Ronin's Requiem

This is a decent no-frills sidescroller with NES stylings. It's not difficult, but I found it engaging enough to enjoy from start to finish. The spritework is, while not ambitious, very tasteful. The bosses and the level 'map' look rushed but everything else does a surprisingly good job at bringing the NES era of spritework into the modern age. Good: +nice visual style and sprite work on tilesets and enemies +pleasant difficulty +very simple to play +no story or other distractions, just gameplay +runs great with gamepad/steamdeck Bad: -Bosses are very primitive, mechanically and visually -could use a little more content (levels lack variety and enemies are heavily re-used throughout) -audio/music is atrocious, even if it is trying to emulate NES sounds. 6/10

The game takes clues from classic action platformers on the NES. It's on the shorter end length-wise, being completable in an hour or so. You have infinite lives and checkpoints are dispersed at relatively reasonable intervals. There's no options to speak of. The game starts windowed and you can change it to full screen. Controller supports works fine. [h2]Controls[/h2] Movement can feel sluggish. Especially initially the character can feel 'sticky' to control. It seems some inputs prevent other actions from being made, which might be caused by a lack of input buffering For example, it can be difficult to perform a jump directly followed a landing crouched attack. If you try to inch yourself forward, you'll note that you're instead clearly forced to take a few steps forward. You seem to be locked into that running state, where it can even be difficult to crouch out of it at moment's notice - rather, you need to be in the particular part of the running animation to be able to cancel out of it. It's almost reminiscent of games with rotoscoped animations, where movement is extremely sluggish with overly detailed animations you can't cancel. Your attacks have a pre-attack wind-up …