Aerannis

This one may be relatively short (~7-9 hours), but it's quite a fun and enjoyable trans cyberpunk pseudo-metroidvania experience. Soundtrack: Great overall, perfectly scratching the synthwavy cyberpunk itch! Bandcamp link: https://effoharkay.bandcamp.com/album/aerannis-ost/ Linux support: Haven't tested yet ;-; In a bit of a personal note, Aerannis (everything about it) inspired me to create [TRANSHUMANIST], a cyberpunk Drum & Bass project set to build a silent city controlled by a secretive corporation and follow a young autistic transfeminine hacker disowned by her parents and her journey to uncover the horrors done by the corporate in the name of security, progress and "human evolution". https://linktr.ee/transhumanistic/ TLDR: Not a metroidvania, not for everyone, but if you're a trans cyberpunk fanatic like me then it'll be a short but great adventure right up your alley!! :3

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ THE SOUNDTRACK IS AMAZING. The game didn't give me the best first impression, you're thrown in a strange area with some chars talking nonsense, your jump is floaty, you can throw a candy with no obvious effect and there's a weird "gesture" button (that we learn later it's actually a grab) but the music alone was enough to keep me going. The controls are not bad on controller once you learn what they do, the floaty jump is not an issue, the only bad thing is the item selection, you have to open the item tab and change the weapon with the dpad but your character still moves while the tab is open making it horrible when you need to make a change mid-fight. Why not just cycle through the items with a press of the button? There's only 3 of them. There's also a bug related to the item selection, if you reached a checkpoint with one item selected, change it later and die, the game will show the last item you used as equipped, but it's actually the item you had equipped when you reached the checkpoint the first time. You'll have to change your item manually every time you respawn, i got a few game overs in stealth missions thanks to this bug. The gameplay is decent, the act…

Aerannis is yet another of literally thousands of 2D retro pixel platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. This shovelware platformer has at least had some effort put into it, it's not just a copy+paste of a platformer template from GameMaker Studio or Construct 2, but all that means is a lot of work went into a poor game concept for an old, dead format, when they could have saved a lot of time and done what most amateur developers do and copy + paste a template. Anyway this one has a metroidvania style and some kind of cyberpunk/cthulu theme, but this is all lost in the craptastic technical execution. Controls are clunky and restrained, somewhat unresponsive feeling, so that's a killer even if you can look past the glaring technical defects. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result. There's no options t…

Ugly Characters, Drepressing writing, and gameplay that more frustrating than fun. Aerannis is another "metroidvania" styled game about a distopic future where the media brainwashes people and covers up major potential hazards from the public. While not particularly novel, the writing isn't bad, and the world requires you to think about how you're going to navigate it rather than just pushing you in the correct direction. The main issue is that just about everything about this game leads it to being less than fun. First, the art style of the game is pixel graphics, but nothing in the game stands out as being really good. The main character looks really bad. Now, prehaps they didn't want a hired killer to be good looking, which is fine, but nothing about the character is appealing (in terms of as a character, not arousing) so I never really cared much. On top of the lack luster art and animations, the movement mechanics of the game are inconsistent and difficult to pull off. I could go on about all the issues I had with the game, the lack of polish, and what not, but the bottom line is that: at best, this game is mediocre, but at worst, it's a frustrating mess. I can'…

Sometimes the liberal memes are a little too... boring? Inside jokey? Not to say I didn't understand the references, as a leftist I definitely did, it just didn't make the dystopian game any better.

They did it. They baited us with a trans protag and gave us some crypto-gamergate ♥♥♥♥ that tries to masquerade as something inclusive with good intentions a la snoot game.