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This game is an absolute must-buy for fans of fighting games and even those with a mild interest in the genre. The character design and art style are this game's strongest points. Each character has its roots in the archetypes of the genre, but manage to bring a unique and innovative twist to what you would expect. Little touches, such as the dead bodies of the characters that have been defeated in 2v2 or 3v3 matches, make this game truly stand out. Those who love Marvel vs Capcom 2 will feel right at home in the gameplay, which is incredibly tight and responsive. However, stylistically, this game feels more like an entry in the Darkstalkers franchise because of the imagination and tone of the characters. Indeed, if Capcom had any sense, they would have reached out to Lab Zero to make a new Darkstalkers game, because it would be phenomenal.
Even for those who are lukewarm or the genre or lack confidence, the tutorial system is second to none and will quickly teach you the mechanics of the game and the strategies of the genre.
I cannot recommend this game strongly enough, as someone who spends a lot of time playing 90s Capcom fighting games on MAME, I can confidently say that this is my favorite 2D fighting game of all time.

I have been playing hockey games since I began playing videogames. This may be the least fun and most disappointed I've been with any hockey game I've ever played, and that statement includes my experiences with the terrible NHL '94 port for the Game Gear and the recent 2K game on mobile.

When I saw the announcement for this game I was very intrigued. However, despite what it claimes, this game is not an old-school, retro arcade throwback. It is a low-rent, unresponsive version of any recent EA hockey game but with cell-shaded graphics and a cheap 1970s attitude.

This game is slugglish at best. It was impossible for me to tell the difference between a player who had bad stats or was fatigued and the game's performance issues. But it's true crime is the input delay. There is a half second pause between almost every input and the games animations beginning. At no point did I truly feel in control of the players. An arcade hockey game should be a balance between basic hockey instincts and fighting-game level speed with your fingers. However, this game quicly deteriorated into me mashing a single button and hoping the players animation would trigger, and about half the time it did.

There appear to be no one timers. Perhaps they hadn't been invented by this point in hockey history. However, by 1994 they were well established in hockey video games, so I don't think this game has a good excuse not to have them as well. This means that the strategy of this game is basically to skate to the middle of the ice and shoot, and sometimes it goes in, and sometimes it doesn't. The players response time is not fast enough to be able to count on rebound goals either. I also found the delay time on the passing to be bad enough that I stopped trying outside of the neutral zone. So, I would just skate backwards (because the game doesn't seem to anticipate that you will do that when you have the puck, and actually seemed faster than skating forward) and then try to take a shot. Which is to say, no actual hockey strategy is needed to be successful in this game.

So, I'm assuming this is actually a half hearted attempt to recreate Mutant League Hockey. The hockey itself is secondary, and the true game is abusing the other team as much as possible and then debuffing them by winning fights. However, the fighting itself is terrible. It is slow, unresponsive, and - stop me if I'm repeating myself - feels somewhat random. It also suffers from a lack of animations, there are no satisfying knock out blows, when one player's health is gone, they return to their default grapple stance and then that player turtles and the other one gets to take meaningless shots at them on the ground. Every fight basically plays the same, you circle around and try to take free shots, then you lock into a grapple and punch or dodge, three punches and you're done. But, it doesn't seems to matter when you hit the button, there is a cool down after each punch, so it will only throw the next one when its ready. And the dodge appears to be broken, except for the computer players.

I will conceed, fighting in hockey games is incredibly difficult to pull off. Blades of Steel was probably the best, because it was simple, reponsive and intuitive (high / low punch, high / low block). This is has basically been the only formula that has had any success: NHL Hits improved upon it, some of the new EA games also combined this system with a grapple to some sucess. But OTH fails. It is some of the least fun fighting in any game. It is exasperated by the fact that happens 10-20 times per game. Despite a wealth of clips of stick combat in their promotional video, it only happened once for me, and it was great, but only because it seemed to be a one shot kill and the fight ended immediatly afterwards.

I would like to apologize to the developers for this review, because I really wished this game was better. Maybe I came to it with the wrong expectations. I wanted a game that was fast and exciting. I wanted something with the NHL 94 speed boosts, 2-on-2 Open Ice Challenge and Wayne Gretsky 64 powerups, and NHL Hits fighting. But its not any of those things. It feels half baked. I will check back in with it in 3-6 months and I hope they have done significant work. If so, I will gladly change this review to reflect it. But at this point, take a hard, accurate pass on it (because none of the players in the game will).

This game was an absolute pleasure. I am a fan of the genre, and Headlander bring a lot of new and interesting ideas into the space. The graphics and art design are amazing. The puzzles are generally good. The action is also a lot of fun, and the leveling system brings some variety to gameplay. The controls are tight and satisfying.

There are a few issues. Limited audio samples, especially in the bosses and the sarcastic talking doors, can lead to annoying moments. The cover system is basically broken as well. But, it is easy to overlook those problems.

I'm very disappointed that I have come to the decision to not recommend this game. I tried to justify a recommendation so many times through my playthrough, but in the end, I simply cannot.
I would like to start with the positive qualities of this game. The sound design is amazing and the graphics and animations are very unique and interesting. It succeeds in creating an intense and terrifying atmosphere despite its story book artstyle.
I was absolutely in love with this game for the first thirty minutes, however, the experience got bogged down by bad design choices and over indulgence.

There are two enemies of a horror games, boredom and frustration, and unfortunately, this is exactly the two flavors that remain in my mouth after my playthrough. The game makes a hard turn from disturbing imagery to challenging puzzles, which was a bad choice. In each stage, there is a unique type of monster that blocks your way, unfortunately, it is only one kind of monster. This game would have benefitted greatly from adding one or two more types of hazards and each environment. However, it is the puzzle design that I found so frustrating. A good puzzle game will teach you the tools necessary for you to solve the puzzle and then throw a curveball. In a good puzzle game, the player should be constantly flipping between the feelings of the puzzle being easy and the puzzle being impossible. But this is not what happens in Neverending Nightmares. Instead, it turns into a pixel hunt, where you are trying to find the little trick to each puzzle by peering through the murky sketches. An example of this: one puzzle requires you to step on a piece of glass in order to draw out the monster, but up until that point, the game has taught you that stepping on glass always results in being killed.

I had to resort to watching YouTube Walkthroughs, and the Youtubers frustration cemented in my mind that this design was flawed. In a horror game like this, you should only be dying when the game decides it's important for the story. But, there is a mixture of scripted deaths which push forward the narrative and cheap deaths from failing to avoid an enemy that led to confusion and, eventually, took the atmosphere and horror out of the game.

Furthermore, the game is relatively short. My first and only playthrough ended up being roughly 1 hour and 40 minutes but there was probably 45 minutes of content. A little bit more restraint in the level design and the number of rooms and encounters would have greatly helped tighten it up. I found myself throwing my arms up and asking the game what it wanted me to do. There are multiple paths and endings, but I will not be going back to explore them.

Four out of Five Stars.
Very enjoyable ittle game. It is well written, self aware and inventive. The puzzles are well designed and the tools that they give you feel genuinely unique. The game does an excellent job of showing you puzzles that you can't solve yet. Then, sending you to a tutorial area, teaching you the skills to solve the puzzle, and then putting you back in the world to use those skills to tackle the problems.
Only major problem is performance. The game frequently drops frames and slows down, which is not acceptable, considering the graphics and AI are modest.
Otherwise, fantastic.

This is the best platformer I've ever played, and I am not forgetting the Mario games. It takes the basis of a fighting game combo system and applies to to the melee combat in a very deep and satisfying way, but it expends that principle to the platforming as well. This is a challenging and interesting game from start to finish.

This is a game that I am extremely conflicted about. It has a clear focus and theme, which it executes well. I believe that it does something very special and rare, which is that it is able to communicate its ideas effortlessly and intuitively without words and with minimal text. It is an extremely simple game, which allows for a very pure showcase of ideas, and that is something that often gets lost by developers under layers of systems and complications.
This game has a very basic graphical style and a singular theme which it sticks to throughout. It is stylish and it works. There are some games, like Limbo, which try to do one thing and do it really well, and this is one of those kinds of games. The shooting feels good, the controls are responsive and work. Halfway through my play through, they added mouse and keyboard support, and I switched from a controller to M&K, and I found the added precision in shooting helpful but didn't make the game that much easier, as I felt that I was trading off some movement control for shooting control, and both aspects feel balanced fairly.
This is a challenging game, it is a test of reflex and some pattern recognition. It is also very short. It is the twin stick shooter equivalent of Super Meat Boy, or, if you are feeling generous, Dark Souls. However, it is in this structure that I inevitably became bored and frustrated with THOTH. The game is a collection of short levels in which you must shoot all of the enemies to progress. The game gives you check points every 4 levels. Being touched by any enemy is always a one hit kill and you will be returned to your last check-pointed level. This seems fine at first, and even adds some tension and meaning to the game’s progression. However, it quickly becomes clear that you will spent a lot of time replaying the same levels. The game does a good job of fast restarts and this is why it feels like Super Meat Boy. It also sometimes has the feeling of beating your head against the same boss that Dark Souls did. However, unlike those games there is significantly less depth to this game. Not that it is totally void of mechanics, but there is basically shooting and moving, and if you aren’t shooting, you will move quicker.
But the simplicity that is it’s brilliance is also it’s downfall. In Dark Souls, if you are stuck, there are other things you can do, like grind out souls to become more powerful, or go to a different area. In Meat Boy, you can switch your character, or go to the dark world and try a different level. In THOTH, you can’t, other than replaying older levels (which gives you no additional bonus), if you are stuck and you want to keep playing, then you have to keep repeating the same sequence of levels and hope that this time you are able to avoid the hazards or shoot better. In Dark Souls, even in the sessions when you make no in game progress (or even lose progress), there is at least a feeling of learning. In THOTH, there is often not even that. Even when I had learned the strategy to successfully pass through each level, I was forced to repeat that same action and hope I didn’t make a mistake, and if I didn’t make any progress in terms of level progression, then it really felt like wasted time.
I only got stuck a handful of times, and only twice really badly. The first was around level 36 and the second time, and more significantly, was the level 16 checkpoint, specifically level 13. I was stuck on this series of levels for roughly an hour, which is significant when you consider I beat the game in under 3 hours. This means that I spent somewhere between a half to a third of my time with this game repeating the same two or three levels, in the hopes that I could get to the fourth, then dying quickly and doing it again.
This is made worse by the structure of the level series. Generally, the first level will show you the new mechanic, and then the subsequent levels will build on that concept and increase the challenge. This means that a large part of what I was doing was replaying the “tutorial” levels. However, they were not without challenge, and the fact that things could go badly so quickly meant that it was not a guarantee that I would get to the place where I was stuck each time. Needless to say, this made for some frustrating moments. Quite frankly, if I was not so close to the end of the game at that point, I would have stopped playing, because a lot of the enjoyment I got from the game was gone by then. Even once I got through and found myself progressing at a reasonable rate through the end of the game, I was maddened each time I had to replay content. The mechanic had gotten under my skin and my tolerance for it had basically vanished.
Once you complete the last numbered level, you are given a series of challenges. They are numbered as 8, 16, 24, 32. These are a randomized collection of level that you need to complete in a row (the first being eight levels, then sixteen, and so on). This actually solves a lot of the problems I had with the repetition of the game, but it highlights another issue, which is the extreme difficulty level. I may be able to complete 8 or possibly 16 levels in a row, but I will never get to 32, so I am not even going to bother trying.
You may find this criticism to be more on me than on the game, maybe you think the failure is my inability to be “good” at video games, and that difficult games should be, well, difficult and punishing. However, for me, the lack of depth and variety in the game, and having to replay the same content made me wish that there was some middle road, such as, if you beat a level more than 100 times, you don’t have to play it again. Because, at times, I felt that my time wasn’t being respected and that sucked away a lot of the enjoyment and enthusiasm that I had at the start of my play through.
Ultimately, I am recommending this game, because I think for the cost and the actual time you have to put into it, it has enough interesting ideas and a good enough style to carry it and make it worth experiencing. It is a great example of how you don’t need a big budget or expensive graphics to make something fun and engaging. However, it is also an example of how a design decision can destroy an experience. If you don’t like twin stick shooters, or you don’t have a tolerance for grinding without progress, then this is an easy pass.

Deeply emotional and emotionally moving, The Beginner's Guide is, in so many ways, unique, inspirational, troubling, awe inspiring. It brings so many new and interesting ideas into the medium, it shows so much creativity and potential. This is a work of genius. This is videogames moving into the realm of legitmate art. This is a collection of Kafka short stories. This is a sketch pad of Salvador Dali. Davy Wreden is a force, and he should be heralded as one of the true inventors in this industry.

This is among the most stunning games I've played. The art is fantastic, the writing is as well. Great music. Good story. OK game play. It's short, sweet and poignant.

This game is a kind of sickness for me. Somewhere between the difficulty and the ability to grind your way through said difficulty, I ended up losing a good 60 hours, and I will probably put another 15-20 to complete. The moment to moment action is fantastic, there is a wonderful feeling of one on one combat when you lock onto a target and it's very satisfying to learn the enemy attacks. I also love the gloom and despair that drapes itself through every aspect of this game and I find the minimalist story telling intriguing.
That being said, the quality of this PC port is appalling. It was obviously an afterthought and they deserve to have their feet held to the fire. There is a lot of documentation about this online, but things that I find most important include a frame rate that is locked at 30, the resolution will not render at 1080p even if change the setting in the menu and I had frequent problems with the game hanging on launch. There's a well known dsfix which deals with some of these issues and allows for better AA and other effects, but it's shameful that this is the only solution. And if you are intimidated by copying files into the game folder or messing with text documents then it's not going to be a good solution. Similarly, not all the problems were smoothed out, unlocking the frame rate caused intense screen tearing, for which there's a different work around but running at 60 also messes with game mechanics like the roll/jump distance, so I ended up playing at 30, and even then it doesn't always run well and sometimes inexplicably drops frames.
It's really unfortunate, since this is a special game and worth playing.