Soulcaster

"Soulcaster" is a student project from the Digipen Institute of Technology, who sometimes can come up with quite compelling games. And sometimes they don't, like with Soulcaster. This is a retro 2D platformer that just barely shies away from being called pixelcrap, and it's a mystery what the teachers thought they were telling the students here. "Hey, it's 2020, 3D acceleration became mainstream in 1995, so we're going to teach you how to make 2D games, because we like teaching people wrong, on purpose." This 2D platformer is painfully generic and boring, and of course as a student project there's not much content either. It's a puzzle platformer that features the "twin" gimmick as you can project your "soul" in this soulless student project into other rooms to help you solve puzzles. Wake me up when Digipen gets a class of students who pass the course. This features really godawful, lazy 2D retro "art" instead of real graphics. This looks bad because of that decision, and that's a major deterrent to gamers. Games like Terraria and Stardew Valley succeeded [i]despite[/i] the bad graphics, not because of them. Digipen failed their students here by allowing them to think s…

It's fun and a lot of the levels are super difficult head-scratchers, but the achievements just seem unfair tbh.

Игра 'Soulcaster' - это увлекательная смесь экшена и стратегии с видом сверху. Управляя волшебником, призывающим духов для защиты от волн врагов, чувствуешь себя настоящим тактиком. Графика хоть и пиксельная, но очаровательная и стильная, отлично передает атмосферу темного фэнтези. Механика призыва и управления духами интуитивно понятна, но при этом дает пространство для экспериментов и создания собственных стратегий. Особенно радует разнообразие духов, каждый со своими уникальными способностями и недостатками. Это заставляет постоянно адаптироваться к новым типам врагов и обстоятельств. Сложность игры нарастает постепенно, не давая заскучать, но и не бросая в пекло с самого начала. Единственный минус - хотелось бы больше уровней и больше разнообразия в типах врагов. В целом, 'Soulcaster' - это отличная игра для тех, кто ищет динамичную и стратегическую игру с приятной ретро-графикой.

I'm a big fan of "archeology girl" games; I think Metroid Prime was one of the first games I considered to be truly exceptional. The curve of difficulty in rooms felt smooth, but none of them had left me completely stumped and were usually solvable with trial and error. I found that the more I started to think of the game as a sort of locksmith puzzle, the more the stone barriers began to actually take on the appearance of rising and falling tumblers. The ending of the game has a surprising amount of set-piece levels, which was a welcome change of pace to finish out on. The game has traded a quantity of Mind gameplay in favor of cementing a Land experience, using the last three levels to escort me out and an extremely simple final level to contrast the atmosphere of the "game" part of the game with a modest jungle ambience. While I was expecting more Land development to appear in the game proper, I appreciate the dedication to the principle against the odds of scoping out a whole new area, which prompts the desire for mechanics unique to that area to contrast the gauntlet; perhaps a stray magic stone from the gauntlet lets you possess monkeys or something. Maybe Steven Universe s…

Not bad, pretty good mechanics Runs smooth as well

It took me 34 minutes to complete all ~20 levels on a Steam Deck. It says controller recommended, but I felt it actually would have worked better with keyboard and mouse because aiming where to spawn the clone with a joystick never felt right to me. Sometimes it didn't seem to move very much. Other times it moved really quickly. It would have been much easier and faster to be able to point my mouse in the direction or at the location I wanted to spawn the clone. In fact, after a while I began to suspect that maybe moving the joystick was actually moving an invisible mouse cursor around the screen. So pressing one way or another may have made a large or insignificant change in the aiming direction depending on where the invisible cursor was relative to my character's position. But I didn't take the time to test that hypothesis. The graphics are simple, but passable. I had the volume turned down pretty low, so I can't really comment on the sound effects and music. I could hear that there was music, but I couldn't really hear it. If it's anything like the music from the trailer, that's probably a good thing, as the trailer's music is a bit grating on the ears. There was really only…