Recent reviews by Rien?

Genuinely the best $20 I've spent on a game in a while. Very addictive, satisfying and relaxing. Great if you just want something to have fun playing while listening to music, a podcast or watching a show. One thing I'd love to see is a timer so you can see how long it took you to complete a level.

Basically a spiritual successor to the old school Ninja Gaiden games. Has a good sense of humor, amazing music, and really awesome sprite work for both the 8-bit and 16-bit versions of the world. Solid game play albeit a bit difficult at times. My two biggest issues with the game is the amount of backtracking you have to do to get 100% and how after fully upgrading your gear, money stops having a real use. About halfway through, the game becomes a metroidvania, giving you free reign to explore all the areas, uncover new ones, and gives you some fast travel stations to help get around. My issue is that the fast travel hub only has 6 stations and this is simply not enough IMO. The fast travel points are spread out pretty far apart in the world so, sometimes you'll have to backtrack through one or two whole levels just to get to an item you couldn't get to before. At first it isn't so bad but by the end it really starts to drag. As for the not having things to spend money on, around half way into my playthrough I was able to fully upgrade everything. The game acknowledges this and jokes about it, adding a literal money sink to the shop, wherein you can spend money on little figures of enemies that get displayed in the shop, a neat addition but, still not worth spending money on. The game does this a few times actually, where it will acknowledge a flaw the game has and joke about it, but doesn't really fix the flaw. Another example being the shopkeeper makes a joke about the wall climbing claws and how sometimes when you're trying to just fall straight down you'll cling to the wall instead. Not a huge issue, since overall the game is very polished but, I do find it odd that they didn't just fix these issues instead of making jokes about them. All in all, its a very solid game, the highlights being the visuals, the soundtrack(Seriously the music is godly) and the dialogue, while the backtracking is probably the biggest issue I have. Would give it a solid 8/10 if I had to rate it, and I think even at full price for $20 its worth picking up.