Black Jewel

Loved it! A short and sweet platformer/slash-em-up with excellent C64-style retro aesthetics, awesome music, and stiff and awkward controls it feels good to finally get a hang of. Black Jewel comes off as punishingly difficult, for two main reasons: - The aforementioned clunky controls (you have to wait through animations to turn around and swing your sword). - Instead of enemies knocking you back when they hit you, they just quickly drain your life for as long as their sprite overlaps yours. You can lose a ton of HP very quickly if you're not careful, including on ground spikes that you might not notice among other background elements. There are no lives, checkpoints or continues, so a death means restarting from the beginning. Having said that, it's also quite accommodating for two reasons: - While the game is going through its loading sequence, type "RYAN" to enable automatic life regeneration. This makes the game exponentially more forgiving, and I made use of this mode once to learn the lay of the land and familiarize myself with what the game had to offer. - The whole game can be beat in less than 15 minutes, so even though you need to start over after every death it doesn't feel TOO punishing. Tips you might want to avoid if you prefer to figure them out on your own: [spoiler] - It's actually generally safer and more life-efficient to simply jump over most enemies instead of defeating them in combat. While your score will suffer (you only get points for defeating enemies), your life bar will thank you. - The spore-launching mushrooms are the most annoying hazard in the game. I found it to be generally safer to get past them as quickly as possible, as there is a delay before they start attacking and you're more likely to take multiple hits if you pause and try to time your approach between seemingly random bursts. - The green projectiles the last boss launches at you can be knocked back to damage him. Doing this, you can beat him by keeping a safe distance and not giving him any opportunity to hit you.[/spoiler] Sadly, there are no achievements and no incentive to play through it multiple times besides aiming for a higher score. Still, I love a nice, compact experience like this. I didn't even play C64 growing up but Black Jewel had me feeling nostalgic anyway. It's janky, but just janky enough for it to be charming. It's challenging but satisfying. Recommended for retro fans and C64 fans in particular.