the grand tradition of such games, mined rocks, and presumably explored things where “Should” was probably a better start to their sentence than “Could.” And I also answered the question for myself I’d also asked in that first level. Where was the difficulty?

Well, let’s digress into limits. There are more than 10 monsters, but not more than 20. There are 6 weapons, 10 ammo types, a couple of firing modes… At first, it seems a bit limited. But those ammo types, those firing modes, do introduce interesting things, and, even on Minor Hazard (the game’s equivalent of “Easy”), it’s… It’s surprisingly easy to get blindsided, and from quite a ways away, by even a moderate group of gribbleys. Some fire swirly trails that hurt. Some fire lots of odd spikey icicle looking things that hurt, like a machine gun. But one of the first enemies you encounter is both the most interesting… And the one that blindsided me the worst.

They’re inoffensive, squid like things, with a single large eye, and glowing some blue/purple/pink shade like every other enemy (I actually like that, it makes for better visual distinction, and the glow makes them easier to spot in the dark too. The very common dark.) And, until they notice you, they really do seem inoffensive. Hell, in the first level, you rapidly chunk them before they do. But when they do notice you, and you don’t notice them… That’s when it hurts. Because they’re suddenly fast, attack with headbutts, and then vanish into some corner, until they spot you again. And again. And again. Projectiles, you can see. The mine like enemies… You can blow up, easily. But those little sods? They did more damage to me than even some of the more powerful enemies later on, overall.

So, from an unpromising beginning, Blast Axis started winning me over. Cyclopean machinery, long dead… The axis of the outer wheel, so far away… The aesthetic started to win me over. The music is filled with low key dread, the station and the machinery of the game feel worn (even the ship is clunky and battered, and I love that.) Aesthetically, it pleases, even the slightly clunky menu, and the oddly 70s style title.

This is not to say the game is without flaw. There is a dash boost, and it’s all too easy to trigger when you don’t want it to (the trigger is double tapping, but even “tap…tap” can sometimes trigger it, which is annoying when you’re being cautious.) The keys are rebindable, but I found it odd that Shift is the default “go down” key (normally it’s Ctrl.) And the map is… Hard to get used to, as it’s not your normal map, but a map centered around you. So using it can sometimes be a distinctly confusing and irritating experience.

Otherwise, though, this definitely isn’t a bad 6DOF shooter, and it starts you on the easy difficulty, which is nice (even if, judging by it, medium and hard are going to be utter bastards. Minor Hazard is challenging, tense at times, but definitely not unbeatable.) I wouldn’t exactly call it a good introduction to this subgenre, but it does feel like it has a solid place within it, with its own touches that make it interesting.

For cross dimensional invaders looking for a good space station to inhabit, please contact TMW, care of… Well, we’ll find you when you’re ready for an offer…

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Source: Review Copy
Price: £2.99
Where To Get It: Steam

Pyromind, in its own words, is a turn based, but also real time action puzzler, in which you are a “Mind” , in a minefield (A… Mindfield? Your groans sustain me), trying to defuse bombs before they go off, reaching a higher and higher score, with more difficult elements, every time you do so. There are two kinds of mines, but there only needs to be two kinds of mines, because a Pobomb (1 square radius) or a chain of them can kill you just as easily as a Limonka (Cross effect across the entire field) or its chain can. Your only saving grace? You can cross from one side of the field to the other.

So… That, and the fact you can earn minds (slowly, oh so slowly at first) with their own special abilities (you start with none, obviously) is pretty much the core of things. There’s a time attack mode, a multiplayer battle mode (alas, I can’t say much about that… Not much of a multiplayer guy), and a campaign in the battle arena mode, essentially a CPU vs Player version of the multiplayer mode.

Alas, while single player modes earn gems for new characters, the Battle Arena does not, although the idea is fun: Essentially, the more points a player has over their opponent, the quicker a screen splitting laser moves toward the opponent, and horizontal screen movement isn’t allowed, only vertical.

So, simple to describe, and indeed learn, and not difficult to master, just requires keeping a sharp eye on where bombs are. Still ramps up the difficulty quickly, and I do wish difficulty was selectable once you’d cleared more than one difficulty, but this isn’t really a big flaw. A middling flaw, really.

Finally, we have the aesthetic. Everthing except the menu is relatively clear, there’s a fair amount of good music, both tense and charming, and its clean, vector style appeals. As mentioned, the menu could do with more clarity, rather than going fully stylistic as it has (Options and credits are currently the arrow in the top right, tooltip for what the hell something is in the top left.) But, apart from the flaws described, this is a solid title, with an interesting core mechanic, and I’m having fun with it.

The Mad Welshman hates Limonkas. They may have become his newest worst enemy.

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