Reviews: Witchtrade, Void Stranger, Corn Kidz, Ketsui

[roadrunnertwice]

Oh, hmm. I've had some of these reviews sitting around for a while, let's thin the herd a bit.

Isaac Safron Robin — Witchtrade, issues 1-6 (comics)

Mar. 11, 2025

Available at author's itch.io page You might also know Robin as the character artist from Christine Love's Get in the Car, Loser.

I liked these a lot! I think I previously reviewed Robin's short comic Baby Universe here; I thought the cartooning on it was delicious and the boys were extremely cute, but it ended pretty quick and I was left wishing for something with compatible vibes but a bit more room to breathe. This is that!

Well, the first issue isn't that, but after that it spreads out a bit and lets you take in the scenery. (You could probably skip that first one, tbh, or come back to it as a curiosity after you've read the rest of the series.) You can see Robin getting better at developing engaging ways to drive a story to nowhere in particular; lots of loose threads pointing at shared history between characters, pauses for exposition on cultural and geographical landmarks, decorative architecture... cuties........

Anyway, I liked the characters a lot, and I also really liked the city-as-character; it's a dreamy place that makes you hungry to visit.

Bonus Level: Void Stranger

Mar 19, 2025

Another banger from System Erasure, developers of ZeroRanger. This time we’ve got a brutal tile-based puzzle game in the extended Sokoban family; the main twist involves picking up a floor tile and moving it to an empty square, with some extra complexity around managing your orientation since you can’t freely turn around in place.

I nearly filled a whole Field Notes book in the process of taking this game apart. Appropriately for the theme of descending into the abyss in search of answers (or absolution or annihilation), this thing goes deep. The screen-by-screen traversal puzzles are gnarly enough, but they’re the mere surface; the live marrow of the game is hidden behind complex encoded meta-puzzles about the nature of the void and its masters. It’s unforgiving and cryptic, and sometimes hilariously vindictive (I have to go to Void Court?! you'll never take me alive, copper), but somehow, every time you finally crack through one of those walls and gain a tiny bit more control over the void, it’s always worth it.

I was obsessed with this game! It’s aggressively not for everyone; not only is the puzzle gameplay niche, but you also have to secretly kind of love it when a game threatens to reset your progress (and then actually does it). But the escalating reveals and payoffs were glorious, the type of artistic experience that only video games are capable of. The amount of badass bespoke content locked behind some of the furthest and most brutal progression gates is astounding (what an inspiring amount of faith in the player!), and the massive setpieces at the culmination of the DIS path are nothing short of jaw-dropping. Whatever you can imagine after playing the first two or three routes, think bigger than that.

Anyway, this game is fucking good and you should strongly consider playing it. If you do take the plunge, I've got some advice:

• NOTEBOOK.
• Take notes on any per-floor puzzle solution where you had to actually think about it. You'll be re-traversing these floors a lot, but there's no need to re-solve them, and I promise your memory's not good enough.
• Note the floors on which you encountered NPCs or cryptic objects. If you need to go see them again, you'll want to know where to look.
• When in doubt, take a screenshot! Some puzzles require this, many benefit from it. In particular, you will be returning to those damaged murals... a lot. (If you missed a crucial shot, the wiki on Miraheze has a library with every room, but you won't want to touch that until you've already cleared two or three endings.)
• When you find a puzzle that seems like it might require a printer: 1. Yeah, it's a lot easier that way. 2. The correct solution has partial visual gaps, but is spatially consistent. (This was the only thing I had to look up, and hopefully will make no sense until you've already solved the conceptual part of the puzzle.)

Bonus Level: Corn Kidz 64

Mar. 15, 2025

A pitch-perfect love letter to the weird glory days of the 3D character platformer genre; a little bit of Spyro, a little bit of Banjo Kazooie, that sort of thing. It handles nicely, doesn’t overstay its welcome, and costs maybe seven or eight bucks. I love the protagonists’ little mall-goth outfits.

This appears to be from a one-person developer that has put out ONE other game, back maybe a decade ago. You would not have been able to guess this by the game's level of quality and polish! I haven't looked them up, but my official guess is that they have a day job in the game industry and have probably worked on some games I've heard of.

Bonus Level: Ketsui: Kizuna Jigoku Tachi

Mar. 24, 2025

More shmup chaos, and okay, I'm breaking my own rules a bit by reviewing this after only playing it for a couple weeks, but: this game rocks.

I'd already tried a handful of classic CAVE bullet hells from the late '90s and early '00s — DoDonPachi, DDP DaiOuJou, and Mushihimesama. Ketsui is from the same era (2002), and is reputed to be especially nasty even considered in the context of its brutal siblings. And of course, this one ends up being the CAVE shooter that finally fuckin' GRABS me.

Why'd I pick this one up? Well, the aesthetic (semi-realistic near-future military hardware) didn't really call my name, nor was I especially enticed by the prospect of "even ruder than DOJ." But as it turns out, this is the only CAVE shooter conveniently available on the US Playstation store, and I wanted one to play on the downstairs couch. (Our cat Annabel reeeeally likes to sit on my lap down there, and she's been especially clingy since Halla died, so I was kind of buying it as a treat for her.*)

Oddly, I actually find this more approachable than the other CAVE games I've tried. The bullet patterns and pacing are, indeed, pretty fucking hard, but somehow they're easier for me to work with than the ones in DOJ and Mushi, at least in the first three levels. It feels easier to parse the patterns into learnable chunks than it did in DOJ (though I don't quite have the language to explain how), which gives my memory and reflexes a lot more to grab onto. The environments, too, have very distinct shapes and zones, which helps in the same way. (A very neat trick here is that each level's background flows directly into the next! It shows a looping interstitial zone while tallying up your score, then scrolls straight into the next level.)

Also, I really like the scoring system, and I really like the lock-on focus shot. Both of them feel like they give me a ton of agency and flexibility for approaching problems, whereas DOJ for example really just demands head-on rigid perfection. Much like Blue Revolver, the scoring involves using small-scale chains to build and cash out a multiplier effect. I like this family of short-chain approaches WAY better than trying to juggle one chain through an entire level! It makes it so there isn't one clearly optimal strategy, which makes the game feel more open and playful. Also, the multiplier-building method here requires going up and point-blanking some (but not all) enemies, which creates a sort of push-pull balance of caution and aggression that I find very pleasing.

This version is one of the famed M2 ShotTriggers remasters. The emulation feels rock-solid and responsive, and the whole package around it is as nice as everyone says it is. Several arranged soundtracks to choose from, a bunch of training tools and alternate modes, save states, and the wild array of widescreen gadgets that inspired the UI in Blue Revolver: Double Action. The built-in save states have been especially nice, because they let me ignore the in-place continue system I dislike so much in these old arcade games: just make a save the first time I reach a level or boss with a decent stock of lives, restart there when I die, and now I can act like the game has Touhou-style or ZeroRanger-style continues instead. That way, I can keep challenging myself to actually handle a whole section in one go, keep pushing further in the game if I squeak through, but not have to start from level 1 each run if level 2 is what I'm working on.

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* Update since I wrote this review: we adopted a new, very young cat several weeks ago, and named her Magpie (Maggie for short). Annabel thinks she is very annoying, and also has become visibly calmer, less distraught, and less bereft ever since she arrived. Yes, pictures at some point.