Letalis

Good game. Reminds me a lot of early Pokemon, back when the series still had some semblance of difficulty. You play as a Letalis Manager, leading your squads of Letalis (gladiator pokemon), to try and become a Caesar (this world's version of a Gym Leader) of your own Coliseum. It's got the good and the bad parts of old GBA stuff. You essentially learn every mechanic in the game by talking to various NPCs around towns. This means if you forget / overlook something, you have no means of looking it up aside from going back to whatever previous area you were in and trying to find an NPC that tells you the info you're looking for. (For me, it was trying to find out how to break rocks- apparently that's an ability you only unlock after beating the first Coliseum? Maybe?) Also, playing this on a big monitor definitely feels weird. I got used to it over time, but this would be 100x better played on a Steam Deck or some other form of handheld. (I would genuinely recommend the developer post this game up on mobile stores, people would eat this up on mobile) The visual style is really nice, I like the limited colors and the 8-bit style. I know that it's supposed to be reminiscent of GBA, but it also reminds me a lot of the old NES games I used to play. Like the horrible Ultima NES ports that I used to think were great. Lol Music is good. It's got that charm. Nothing that really gets stuck in your head, but nothing annoying or offensive. All in all, it might be just a bit too deep for such a limited visual style (the UI is a bit confusing, especially given that everything is explained via short conversations with individual NPCs scattered across towns), but the game is good and it deserves more eyes on it.