Dear Readers,
After chatting with my buddies online I decided to play some Demontower into the night.
This game was all pixelly and dungeon crawly. It had a retro aesthetic but it was undoubtedly a PC game adopting the style. It reminds me of free games that did that deliberately like Cave Story. Yet this game was about 10 years old. My guess is still that Night In The Woods takes place in the late 2000's. Could this game be from the late 90s? Since Zeldaclassic has been going on since 1999 I would guess that could be true.
So yeah, the sound effects are like all harsh and digitised, giving them a blood curdling effect. The enemies that spot you sound scary when they make that noise. The music is like a much cleaner music track. That contrast was common with PC games and Flash games back then.
I played the first level which wasn't too tough. Just messes of rats (I think) and some other creatures that aren't too tough. In every level you have to go offscreen and open a tomb to retrieve a key.
Y is slash and B is a little dash move. Like I said the enemies weren't too tough on the first level and the boss wasn't hard at all. Some nice draughty wind sounds in the boss room after defeating it too.
Level I was The Hole and II was The Cellar. On this level there's a green guy with shifty eyes just standing there. You can kill him but I really don't know what he's for. His speech was 8 holes with one of them being white.
The music in The Hole was all riffy with a cool bass line that sounded very videogamey and sounded proud of it too!
I got the key here in a room to the right. Enemies were little skeleton dudes and ghostly wailing dudes that looked a bit like Plague Knight from Shovel Knight. Those red guys with the blood curdling screams killed me here :/ I got back in though and made it to the boss, who was a bird guy trying to hit me with his bag. I just walked around in a circle and got hits on him that way. He was pretty easy too.
This game has a roughness to it. You just do a couple of things a level and move on. You can go after the enemies if you want but really it's just batting what's in your way. PC games are like that really. When they're not focus group tested. Stuff looks like it's been thrown around instead of meticulously orchestrated like in a Zelda game. That roughness gives it character though and I appreciate it here :)
Skellie Outskirts for level III. The music here reminds me even more of those PC retro "Metroidvania" style games from over 10 years ago. Like something that was on Jeremy Parish's curated list.
Dash stamina increases after every level. There's also sword stamina which is a trend I don't like... ^^; I died to those rat lumps here as I wasn't hitting them fast enough due to it. The character flinches if you try to do too many sword slashes at once. Not as fit as old-school Link! Come to think of it, the poor dude looks like he can barely lug that sword around. No wonder he gets tired.
The key here was in a room to the left. The skeleton dudes had helmets now so I had to hit them 3 times to off them. Spikes were in the floor here too.
The boss here was a bird zooming around on the bloody lines of an inverted five-pointed star. It was spawning enemies too. I made sure to stay off the line and whack it when it settled on a point.
Skellie City for level IV. The shifty-eyed mysterious green dude was here too. This time his speech bubble had the white dot in a different place. Second from the left on the bottom row. What does it mean though...
This time the skellie dudes had shields as well so I had to hit them 4 times! There were also some kind of fireball throwing mages. These gave me lots of trouble and I had to catch 'em by surprise.
The key here was in a room off the bottom right corner of the level. There were 4 blood curdling dudes at the boss door this time. I had to lure 'em out one by one.
The boss here was king of those skellie dudes. Much bigger too. He was sitting on his throne and was being carried by three of his subjects, trying to hit me with a sceptre. He killed me twice! I had to retry and go back to beat him.
That's all I'll do for now. I decided to quit. This game puts it "Surrender to the Horror". I went back to the desktop and back to me in my room at night. Ah! Game within a game! I remember when Animal Crossing on GameCube was like this with the NES games :) I went to bed.
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