EMUUROM

I guess i have to recommend it bc it's cheap and made with love or whatever but it's so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ frustrating. It's like if jank was a core game mechanic

Well this is an absolutely fantastic game. EMUUROM is really, really great. At least, if you're the kind of person who's going to dig very, very deep, because that's what kind of game this is. I don't want to spoil it, but it's a game where you... scan creatures with your scanner. You don't get upgrades (...not really), but you do unlock shortcuts in the map, and you definitely learn things as you go, oh, do you learn things. Lots of things. I want to stress the "you don't get upgrades" part because you might be thinking that it's a metroidvania. It is not. EMUUROM is a metroid*brainia*, but not a metroidvania. It's OK with this. Again, I don't want to spoil the game because this is one where you definitely want to go in blind, but something you should notice is the number of hours reviewers have spent on the game. Go on, look at that number. There's a LOT here. So when it looks like the game is fairly small, IT ISN'T. AT ALL. And oh, it goes SO deep. The puzzles come in two basic varieties: you have navigation/movement puzzles, which do include some platforming but are mostly about understanding how to use the environment to get from here to there, and knowledge …

I like this game, but it could be a lot better. It's fun the first time to figure out how to get through a room, but in exploring and re-exploring the map you end up having to redo them so many times, it gets quite tedious after a while. I think this game would benefit a lot from having a fast travel system. It can be very easy to accidentally go through a one way door that requires you to take a circuitous route to just get back to the last screen you were on.

Another fantastic metroidbrania. If you like games such as Animal Well, Fez or La Mulana you'll love this. Choc full of exploration, puzzles and secrets!

Not sure how this ended up on my radar, but it has this "secretive vibe" flavour which is my weakness - and it's Finnish, too, although I only learned that when I started playing. And Finns literally are a cut above the rest when it comes to this (Void Stranger, Baba is You, Environmental Station Alpha), so hey. But... no. It just feels weird to play. Metroidvanias are games about movement and exploration, and if one of these is lacking, the other won't hold it. Here the movement just feels janky and wrong. That's what made playing it unfun, in spite of some pretty delicious promise. Emuurom. Do you see? Emu Rom? At first I thought it's just a funny coincidence, but when I learned that it's about a forgotten, nuked world that only exists via some kind of recording, and the world is called "Emuulehto", I smiled while shaking my head. That's terrible! But also immediately tells me what to expect, and I did travel to "Emuulehto". Many, [i]many[/i] years ago. I also experienced long-forgotten worlds; they shaped my sensibilities as a gamer, as an artist. As a person. So even if the pun is awful to the point of actual pain, I immediately understood the gravity of the message. Sure en…

Fantastic puzzle game I find hard to describe in just a genre title. Way deeper than first appears and extremely satisfying to figure out.