A Few More Fun Indies! (Thoughts on Rift of the Necrodancer and Star of Providence)

     Hey friends, it's that time of year where I like to sit down and check out some of the new indie games that have caught my eye in the last few months. Today I have to talk about two of them that I've really been enjoying in the past few weeks. Even though one of them really didn't catch my interest until it was already out, the other one is something that I've been excited for. So I'll go ahead and talk a bit about each of these in what will be a fairly short post today.

The Depths Of A Mysterious Factory, or a Funky Void?

    The first game I'll talk about today is Star of Providence. You may remember last year that I talked a bit about a game called Animal Well, which was the first game being published by Big Mode Games, the company owned and headed up by the Youtuber Videogamedunkey. That game was great, so when they announced the second game, I had to check it out. I didn't think this game would be for me, because it's a roguelike ship-based shoot-'em-up game, and I am not great at most roguelikes like this one. I will say that I have had periods of time where I was pretty alright at Enter the Gungeon, and I played a lot of Binding of Isaac years and years ago, which both aren't too different from this game, but those were a while ago. I'm happy to report that Star of Providence (which is a remake of an older game that was only on Steam called Monolith) is a lot of fun, even though I'm still not very good at it. It's a tough game about maneuvering your spaceship through hordes of enemies and projectiles in a very narrow and dangerous space, and trying to get to the deepest floor you can, while fighting whatever bosses randomly spawn along the way. It's a familiar premise to follow if you've played some of the games that I've already mentioned, but you're playing as a ship and constantly getting weird and unconventional weapons, getting you stronger and stronger for lots of different bosses that can be brutal. The best thing I can say about this game is that even if you've tried a certain weapon, there are so many different ways to tweak and make that weapon stronger because of keywords, which you pick up as you go along. These will give your weapons perks to make them better, but once your weapon runs out of ammo, then you lose it all together. There have been runs where I nearly won just because I happened to get a really good gun, but I'm still just not very good. I beat one run, but I didn't have the right material to unlock the deeper levels so I had to start again. This is a very deep game, and I'm not really sure how to put it into words in this short period of time, but I'm very glad that I gave it a try. I'm hoping that I'll make some more progress in the near future, but it's a tough one for sure.

    Rift of the Necrodancer is another game that came out recently, and one that I've been waiting for for a good while. There's an indie game that came out a long time ago called Crypt of the Necrodancer, which is a really cool blend of rhythm games and roguelike dungeon crawlers. In the game, you play as Cadence (or a handful of other characters, depending on how far you are), and you move around the dungeon, hopping from tile to tile along with the excellent soundtrack, and try to defeat the monsters and take out the boss of the area. It's a very hard game, because even though I really like rhythm games, the monsters in this game all have different movement patterns that you have to memorize in order to be successful. It's shocking how quickly a run can be ruined because you forgot how this one enemy moves, and they took out half of your health before you realized what was happening. I really like rhythm games though, and Rift of the Necrodancer looked to be a much more traditional rhythm game, almost looking like a spiritual successor to Guitar Hero with the inputs rolling down the screen towards you, and then occasionally, the game breaks into a boss fight or a Rhythm Heaven inspired minigame, which is always a lot of fun. This game is very good and I'm glad that I picked it up basically right away, though it is definitely really hard, for a lot of the same reasons as Crypt, with the enemies all moving in different patterns and with you having to remember how each monster moves. I'm still not finished with it, but I'm hoping that I'll be able to get better at this game too, especially as they continue to put out more and more indie-inspired DLC. So far they have released Super Meat Boy, Celeste, and Pizza Tower, with more to come it seems.

    Indie games continue to chug along, and I'm all for it! Sure, we haven't heard anything about Hollow Knight: Silksong in a while, but in the meantime, there's good stuff coming out all the time, and even more stuff is coming when you consider AA titles like Clair Obscura: Expedition 33. I haven't had a chance to play that yet, but I'm hoping that I'll enjoy that once I have a chance to. It's always so great to dive into a new Indie game that you're not sure about. To find something special that you keep coming back to makes it even better.

    Thanks so much for reading this post, friends! I hope you enjoyed a few fairly short thoughts on a couple of games that have caught my eye recently. Let me know somewhere online if you've found something recently that you've really enjoyed, I would love to hear about it! I hope you're all having a great week and I hope to talk to you soon! Until next time, I'm Jonathan, a Self-Proclaimed indie game enjoyer, and I'll talk to you again soon!