GAMES BEATEN IN 2023

I'm a person who has a lot of Thoughts and Opinions about the video games I play, and usually those thoughts tend to get condensed into several paragraphs' worth of rambling in a tiny, tiny Discord server that typically get a very small acknowledgement at best before the subject moves onto the next thing. Until Now, where I have a website and I can dump those thoughts and opinions on You, Dear Reader, just like websites were always meant to be for before corporations got wise to the internet and poisoned the humble web 1.0 environment irreversibly with Content Algorithms. What were we talking about?

This list won't be limited to games that come out in 2023, though they're certainly not off-limits; the vast majority are almost certainly going to be much older games as I tread through my gargantuan backlog. Starting with...

The law of nature dictates that once every year or two I just get real obsessed with Metroid for a few weeks. That happened this time at the tail end of 2022 leading into this year, and after going through the Prime trilogy with the very cool PrimeHack Dolphin mod (and finally finishing Corruption for the first time), I took the opportunity to go through the only* major entry I hadn't played some incarnation of at all yet: Fusion. (*Other M doesn't exist and if we close our eyes it'll go away.) I don't know why I didn't do it before! I think in my original series marathon around 2017-ish I skipped it because I heard it's more linear and then I burnt out partway through Zero Mission because the Mother Brain fight was a spammy mess, so I just never got around to it.

Spoiler alert!: The game is really good! A year prior I'd have called Dread the hardest Metroid game by a wide margin, but it turns out this one gives it a considerable run for its money and is on par at the very least. This game sells incredibly well how inhospitable its environment is and does not hold back on everything doing a scary amount of damage from the onset; there's a later sequence where it delves into genuine survival horror resource scarcity, because the power to doors gets cut and forces you directly into the path of an enemy that can kill you from full health in like three hits, which will likely leave you running on empty for a lengthy section that requires you to work your way to another boss before you can even access a recharge station. It's mean!! It's cool!!! I got frustrated at a lot of bosses and then when I beat them I felt very accomplished because it was a cool challenging test of skill!

It IS more linear than the other games in terms of the game clearly telling you where to go next, but it's really more in the vein of Corruption than the weird mental image I had in my brain of each sector being basically a one-and-done "level" that you'd never go back to. I'm honestly not sure where that idea came from, in hindsight? It's a Metroid game. You Go Back And Forth A Lot. ...That said, the completionist in me does wish the point of no return was more clearly signposted instead of it just being an abrupt cutoff after one of the Nav Station meetings that have previously just been part of the gameplay loop. I get that it's urgent but I wasn't done yet!! Adam!!

Anyway, I finished with like 65% items collected and said "Well I guess now I have to play it Again". I feel like the fact that my immediate response was to want to go through the entire thing a second time in spite of its difficulty speaks for itself, as far as reviews go.

I came into possession of this game per the impending doom of the Nintendo 3DS eshop, as it is a vital piece of the puzzle for installing the firmware necessary to homebrew the system, and it's also conveniently free! Wow!! But before I get around to doing all that (and because doing so wipes your save and makes the game inaccessible), I figured I'd actually play it first, given that I am secretly a massive picross-head. I go through phases where I practically live on puzzle-nonograms.com. Can't get enough of them funny number squares. Thanks, Holly.

I was immediately reminded of the reason I neglected to play it before now, which is that it is completely smothered in free-to-play mobile game mechanics. Uh oh! Every new puzzle completed adds a new Pokémon to your team, which each have one type and one move that you can use to cheat help you, and the puzzles also all have a number of missions like equipping certain types and using certain moves (that there is a ten minute cooldown on, of course) that you can fulfill for a dripfeed of currency. I actually did not come close to finishing this game, because it is designed such that you cannot re-earn said currency from completing missions again, so if you happen to spend your little doodads early on expanding your energy meter so you can play more than like two or three puzzles at a time (like I did) and no longer have enough left to afford to unlock the next area (also like I did), you are just fully locked out of progression unless you buy more with real money or grind out the very limited number of achievements that give you a grand total of three each. Should it be included on this list if I didn't beat it? I have enough opinions about it to type up a good few paragraphs, so I think it qualifies because I also don't care.

The thing about picross is that, fundamentally, the gameplay is always exactly the same no matter the skin you layer over it and the mechanics you staple on top to encourage you to just cheat at the game, which means that this is literally the same as all of the other ones but objectively worse. I feel nothing about the fact that all my progress is going to be thrown into the fire never to be seen again as soon as I set up the actual reason I have it, or that I haven't seen the vast majority of it. Nothing of value will be lost here. Thanks for reminding me why I habitually refuse to so much as touch mobile games, The Pokémon Company International and Jupiter Corporation (developer of all games under the Picross name and also, inexplicably, cult classic DS JRPG The World Ends With You)! I'll go back to playing literally any other picross game now.

A house is like a person, in a lot of ways. In the abstract, does something really need to have a beating heart to live, to breathe, to have a soul? Kitty Horrorshow's ANATOMY is a little game I've been seeing people talk about for ages, so when I encountered yet another mention of it I decided to finally go pick it up. It's only $3, after all.

Gameplay-wise, it's very, very simple: you explore a very dark house and find cassette tapes in rooms you're guided to, then bring them back to a tape recorder in the kitchen to listen to what you've found. Eventually, the game abruptly closes itself, and when you reopen the program, everything is... not quite right. This game is short enough that it's difficult to go into any sort of detail about its contents without taking away from what it's doing itself, because I think, in broad terms, it's really less of a game and moreso an interactive piece of poetry. It's snippets of prose buried in deep metaphor and spaced out by moments of quiet dread that are equally important to the piece as the writing itself is. It's about how we, by our very nature of being, give life to our everyday surroundings, and that a life is an inherently fallible and messy and bestial thing. This is about as pure an example as you can get of video games as an art form, I think. Past that, I'll let it speak for itself.

WHAT!!! You're telling me Sonic is DEAD???

They just dropped this whole visual novel for free a day ahead of April Fools', so of COURSE I had to immediately drop everything I was doing and play through the entire thing, and I am happy to report it is absolutely delightful. Oh my god I had the biggest smile on my face this whole dang game. I was unsurprised to learn it was written by Ian Mutchler, the guy known for his Sonic Forces avatar repeatedly finding his way into official materials (including this very game) and who is the star of some Extremely Beautiful comics chronicling his tragic forbidden romance with antagonist Infinite. I saw his name in the credits and everything clicked into place (especially a particularly funny villain motive); no wonder this was such a treat to read.

This game puts you in the shoes of a train's professional event caterer (read: Microwave Operator) on their first day on the job, which just so happens to be a murder mystery game Amy is running for her birthday. There's a weird hiccup in the train's operations, and when they get that little mess sorted out, Sonic is found unconscious in the dining car! This seems... a little more serious than just a party game. Amy sets off to investigate on her lonesome, leaving you and Tails to interrogate the other passengers and get to the bottom of who could've done this. You check out clues, ask questions, and play a surprisingly challenging little special stage as you piece things together.

This is the latest in a recent line of the absolute best official Sonic content being the stuff made by longtime series fans as they are given more and more creative control: Mania, the IDW comics, the movies, the list goes on. In fact, this feels like it could fit right in as a particularly fun arc of the comic! Its premise and genre puts it in the unique position of not being bound by the usual "action platformer series with one protagonist" rule that tends to get in the way of the stories in the games, so it gives the cast a chance to breathe and get fleshed out with goofy interactions that they wouldn't have if they were still busy trying to segue between levels; the very same rule that gives comic characters like Whisper or Starline a chance to exist where they don't have to justify their presence with gameplay. After having most of the extended cast get sidelined hard in the games proper for more than a decade, this is a wonderful way to welcome them back into the fold. I don't expect it given that this was an (exceptionally well-produced) April Fools' joke, but if SEGA wants to do more Sonic VNs, I'd eat it right up. ...Pretty please? For me?

It's that game where Sonic the Hedgehog has a sword! Depending on who you ask, this is either one of the abominably bad bottom-of-the-barrel ones or a hidden gem. It's divisive enough that I decided to just get and play through the dang thing myself to form my own opinion on it like two years ago; then I only got halfway through it, not for lack of interest but because playing things on console requires just enough steps that it is like a poison for my sad little ADHD-having brain. But then! The mammoth, comprehensive let's play of the entire series that I have been following on-and-off from day 1 finally made it to this game, which compelled me to start again...! And then I dropped it before beating it again for the same reason. A few months later I decided to just play through it on Dolphin with the Wiimote shaking mapped to a gamepad button to see how it compared, which it turns out goes significantly faster when you don't have to take periodic breaks to keep your arm from falling off. (Coincidentally, this ended up happening the day after said LP was brought to a close after four entire years due to burnout, which is bittersweet but at least now it's theoretically feasible to catch up on it if you really, REALLY feel like committing.)

In all honesty, it's kind of in between the two extremes of its reputation. It's a far cry from the sin against god and video games some people will try to convince you it is, but it's also kind of a mess, like... a lot of Sonic games, really. It certainly has some bits that absolutely suck to play—looking at you, King Arthur—but for the most part it's just like, Fine. It's a serviceable action game with some jank, a lot of motion control waggle whose imprecise nature occasionally gets in the way, and most glaringly some weird mechanics that could be communicated a LOT better. In terms of gamefeel it is, if nothing else, leagues ahead of its older sibling Secret Rings, on account of you control Sonic with the stick like a normal video game instead of having to awkwardly steer him with the Wiimote as he perpetually accelerates, which aged dreadfully and often feels like trying to convince an unruly dog to stop jumping on the couch. I'd be surprised that there's any argument which one is the better of the two, if not for the fact that Secret Rings actually has level design.

Perhaps because Secret Rings became something of a blueprint for mainline boost gameplay starting with Unleashed, Black Knight's differentiating gimmick means it's more of an on-rails action game than a platformer like its predecessor; if you take away the sword, there's really nothing else of substance outside of occasional jump timing challenges. Now, if you take it at face value that the game isn't trying to be a platformer, this isn't inherently a bad thing. Like, of course taking out a game's central conceit will make it feel empty. But at the same time, while the swordplay is fun in the moment, it's... kind of very shallow, and the lack of meat elsewhere just makes it stand out all that much more that the entire game really is just mowing blindly through crowds of dudes way too quickly to strategize about any of it. There's no real precision to any of it, and most of the time it doesn't ask you for much of it, but the second it does things start to fall apart real fast, which compounds with how absolutely inscrutable the mechanical conveyance can get. It begs the question: is there more value in something competent but uninteresting and confused, or in something with stronger creative ideas that's actively kind of miserable to engage with? (I'd personally still give BK the edge, but when I look at SR what I see is a game made by devs with years of platformer design experience held back primarily by obligation to a gimmicky new control scheme. If both of these games used standard controls, the competition would be a lot fiercer.)

This all of course neglects the main reason this game is revered in certain parts of the fandom, which is that its writing is particularly standout as far as the series goes. It's got a fun twist villain and fakeout ending halfway through! (...Which turned out to be a death sentence when most of the reviewers just stopped once they beat the worst boss in the game and got booted back to the main menu after a whole five minute credits roll.) But over everything else, this is Sonic himself at his peak. The game's whole narrative theming around chivalry and nothing lasting forever is used as an interesting window into his own moral code and ideals, and longtime comics-turned-game-writer Ian Flynn has specifically cited it as one of the games he looks at most as a guideline for his character. It's not gonna win any awards and I can see how people who prefer his more attitude-heavy characterization from a lot of earlier materials compared to the mid-aughts edgeless Nice Boy Sonic might not be enthused about more of the same, but it's enough to make me smile. Overall, it's a deeply flawed game, but if you care about the little blue guy as a person there's probably something for you here.

"hey what? what the hell is a flixmix. i have literally never heard of this," I hear you say. I was the same as you, earlier this morning, when I saw a post that linked to its soundtrack and clicked on through to give it a listen. I found that it was, in fact, very good, and decided to do a little bit more research into it. FlixMix is a 1993 puzzle game for the MS-DOS and PC-98, and upon learning of its platform I said "I wonder if my good and trusted friend The Internet Archive has a copy of this", and lo and behold, there it was! It's the MS-DOS version, which has a different soundtrack from the one I was listening to, but I had accomplished my mission nonetheless.

The gist of FlixMix is that you're fitting squares onto a board to form a larger picture like a traditional jigsaw puzzle, but instead of having little nubs to match and fit into each other, the twist is that the picture beneath is a complicated perpetually-looping animation, either some abstract pattern of shifting colors and shapes or some of that good, good early CGI you'd see on your Windows 98 screensavers. If this sounds like hell, that's because it is! But it's an extremely mesmerizing type of hell, and I can appreciate that. There's a sort of zen to trying to find anywhere at all where this mess of color goes together while listening to a MIDI rendition of some classical piece. I stared at shifting boxes for like ten minutes trying to figure out what I was doing wrong while Fugue in D Minor serenaded me. FlixMix embodies my favorite part of having a page like this, because it's comparatively just a complete wildcard and nobody can stop me from telling you about it.

After I'd done all the puzzles in the first of the two sets I tried the timed mode where it gives you all of them in a row and got through one round when it circled back around to the first puzzle, but now the animation was periodically reversing itself and half the pieces were upside down. I couldn't figure out what it wanted from me, and in my panic I eventually just started clicking all my mouse buttons in an attempt to flip the errant pieces and accidentally hit a backpage shortcut, allowing me to escape. I'm glad to live another day through such a frightening moment to share this tale with you.

Happy new Zelda release week! Here's another Picross game!!! hey wait where are you going come back

As implied by its title, this game was an exclusive reward for My Nintendo club members, but what isn't hinted at is that it is also themed specifically around The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. You remember when they rereleased that game for the Wii U? Yeah no I forgot too. They did do that, and released this to commemorate it. Its exclusivity has made it impossible for me to play until now that I live that Hacked 3DS Lifestyle, with Citra deciding not to run it and leaving real hardware as my only option to access it. (It turns out the Pokémon Picross hacking method is outdated and you don't even need it actually, which means that that game really is completely worthless! Wow! Also hacking your 3DS is so so easy to do and when people tell you how simple it is they are not exaggerating.) (EDIT: If you're looking to do so and haven't yet, do NOT download the latest system firmware update as of 5/23, as it will break the necessary exploits. Hack safely!)

As I mentioned earlier, every Picross game is fundamentally pretty much the same, and it's no different here even if I did have an involuntary pure glee response for two seconds when I revealed a picture of everyone's favorite deeply troubling business baby Malo. (For the sake of this superlative, please pretend Dreamworks' hit movie The Boss Baby does not exist.) After an excruciatingly tedious tutorial that you can't skip any of (apparently its speedrun record is nearly six minutes because of all the animations you have to sit through), you get three pages of puzzles to do. After that, though, you can move onto the next set, which is all of the same puzzles again but in a different order and this time with Mega Picross rules.

Mega Picross is a decently common fixture of recent Picross games, but this was my first time personally playing it, so I floundered hard when its tutorial was kind of garbage (especially following the basic tutorial which assumes you have never touched these games in your life and step-by-step walks you through every individual piece of logic you can apply). Whoops! This set was accompanied by an ominous Twilight Realm theme, which accurately reflected my despaired mental state while I tried to figure out what in god's name I was supposed to be doing here. I eventually managed to feel it out by piecing it together from half-useful explanations in GameFAQs threads of other people complaining about confusing tutorials, but it was a fraught journey. I might make my own Mega Picross guide to save others like me one day.

The third and final set is called "Micross", which both is and isn't kind of a misnomer because it involves solving a very big puzzle by doing it in 10x10 chunks, so actually it's just another set of normal-sized puzzles that are all timed as a whole. By the nature of forming a bigger picture with few tiny details, these are all pretty easy, but they're a decent way to kill like 40 minutes. The picture at the end was the same art that's on the wallet I've been using for like a decade. Overall, it's another Picross game and there's not much to be said about it, but it provides a solid amount of variety for what it offers. I do not know how this feels like one of the longest reviews I have written so far on this page.

This one made a big enough splash to get its own page! I'm not even through it all yet but I couldn't wait to talk about it. TLDR: It's really, REALLY cool. It's like, genuinely kind of insane how transformative what they're doing here is and I'm a little obsessed; what a special thing to walk into after spending most of my life tolerating the dated quirks of a 20-year-old MMO. If that also describes your relationship with good ol' Toontown Online, or you have any nostalgia for it in general, you're doing yourself a disservice in NOT checking out what this team is cooking up. It might be hard to go back.

What? What is this. They never made a version of this game for the Gameboy Advance. Huh?

So I thought, as I was perusing my usual list of GBA ROMs; I had come here to seek out a specific game and was casually browsing the full listing as I made my way down towards the end of the alphabet, where my good friend Wario lives, when I saw a listing nestled between the nostalgic licensed nonsense and the actually good video games that was entitled "Resident Evil 2 (Unknown) (Proto)". Intrigued, I downloaded it and pulled up the page for it that inevitably existed on The Cutting Room Floor, which told me this was a tech demo but did not elaborate on the actual playable contents therein, because the most interesting thing it contains is an ample amount of leftover data from another game this studio made.

I've very briefly dipped my toes into this game, but never gone past the first Licker; my complete-playthrough experience with this series as of yet consists only of the original RE4, which I intend to rectify sometime. But this will not be that time, because, as I said, tech demo. I expect it to be a sort of 2D demake because I am so used to GBA games being strictly sprite-based affairs, and because I AM familiar with the inexplicable version of this game that they made for the Tiger Game.com (a console made by the guys whose video game pedigree otherwise consists of little LCD handhelds like the ones they used to put in Happy Meals), but as far as I can tell it actually is just a faithful port of the first few rooms.

You press start on the title screen and are greeted with the standard opening, with Leon describing the events of the previous game over still images, except each card only lasts a few seconds and cuts itself off as it moves onto the next. After these you are dumped into the first screen with no trace of the intro cinematic. It's as barebones as you can get; the health system doesn't work, and going into your inventory to equip your knife does absolutely nothing and just keeps your gun equipped. You pass on through to Kendo's shop, where in one of my runs through this the level collision broke and allowed me to run around on top of the background (as seen in this section's lovely image).

After you head through another alleyway, you come to the second door in this game, at which point it tells you IT ALL DEPENDS ON YOUR SKILL! GO FOR PRO!, because instead of continuing like normal it plays a very short demo video of a 3D Street Fighter game that I do not have enough fightgame knowledge to identify. And then it boots you back to the title screen. Weird! Okay! That's everything there is to see, I guess! This was a fun little excursion for all of three minutes.

Mundaun is a game that's been on my radar since it first came out a couple years ago, and then I downloaded it I think day 1 when it finally came to Switch and proceeded to not play it for a very long time anyway because my brain is broken in all kinds of fun and special ways. That is, until this October when I briefly got a burst of media-consumption energy and watched a few horror movies, at which point I thought "hey i could probably keep this pace going by playing that one game" and almost immediately learned that I had been mentally pronouncing its title wrong the entire two years it was sitting there. (It's "moon-daoon", by my mediocre American approximation. Romansh pronunciation rules.)

We begin having received a letter from our hometown's local priest informing us our grandpa has passed away in a terrible fire and... seeming to conspicuously be hiding some details from us while telling us not to come. Because we are a horror protagonist, we choose not to consider that this might be a warning and we are already riding the bus up the mountain to visit the little municipality of Mundaun in Switzerland (which happens to be a real place! Or at least was.) We check out Grandpa's now burnt-out barn and almost immediately fall into some reality-bending nonsense; determined to find out what All That was about, we continue making our way up the mountain for answers and learn he apparently signed a pact with some sort of trickster spirit, who now seems to be quite interested in us.

This game's primary Thing is that its textures are all traditionally hand-drawn graphite illustrations with the tangibly big, chunky lines of a pencil whose tip has been worn down to a flat nub, and it is properly moody in its full monochrome. It... kind of takes a notable hit on the Switch, because basically everything does, though the fact that I only play handheld nowadays probably does not help. My system's obligatory aliasing pixel garbage aside, the art direction is more than enough to make up for it. Beyond the instantly striking visual style, its designs fall squarely into the realm of eerily evocative folk horror that frequently draws from authentic traditional costuming in the alps; inexplicably floating apiarists in early beekeeping suits with faceless wicker masks, haybales standing up and stalking the fields past nightfall with ghostly faces peering through the grass, none of it ever bogged down with unneeded explanations and all the more haunting for it.

As for the gameplay itself, it's pretty standard horror game fare that mostly serves as a vehicle to get you to the next setpiece. You wander around the mountain picking up little scraps of paper for your journal, which you can reference as solutions for puzzles or just inform you of a new bit of lore or enemy ahead. When you've progressed sufficiently, night falls and there's a stealth section to avoid enemies, and while there IS a combat system it's clunky enough to not really be worth engaging with outside of emergency situations and acts at odds with a "fear" system that slows you in your tracks and makes you incapable of performing certain actions. (I was never sure whether I was actually hitting anything even with all of the rifle stability upgrades; at one point I shot at an enemy several times point blank and just assumed it was an unkillable ghost when it didn't respond, so it caught me by surprise later when I did successfully down another one in a moment of panic.) Sometimes you get to hop in your car and have a moment of power where you get an opportunity to mow down a few dudes. You get to safety, rinse repeat. In the moment it can be kind of unintuitive what your next step is and there were several times where I just stood around dumbly for a minute because I hadn't found the one little interact prompt I needed to do to progress, but I only ever felt compelled to look something up once because I just failed to grok how one of the early puzzle mechanics worked.

That said, even if I still couldn't tell you exactly how the haymen work mechanically, this game's still easily worth it for the visuals alone and the incredible atmosphere they create and a lot more than just the sum of its gameplay. Just... maybe play a different version of it.

Castlevania 10 is a real video game that you can play on your computer. I would recommend doing so yourself before continuing, because this review will recap basically all of it and I wouldn't want to spoil the many wonders within. It might honestly take longer just to read this.

I learned of this work of art while watching a playthrough of another game by the name of At Least There is Čeda Čedović, a platformer that is built entirely around homages to weird, incredibly obscure 2000s-2010s internet culture, pulling out such deep cuts that it is deliberately intended to feel like laughing along with an in-joke you don't have the context for. Among the game's worlds is one dedicated to Flash games, and the first stage this world presents to you is entitled "Castlevania 10". At the behest of comments mentioning that the source material for this one was incredibly worth witnessing firsthand, I sought out a playthrough (which was approximately three minutes long) and then followed its description to a download of the game itself.

This game was uploaded in 2010 by developer Blueberry Soft to the website Glorious Trainwrecks, whose main page declares they aim to be a hub for the video game equivalent of the old practice of staging trainwrecks for public entertainment, and I think this is unironically an incredible mission statement. This website is dedicated to people making The Room of video games just because it's fun and I have a feeling this is not the last you'll be hearing of something I found there.

The game opens with three midi piano notes before bringing you to the magnificent title screen, which consists of a red-to-black gradient with a large pixelated X over it and the title of the game in dark blue Comic Sans. There's no time to waste marveling at this, however, because there are draculas to kill. This is the latest installment in Konami's hit franchise, after all. The first screen of gameplay presents you with zombies hovering about a meter in the air and floating away from your unidentified viking helmet-wearing Belmont. You must use the incredible power of your Attack Button to clear them away with approximately one million swords, because attacking in this game does not swing your sword but instead spawns an identical, persistent clone of it that slowly drifts forwards through the air. You can hold the button down to fill the screen with these because there is zero cooldown on this mechanic. I think the limit of how many can be on screen at once has to be at least a thousand. The game plays the same sound effect every single time a new sword appears.

Once the zombies are defeated, you continue beyond to find behatted men in yellow outfits who vigorously bounce around the screen like fleas, followed by a clock tower where if you do not immediately enter you are treated to the brilliant sound design of (presumably) the developer's own voice saying "bong" repeatedly. The interior replaces this with a stock cuckoo clock sound effect, and past this are women in white leotards who are bouncing across the walls like a DVD menu screensaver and making little metallic ping sounds when they change direction, animating in such a way that can really only be described as "like that one gif of Elaine from Seinfeld". If you can conquer this terrible force, you can proceed to the first boss.

The first true challenge you must overcome is a very large skeleton with some sort of demon head that is constantly spawning fireballs from its hands, rendering the floor at its feet unapproachable. Lucky for us, we can simply shove our sword inside of the energy barrier behind us to scale the wall and toss a few hundred swords at its heart, because only one needs to actually hit to grant you victory in this encounter. This boss has a pretty cool design and I am almost certain its sprite was ripped from an actual Castlevania game, or potentially frankensteined together out of multiple sprites from any number of sources, but I wouldn't be able to tell you at all where exactly it's from because I have not played any of them outside of like an hour spent being bad at SoTN. Or maybe it WAS made for this game! World's full of many great possibilities.

Once the remaining flames have expired, you can backtrack in the other direction where you must head downstairs into The Sky. There are a few wraiths in your way, who are a bit of a skill check because they're easier to hit if you aim down, and once they are overcome you find yourself at the second boss. This is the hardest part of the game, and it's kind of more a puzzle of how to beat it more than anything; you arrive to a strange sort of insectoid husk and, after some waiting, it sprouts six legs that are lethal to the touch and starts spawning weird cackling faces that start to drift towards you and leave behind a bloody eyeball when they are defeated. Defeat enough faces and the body itself will start flying around shooting lasers. You don't actually have to deal with any of this because the boss is defeated when all of its legs are destroyed, so you can just make use of the ample time you have before they sprout to leave about a zillion swords where they will eventually be.

Beyond this lies a terrifying jumpscare known as Growling Guy Who Runs At You Really Fast, and once he is defeated you are presented with Dracula, helpfully denoted by a second title cutaway that is mostly identical to the first one but now it says "Dracula". The part of Dracula in this masterful work is played by a man in a gorilla costume, surrounded by two guards, all three of whom die instantly when attacked. You've successfully sealed away Dracula's dark power for another 100 years, and so now you can turn around and leave the way you came, at which point the game closes. Rest easy, Belmont. I rate this game a Castlevania 10/10. There is a very real chance this is the final game on this year's list and I am fully satisfied with this.