Recent reviews by Gitrogatog

Very cute little srpg! The constant betrayals were very funny and the battles, though small in scale, can have a surprising amount of depth. My main complaint is that the first 2 chapters are basically an extended tutorial that you have to replay each time, and you have very few "real" battles to contend with. But the final confrontation is worth the effort!

Great demo! Art is very pretty, loved the interplay between using the whip vs the knife. 1st level starts out pretty slow but the castle levels were a lot of fun.

Great little tactics game! This was my first cover-based tactics game (I'm more accustomed to Fire Emblem) but it does a great job of easing you in with the tutorial. Big fan of how it shows the danger of overcommitting with Alex and then protecting with Riley. Your standard attacks feel surprisingly weak, it takes a full round of attacks from all your units to take out one basic enemy, so you have to rely pretty heavily on cover and your skills against the larger groups of 3+ enemies. The crit system is pretty cool, it pushes you to push your luck, play more aggressive and get closer to enemies but the proc chance is low enough to where you don't build your turn-by-turn strategy around getting a crit. My favorite part was at the end of level 2, where I overextended and had to deal with 6 enemies at once. Only Kiran's brain blast saved me, but from level 3 onwards I relied almost entirely on Alex's bear rush. You don't fight very many enemies at once, and bear rush both 1. deals as much damage as 3 attacks combined (since it also prevents an enemy from becoming half-dead) and 2. lets you take an additional action afterwards. The boss fight in level 4 was a nice change of pace but I do wish there were another standard level to play with the endgame skills. Having to fight a boss with such a massive hp bar just pushes you towards maxxing out damage via star rain, and the other skills feel almost irrelevant.

I would have appreciated being able to see enemy threat ranges but I do understand making games under a deadline means you can't include every quality of life feature. Balancing-wise, I think bear rush is a little too strong, and I'd like to see the basic attack be buffed up a bit. Letting you kill a basic enemy with a cover attack + a non cover attack would go a long way. I'd also really like it if enemies would stay half-dead for at least one more turn before coming back, it would incentivize downing enemies without killing them immediately instead of just downing and killing them in the same turn.

Also the art is really cute, especially the 2d character sprites. The whole game really nailed the feeling of playing pretend against imaginary foes as a kid! We need more games with whimsy!

The End Of Gameplay is a collection of short platformer games related in some way to the idea of "kill gameplay". If you're going in expecting some Grand Insight into "kill gameplay" don't get your hopes up, or at least it didn't happen to me. Droqen's (admittedly quite scattered) writings about kill gameplay are a better description of what it is and the logic behind it. In my mind, The End Of Gameplay serves more as a companion piece, providing some insight into the dev's internal journey and emotions with kill gameplay and game development in general. Though I won't pretend to understand all of them.

Some of the games had interesting points about droqen's critiques of gameplay expressed through the act of playing them, such as it being easier to get yourself entangled in the bowels of machine lover than it is to worm your way back out. Though his critiques are mostly just expressed through cryptic writing and general vibes. Others (like romantic) feel less like a direct commentary on gameplay and more just life experiences droqen had that he wanted to share. And in doing so serve as an inherent statement of, "these are the sorts of things I'd like games to talk about and here is how I'd like them to be expressed". The end of gameplay did expand my view of what games can be, even if just a little bit. Even if I still love gameplay.

Now, is the end of gameplay worth your $20? That's a tough call. If you haven't yet, buy two copies of kero blaster first. Then I'd say go for it.