This might earn a neutral if the option existed, but even then it'd still tether quite close to a negative. It's not the worst game I've played or everything, but for every thing it does right, it does at least one wrong.

The gameplay is a mix of parkour with occasional slight "stealth" elements (read: there's patroling robots which more or less instakill you if they spot you) and brawler sections. For the parkour some of the moves (mostly wallruns) are slightly janky, which make successful completion of a couple of some manuevers unguaranteed (not ragequitting bad, but often enough to add up). These parts actually feels rather well when it's flowing well (though sometimes the timed obstacles prevent a superfluid motion like you can achieve in superior precision platformers). The brawler sections boil down almost entirely to button mashing (the tutorial swears there's combos, but I could never get find anything more complex than the air versions of light and heavy attack). There's a bit of strategizing to be done to make things easier and a couple of the bosses take more conscious actions, but they are all too similar not to feel like they're there for padding after a while. There's a few enemy variants found throughout the game, but their low number paired with all but one of the "arenas" being just a hallway (literally, more often than not) make this a chore.

None of this is helped by how padded the game structure is. Every chapter contains at least one "get to key, then backtrack to use it" section, so you'll be crossing almost every screen in two directions (chapters two gets "open worldy", so there's even a few screens that need to be traversed four times). This isn't terrible because at least you don't need to hit switches again, but it rarely gives the rooms any significant new dimension. Oh, I mentioned switches... yeah, some screens contain switches needed to open gates, sometimes positioned so inconveniently that you'll actually need to traverse the screen three times in a row (without dying) before you can advance. There's relief when a particularly frustrating one gets finally completed and you don't have to deal with it anymore (until the return trip), but not in a "I got gud" manner that leads to self-congratulations.

The final problem is a relatively minor one, but bears mentioning: there's no proper saving, just chapter select. These chapters can get relatively long, so may you hopefully not have to interrupt a chapter halfway and leave it for later, lest the last thirty minutes having been in vain. I get this is likely engine limitations, but it's annoying nonetheless.

The plot is actually cute (and even includes a bit of self-awareness, as expected from a game with this title) and has some mildly funny parts. The protagonist is as loquacious as you might expect from a chuuni, but there's enough charm that even when it does get a bit too much in a couple of spots you can still wonder what comes next. Some of the fetch quests are legitimately funny. I'd quite like a remake which revamped or at least streamlined the gameplay, as sadly the sequel's tone doesn't appear to be as entertaining.

A barely functional platformer that commits so hard to it's main premise of sticking you in the role of an unlikeable autist that it forgets to be fun to play.

Hikikomori No Chuunibyou is yet another of literally thousands of 2D retro platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere.

You might think this is just another copy + paste of the Ninjahtic game the developer cloned several times (why get paid for a game once when you can get paid 3 times?) but it's not... the brawling is different, there's a lot of differences, but then these are ultimately minor and while the game plays slightly better (but not much), it's got more in common with the Ninjahtic games than it has differences. I guess that's the GameMaker Studio platformer template heritage.

One important note is that even though this is an amateur project, it does seem to be sincerely and genuinely made. I couldn't find any flipped assets, plagiarism or any other kind of insincere actions from the developer, but unfortunately genuine intentions alone are not enough to produce a brilliant PC gaming experience.

From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.

A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result.

There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.

The controls and game handling are notably very clunky and unsmooth here. It's janky and unsatisfying to play... and any experienced gamer will tell you, the handling, responsiveness and general gameplay feel of the control scheme must be well polished for this kind of game to succeed. Unfortunately, this is something the developer seems to have phoned in, with little to no apparent gameplay testing. They dropped the ball on this one.

The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts. To make matters worse, there's no mouse input, despite this being sold on PC as if it were a PC game. This is unacceptable and somewhat insulting to PC gamers. It's a good demonstration of the poor attitude the developer has towards PC gamers, and this attitude has resulted in yet another defect in this game.

Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the GameMaker Studio construction kit/toolset. This is a very poor quality toolset favoured by amateur developers as it's cheap and requires little in the way of development skill, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities. Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine. GameMaker Studio is most commonly used to make retro pixel shovelware and cash grabs.

A strong argument can be made that construction kits like GameMaker Studio should never be used to make games for profit, as the "developer", Blaze Epic has done here. These construction kits are intended to teach people some of the basic principles of game development, and to make small demos to pass around with friends. They're not intended to replace to actual work of real, professional game developers. So it's inappropriate when amateurs try to use these for profit, without any actual, real game development effort taking place. This doesn't result in products that have any real meaningful value for gamers.

These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

You don't have to take my word about how bad the game is, we can measure the interest in a game by how much people bothered to play it. Hikikomori No Chuunibyou has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game absolutely failed to capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for finishing the tutorial (without dying), trivial to achieve, but less than 10 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered with this. Ouch.

Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a modest spike in player counts for the game. But this only happened once, and isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 10 percent of players bothered playing the game for any reasonable amount of time. How is it possible for this game to have so many concurrent players who didn't bother engaging with this game? Trading cards. People will use card idling software to collect the cards and sell them, but this won't trigger any achievements in-game.

That tells us people only really bought this game for trading cards, and that's a damning indictment of the woeful quality. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with little merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.

Hikikomori No Chuunibyou is relatively cheap at $2 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.

The game is quite difficult and it has a tendency to throw you into situations where you have to spam your way to victory. It has some elements of parkour and some from fighting games. The story isn't anything to write home about, but seems to take a lot of queues from anime like Welcome to the NHK and such, it really likes making references to other anime. Overall, not a terrible experience considering the low asking price. 6/10.

This one's just too rough / flawed for me, and I stopped at Act V. That's when I learned that the save system only saves at the beginning of each act (augh!). I don't think I'm going to finish it.
A lot of the problems with this game are fixed in the next one, so this one's interesting just to see the evolution.

A fun little game worth the price you pay. If i had to complain I'd say the later parkour sections are borderline sadistic and that the wall jumping is fairly jank.

My apologies to the dev.
Once, he reported me for abuse.
I made a youtube vid about his game.
It wasn't very nice.
But I still don't like it.
Yet now the video is gone :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjRt-kLBqHg

well, it doesn't actually show much in the way of evolution, but I will admit I enjoyed this one even after marathon-ing his previous three titles; which, at the time, I considered, slightly good, better than good, and a slap back down to boredom and frustrating for each one in turn.

The story for this one: you are 14, a famous artist, a prodigy martial artist, and you are high... seriously, in this one, the main character just does the auteur artist "thing" and gives his own version of "by the power of grey skull" right before he runs off for an appointment or opts to take a side quest. he goes on like this for a while, sometimes going into a huge goth/ anime/ Shakespearean sonnet when he runs into new people. The cosmic horrors don't REALLY show up until the end, and even then, the AI is programmed in such a way that everything looks more deliberate. so I personally choose to believe the ghosts and zombies near the end are actually magicians with flame throwers and homeless people respectively.

My wording may be a bit sardonic, but really it’s a... YOU GUESSED IT... tale about a free runner kid in modern japan, who gets roped into dealing with the mob, and gets stalked by entities of cosmic horror, sort of...

but here's the thing: ITS ACTUALLY GOOD!!!

-the story actually follows a three act structure, with few plot holes (considering), and not only does it make sense, it also doesn't destroy the cannon of a far more deserving game. it's actually most like that of old school RPG's, but while it is a rigid story structure - it is still a giant leap in the right direction

-the game play mechanics are similar to that of the way of the pixelated fist. while animation is less fluid, the really stupid press up or down to block randomly generated/ unpredictable attacks "bull****" is gone. fighting actually feels more like a skirmish with single button attack patterns and limited combos. its good!

-the environments... well the environments still look like Ninjahtic a bit,

-sound track... look smooth jazz in the rain is great, but for some reason it’s really grating here, AND all of the tracks seem to merge together after awhile. And as the game gets more and more tense, the music starts to lul me to sleep, and it just tenses my mind, to the point that I actually had to start listening to classic rock music just to be able to focus... if that makes sense

-the main character (and all of the characters for that matter) actually has a personality. Some characters are all harsh and stern and some never really left Woodstock... but that's just fine and sometimes its wholly enjoyable!

i just take umbridge with 3 things:

1) game-play doesn't inform your story.

out on the street, trying to make a martial arts name for yourself? hey lets have a street gang fight the main character the entire way... instead of steadily getting worse with every poster...

an impostor is hounding you? well lets just bring him up out of context among other anime references and drug addled ramblings... instead of running into him, stealing, and then selling your work a few times...

2) the music, for some reason, doesn't sound as good...

and 3)this isn't a new game play style.

the screens don't scroll, to my knowledge, and the combat and free running elements are back in full swing. sure the pole standing mechanic is a breath of fresh air, and it isn't the same wall jumping, pixel nightmare like the last three, but the whole game is still a 2d/platformer/beat 'em up

branch out, do something more zelda ish, or something more metroidvania, or even try to do something like hyperlight drifter to get out of the usual comfort zone. focus on making a HEARTFELT story and make an RPG, or just experiment with something else entirely different.

i do, However, enjoy this game, and I choose to see it as both a fresh step, and a massive apology for releasing "the way of the pixelated fist" in a broken and unforgiving state.

its good again blaze, just a few minor tweaks and it could really be something... but its all actually starting to feel FLAT. I marveled at "samurai_jazz" and all that was was a zelda dungeon stretched out to a full game all to itself (VERY Broadly speaking, that is) and I liked the sequel, but the sense of immersion has dimmed to less and less with each game; until now, when I see the city in the background as more of a matte painting than the setting of a grand adventure.

if you want to move on, and get better:
design something from scratch and make it a somewhat enjoyable experience, using what you learned as a guideline

if you want to revisit your classics and focus on the past, then let me suggest a script:

"The demon lord has been defeated, and the earth has been fixed by Imp-Fiend (who now has no place to go and is stuck in the mortal plane). after doing the whole ghost/'poltergeist' thing around the world he runs into Dag.
Then, as Dag, you start to follow the advice of some shadow (that we all know as Imp Fiend) and make your own martial arts street gang steal a bunch of art and old weapons. This gets the attention of 'Ninja'.
Ninja starts to notice the drones and cyber punk alien stuff gravitating to one point in the city. 'Ninja' runs about taking out the drones and 'tomb raiding in the catacombs'.
Imp Fiend then uses Dag's gathered tech and ancient weapons, to make a new body. the ancient tech goes haywire, and falls into the control of the aliens.
Dag and Ninja make a break for it into the jungle and meet Imp Fiend who basically says 'sorry, it’s what I do'. everyone has their backs up against the wall as the aliens approach... so Imp Fiend throws open a portal and calls fourth death incarnate.
tons of creatures and ghosts fly out of the portal. they all run again for a short time (all the while cursing this dark ghost (that we all know is Imp Fiend)). at the very end of the path, the 3 are hiding behind cover, from the aliens and malevolent spirits, and the Ronin digs himself from the earth, behind the hoard. As Ronin, you slaughter the alien herd and lead the others to safety.
The final levels take place in the neo 40's Tokyo district; and are equal parts poltergeist -ing, Ninja poof jumping through air ducts to hack computers, Dag directing runners/gang members to secure buildings, and Ronin hack & slashing and stealth killing AND dodging/acrobatically jumping over ghosts and aliens.
When everyone gets to the end of the district, it turns out that 'Ninja' is still under the control of the aliens, and has actually been relaying info to them the whole time. He is beaten back into a coma by Dag. Imp Fiend, Ronin and Dag find the 3 spirit mobsters in the old building and ask them to banish the aliens and demons. the spirits retaliate, Imp Fiend wins his battle, but gets canceled out, Dag wins but gets thrown out of the building to the arms of his gang, and Ronin wins against his own special boss. The three tell him that the only way to banish the wicked spirits is if he dies (since Ronin is the last thing holding open Imp Fiend's portals).
Ronin is assisted in suicide by the ghost of his dead master, as Dag and his gang watches the final honorable rite. cut to a final epilogue with a picture of Dag and his gang carrying Ninja and Ronin's sword back to the mega city all the while, stalked by the alien princess…”

A nice little platformer. I liked the minimalistic aesthetic, the jazzy music and the not too serious banter of the characters during the cut scenes . I had a bit of trouble with the wall running mechanic at the start, but I found the explanation in the discussions page (you have to jump near the wall to run on it). The game requires a good timing and precision in the most difficult rooms. A good challenge for me (not a big player of action games), difficult sometimes, but not impossible.

I really want to like and enjoy this game but it has the worst controls in a platformer i've seen in a while, just trying to "parkour" a wall that can't be done in one bound takes forever to pass and you'll be constantly jumping and wall-hugging, and SOMETIMES you are able to get over it. One other thing, sometimes you may get in places where its literally impossible to get out, what makes it worse that if you could just reset your position or refresh the screen, but you have to go back to the beginning of the WHOLE STAGE. Lastly, the plot is like if someone from wattpad or fanfiction.net were hired to make the story, as it has no structure; as if each part was made on a whim, after they finished their homework.

TL;DR: Graphics are okay at best, combat is rather pointless, controls are very stiff and clunky, dialogue isn't very well written, story/plot is boring and actually makes no literal sense at all.

Take it from me, just dont get this game.


My review to the sequal "HIKIBYOU2": https://steamcommunity.com/id/Roran212/recommended/586450