The Lost and The Wicked

Despite the game being a roguelite, the game suffers heavily from weapons being vastily underpowered except for a few cases, the game feels rather grindy and the ability to swap abilities on keyboard was horrorundus, the upgrades scale terribly and despite being listed as a 3-4 hour game, you'll easily spend that time alone grinding money. Overall the game could have been fun, but the balance of pricing with the weapon damage and poor controls just make this game more of a chore than anything to play after stage 4.

Neat.

Amazingly creative. Still lives in my memory to this day

"The Lost and The Wicked" is a pixelated and stylised top-down-shooter, taking place in a monochrome, limbo-like hellscape. The story about recollecting your mind, [spoiler] addiction and war atrocities [/spoiler] is a bit on the nose and sometimes meandering, but some aspects click, plus the atmosphere is quite dark and dense. The soundtrack is spot-on and eerie! Gameplaywise you get randomised arenas to blast away grotesque foes with some in-between-stat-progression. It is quite frantic and gets progressively harder, but can get a little repetitive near the end. All in all a nice indie title that takes around 3-4 hours and a recommendation for genre-fans and/or niche-enjoyers!

A twin-stick shooter with mostly minimal graphics and simple gameplay mechanics, as well as meta-progression. Health, stamina, damage, and money multipliers upgrade your survivability and the accrual of cash to upgrade that survivability. While some "cutscenes" that seems to be about a soldier coming to terms with who he is and things he's done at the end of his life, beyond the cutscenes though, that is not explored much at all. However, the game easy to pick up and put down, and the gameplay itself is satisfying with screen-shake accompanying plenty of guns and enemies exploding into money. If you like a light psychological element to your top-down shooters, you may find this worth it. This is also another game that is easy to "perfect" on accident.

https://youtu.be/zcsNzhKaD2I Deep down there is something interesting going on here, but it almost feels like too much at once with a focus on variety over the individual quality of the elements featured.