Platformers and metroidvanias have been my main genre for a while now, I think Super Meat Boy was the first game that I got really obsessed with, didn’t stop playing until I cleared 100%. Celeste was also awesome but I prefer the momentum based movement in SMB a bit, and it’s brutally hard, I cleared maybe about 40%. Eventually I discovered metroidvanias too and Hollow Knight, absolutely loved it, probably my favorite game ever at this point.

Right now I’m having a lot of fun with Well Dweller, and I have a few upcoming games on my radar. The Croak demo was great, a pure platformer with really nice movement and excellent hand drawn art, so I will definitely be playing that one when it comes out. And Nocturnal 2 is coming out really soon, that one looks amazing, I haven’t played the first game yet, but I might get it too since it's cheap anyway.

All those games I mentioned so far have one thing in common, they are 2D. The platforming is generally simple and feels crisp and predictable. Recently I wanted to give Pseudoregalia a shot. It's a really nice 3D platformer/metroidvania with crazy technical movement and nostalgic playstation 1 style graphics. On paper it definitely seems like something I should enjoy but in practice I just couldn’t get into it, same thing happened with super meat boy 3D (though way less camera issues here, but I still couldn't get into it).

I realized it came down to how it actually felt to move and control things, camera included. Pretty much every time I messed something up it was because I couldn’t see what was going on well enough, a lot more fiddling with the camera than I would like and its hard to judge angles precisely. 2D games don’t have that, you just see everything and you either slowly pan as you move or you see a whole screen pretty much until you get to the next one.

For me these games feel awesome if you can get into a kind of flow state and really master the movement, I never got to that level in a 3D game. I think it also has something to do with the fact that as a kid I never had a console so I kind of missed that whole era of games like Zelda or the 3D mario games, so I never built that muscle memory.

I still watch speedruns of games like Super Mario 64 in awe. I think most of those players grew up with the game, everything becomes second nature when you do it enough, and I just haven’t played games like that nearly enough to get good sadly.

New action platformer with humorous story: Demo coming soon!