Midnight Witch Starlight

Midnight Witch Starlight is a student project from DigiPen. One of the first things students should be taught in game development is that 3D graphics became mainstream in the mid 1990's with dedicated 3D cards like the Voodoo3 and the ATI Rage. But the students were deliberately mistaught that's it's okay to release obsolete 2D games in the 3D era of gaming... certainly any professional developer seeing a prospective new hire who doesn't even know about 3D gaming probably isn't going to give them a job. Needless to say if an educational institution taught me incorrectly on purpose, I'd ask for my money back. It's a 2D run-and-gun side-scroller inspired by 90s anime. The story involves a magical girl fighting a "legion of shadow" to free corrupted spirits. You use spells with different elements (e.g., light) to attack enemies and progress through the changing forest. This is possibly one of the laziest, lowest effort DigiPen projects I've seen... it's just a single screen shooter, and apart from the upgrade gimmicks, has absolutely nothing going for it. We also have to question what value there is for gamers on Steam when institutions flood the store with low quality 2D vide…

https://youtu.be/ksbw_mXwL8M My full playthrough as well as thoughts and commentary along the way. So I won't lie, I had some issues with the game, and when I mean issues I literally mean I had some troubles figuring out how to play the game. It was all on me after a while it finally clicked in my head and I realized I had been doing this wrong the whole time so don't be like me. Give the game a try it's pretty quick but enjoyable.

I started in my usual hubris of attempting to intuit how to play rather than just reading, yet I had not realized that I would find it to be more esoteric than I expected; enemies have potent strengths and weaknesses and also look identical save for their status icon showing their element. Spamming the basic elemental attack ran me out of time in short order, and the combination spell probably wasn't something I was privy to stumble upon due to the pace of the game. Even once I had learned it, I assumed I needed to run past the elemental bullet, turn around, and fire back at it. Thankfully I was able to intuit myself out of that hole and simply shoot a double, although the timing between shots feels sticky. The game is a finely paced and engaging Nerve beater with a null progression; that is, even the most substantial change between levels, the upgrades, are hard to verify because the health and shield bars don't change in size, and attacks are inevitably entangled in elemental damage calculations that I can't see. My radical course of action would be to just take away the levels and centralize everything around the timer mechanic; victory could entail receiving enough time bonuse…

I got interested in this game because of the magical girl character design. At first, I had no idea what I was doing and kept losing, but eventually I figured out the mechanics. You should use your elemental magic first, then your light/basic magic—it spreads and becomes much stronger. The game can be challenging, but I found out that using the dash ability lets you tank enemy attacks, which is super handy and can be a game saver. The shop could also use more information about what each potion or upgrade does. Overall, it’s an okay game—confusing at first, but you will get the hang of it.

i know that guy

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