Recent reviews by ned_ballad

It's always funny when I see lists on forums and websites stating "best game remakes!" and they never mention this game. Which, as far as I'm concerned, sits right up there with Zero Mission and Mario All Stars as one of the best remakes. It took a good, but flawed game and turned it into a masterpiece. This game is basically perfect.

- It's challenging, but fair. I hardly ever find myself thinking "this was a cheap death." 99% of the time I die because I picked up a bad item combination, I rushed myself and missed resources, I didn't dodge right, or I was just not paying attention. Ironically, in a game that's entirely randomly generated, there's very little RNG. You always feel "in control", despite random rooms, random items and random enemies. Pretty much every run is entirely possible to beat. Once you get into a "groove" and understand the mechanics, it's very easy to start a run not thinking "will I win this run" but rather "how can I maximize my resources and time to work towards unlocks"

- It's got an incredibly charming visual design. The enemies and characters are adorable. They have big eyes and heads. They smile a lot. They're all immensely charming to look at. And you don't even realize just how grotesque and disturbing the game actually is. One of the bosses is super happy, jumping around. And then you deal enough damage and his eyes pop out of their sockets. And then later you might encounter his rotting course, eyes still bleeding out. But its name is Peep and it's pretty cute. This is also a story of an abused child fighting against gross abominations, who eventually kills his own fetus and asends to Heaven to come to peace with his mortality, or travels to Hell and literally defeats the devil and realizes he is full of sin and maybe he should be sacrificed. One of my favorite characters in the game, and the one I think is one of the cutest, is literally a dead baby. But it's never done for shock value. He's just colored blue and has silly cartoon x eyes. This isn't a game that's gross and disturbing just to shock audiences, because the game isn't really shocking and grotesque on the surface. And it never takes itself seriously. While also dealing with serious issues like child abuse and death. It's a complex game in a cute little package, which is kind of hard to explain just how well it "clicks."

- Every run is entirely different, but at the same time, all pull from the same mechanics. About half the items in the game are simple stat +/- items. One item makes you fat, giving you health, but slowing you down. One increases all your stats, then shuffles them. Quite a lot literally just raise one or two stats and do nothing else. That's not to say there isn't an absurd amount of variety (I don't believe any items overlap), but really, at its core, a ton of items are simple stat changes. The other half range from game breaking (Mom's Knife, Brimstone), to useless (Butter Bean), to run ending if you're not careful (Tiny Planet). And note I said "if you're not careful" because every item is entirely possible to beat the game with, some just require more skill to use than others. And it's kind of intimidating to have hundreds of items to remember. But... it just sort of happens. Over time you just learn what are "good" to pick up and what should be avoided. As long as you remember a few "problem" items like Tiny Planet or Cursed Eye, you can pretty much safely take anything without much fear of ending your run.

- You always make progress. The game has like a hundred hours of raw content before you unlock everything. And these things take time. It takes time to get good enough to beat the big bad final bosses with every character. Very rarely will you have a run where at least one pop up stating "such and such has appeared in the basement" doesn't appear. But the nature of the game, randomed levels and enemies every time, it ends up not really feeling tedious at all.

There's something very raw and I guess... "wholesome" to this game. It feels like the sort of game I'd play as a kid. It's always gameplay first at every stage of this game. Nothing gets in the way of the raw gameplay. To me it has a very "Nintendo" like design to it, much like most of Edmund's games (like Meat Boy, Gish, Time Fcuk).

Also buy Afterbirth because Bumbo want coin