Maytroid. I swear it's a nice game too

Maytroid is a short but reasonably fun game with Metroidvania elements (but a lot less backtracking). It controls well and your character has a nice variety of mobility options, particularly after unlocking special abilities from bosses that allow you to interact with floating eyeballs of different colors. You can unlock a few new weapons too, but that's done buy buying them from a shop with money you accumulate while playing (you can buy them in any order). There is a Metroidvania-style map divided into different-colored zones, but they don't really feel particularly different from one another. What I found most noteworthy about Maytroid is that the individual rooms are designed almost like puzzles. You often need to make good use of your abilities to navigate the terrain and figure out how to get to the next room. A welcome touch is that there is no real penalty for dying, you can retry a room as many times as you'd like and you always start a new room with full life. As an added challenge, most rooms have several blue flames (the game's currency) that are tucked in out-of the way places that require a bit more skill and finesse to acquire. At first I thought I would need to make a concerted effort to collect them all in order to unlock all the images in the game's gallery, and I thought that was a good way to encourage people to explore each room and develop their skills. In the end, though, that currency is moot as I found an arena-type secret room with infinitely-spawning enemies where I accumulated more money than I could ever use, making the scattered flames kind of pointless. I thought there was a good variety of enemies with interesting attack patterns that required me to learn what they do and how to defeat them. Some are better tackled with a particular weapon, some require you to keep moving, some become more dangerous when paired with others... If you just blindly run & gun you're not going to make much progress. The bosses offered a decent challenge too, with some interesting set pieces and phases that require acrobatic finesse. The last boss was a suitably difficult challenge that required a few tries but wasn't terribly unfair. The story is, in my opinion, pretty difficult to make any sense of. It appears this is a sequel to a game I've never played, and while that might have made a few things clearer I found Maytroid's plot to be a little too angsty and obtuse for my liking. It's also pretty jarring how you'll often get the story delivered through lengthy conversation segments that play out seemingly whenever you enter a new room. This hurts the pacing of the game somewhat, although if you don't mind skipping the story altogether you can do that and not miss out on much. As I mentioned earlier, there is a gallery full of images that can be unlocked. These are racy images of the game's female characters and come in three tiers: Sexy outfit, tiny string bikini, and nude (albeit censored). The art isn't bad, but I found there to be an odd disconnect between the game's fairly serious themes/plot and the sexually-charged nature of the gallery images. If such images don't interest you, they can be easily ignored. I beat the game and got all the achievements in under four hours, which I thought was a good length. As an indie game, I found Maytroid to be pretty entertaining and a decent challenge. It's also incredibly cheap so it doesn't require much investment to try out. It's not a deep or full-fledged Metroidvania experience, but it does enough well that I recommend it to fans of short indie titles.