Xeodrifter
TL;DR: A very short mini-metroidvania full of challenge and fun!
Gameplay Gist: There are 4 planets you can visit, and you visit each one multiple times as you gain your new powers that let you get to new parts of them. On each trip, your goal is to reach a boss (the same boss every time, but with more abilities), and kill him to suck a new power out of his corpse, which in turn lets you reach new places. There are also a lot of hidden powerups you find with these powers as well. One fundamental power you get is the ability to jump into the background of the game, where you are now teeny tiny (perspective!), which is really cool.
Kombat Kuality: This is a pure platformer: run, jump and shoot! It's well executed so the controls feel good. Your only attack (until much later when you gain a powerful but generally useless super-shot) is just a simple plink of a bullet. What's fun is you can upgrade it in 5 or 6 different ways and tweak it to the situation at hand. Wavey bullets are really useful in the levels, but not needed at all against the boss, so you can dump those wavey points into more damage or fire rate when you get to the boss. The controls just feel good, except the super-clunky way that you toggle between your normal gun and the super shot. There are plenty of unused buttons, it would've been no trouble to just put that on another button instead of having to pause the game to switch it on or off. Also, the boss does have one really annoying power where it turns invincible for a long period of time and you just have to dodge until that's over.
Story Stupid? This is definitely not a story game. Yes, the story is truly stupid. Your ship is stranded, and for some reason this monster has eaten? your warp core, so you have to fight it 7 or 8 times across these four worlds to get it to cough it up and you can travel again. Interestingly, there's no dialog and almost no text at all in the game, which works pretty well, but there's no story to be delivered, so I guess that's why.
Wrapid Wrap-Up: This game feels like a really really good Ludum Dare entry, with a few weeks of extra polish added. It's exactly the kind of game you see in LD, and short enough to make sense there too. I recommend it, it was free with my PSN subscription this month, so yay for me! I plowed through it in an afternoon and couldn't quite stop until I won.
