izigame.me

Top-tier roguelite, and maybe, just maybe there's something here for the shmup fans too, no promises. Veers too much into bullet vomit clustermuck territory towards late game, and makes some design decisions I don't agree with (t. don't find fun) but the developers clearly have a strong vision for this one. It's just that they're trying to balance that vision against years of added content and mechanics. It doesn't always work.

I went in with the context of having played this game a lot during its Monolith days. Getting into SoP today, completely blind, you'll probably be fine... but you might be confused about like 20 unexplained mechanics. Maybe this gives the game a sense of mystique for you, I don't know.
I do find it funny that the developers realized the cumulative damage upgrades throughout an entire run would trivialize an especially late floor so they put in an invisible damage softcap. Or that they added a damage nerf to weapons that fire in a burst that goes unmentioned otherwise, because obviously giving the player a weapon that's just like another weapon, but fires in triples and thus deals triple the damage, wasn't totally balanced.

Some bosses are too RNG in the sense that like, one of their attacks will absolutely crush you while another possible attack might blow raspberries in your general direction. This is a prevailing issue with bosses from Floor 1 (though obviously the stakes are much lower so early on), all the way to, I'd say one of the super bosses. Some bosses are too RNG in the sense that like, they will do the same attack 5 times back to back and you really feel it in your bones that they weren't expected to do that. It's either that or it's that one pigeon attack that you can completely avoid by tapping right or left so the real challenge becomes staying awake. Late game difficulty scaling will make some room layouts and bosses disproportionately more difficult which will surely mess with your target prioritization muscle memory.

Some bosses are really cool though. One boss in particular while not particularly "late game" per se, let me stretch my legs with a hybrid melee/ranged ship in a twin stick shooter where the boss is actually designed around the melee hits being much more powerful than the ranged ones. It's pretty good. You'll know which one I'm talking about when you get there.

Storytelling is a mixed bag. At points, the game manages to be crystal clear with no dialogue, and at others you'll be hit with a textwall of cryptic nonsense that you won't be able to decipher unless you're jacked into the Discord server lore discussion matrix. How many councils were there again? I don't care for it. Well, I wouldn't have cared for it if not for the Gauntlet Master, who requires you inquire him with a specific dialogue option before you can fight him. Which I didn't do for the longest time, because I was sick and tired of his endless ranting about something or other lore thing only lore nuts care about.

This review feels like a laundry list of things that annoy me specifically with this game. This is why, if you read this far, you might be surprised to learn that I love this game, and it's an easy recommend for me. It's a cutesy package with a deceptively huge amount of content. Well worth double the asking price. It hits some emotional high notes that I wouldn't have expected a roguelite where you shoot stuff as a spaceship could. No doubt, the reason it can is the presentation, and the tear-sheddingly gorgeous soundtrack with over 3 hours of original chiptune compositions.

Some random assortment of points I couldn't segue into:
Metaprogression isn't huge here, you can probably unlock everything you care about sans loops in like 5 or 6 runs if you know what you're doing. I still wish there was less of it.
Half the weapons in the shop are annoying to use. It's an important skill to figure out which ones to disable so they free up some space in the loot pool.
In terms of accessibility, I mean, there's a photosensitivity option that's not really all there, and a controller autoaim that's in the works at the time of writing. Good enough for me.
Maybe set the game resolution to one of the pixel perfect scaled ones. They're the 580p and 870p ones. Yes the game internally runs at 290p. Don't even ask.

Is this game for you? Would you like a tightly designed, bite-sized roguelite with a charming aesthetic? Can you look past its flaws I can't anymore as a tired gamer who put way too much time into this one videogame for some reason?

Since I was playing on the GOG release for this one until fairly recently, I won't be able to get 100% achievements unless I start over in a new save. This also means like, a hundred or so hours won't show up here. That's more of a me issue but just heed this as a warning to not purchase the GOG version. They haven't even updated it with the name change, and the DLC which was merged into the base game a long time ago is still up for retail on GOG. They're clearly moving forward with Steam as their primary platform. The game doesn't have DRM, you can delete Steam .dll's from your game folder if you're concerned about DRM. Well, since I am, and I deleted those .dll's, I won't get to unlock any more achievements for this game. My completion state will simply stay frozen like this. I'm totally okay with that. I will update this portion of the review if they ever release the latest version on GOG.