Me and my eldritch parasite

Parasite, it's you and me, I know it's my... oops sorry wrong universe. One thing this strange experience has going for it is a compelling eldritch narrative, it dropped me into a world that I could not fully understand, and even after exploring the game I don't have a good grasp on it - granted, I probably found more meaning in it than what the developer intended. It's kinda like experiencing your favorite horror universe for the first time, I just think this game has an instantly intriguing concept with the parasitic bonds. The gameplay would not be so bad if the developer would do some quality of life changes, like the worst part is probably the lack of a floor number, so you have to manually count every floor if you don't want to get lost in the later stages. There are 6 endings, the longest one might take about 50 minutes give or take, depending on your luck, so about 3 hours of content. The goal of the game is to remove your parasite, to do that you have to navigate randomly generated rooms, get a key, open a chest, and if you are lucky you will get a correct item (sadly they are randomized too). The endings are based on which items you have when you decide to remove the parasite. Part of me feels like I should explain how the game actually works, there is a tutorial but it does not do a very good job. So in order to 'dodge' enemies, you have to move your parasite out of the way, not your character. So your hitbox is actually the blue thingy in your chest, and if there is a projectile coming toward it, you want to move it out of the way. For some reason it took me a long time to realize that you can kinda walk and keep your buddy out of the way by spamming the button, it's a little clunky though. In order to dodge enemy attacks, you have to keep an eye on their blue, or sometimes gray projectiles, not the actual models. During most of the stages, in order to find a key you just have to follow a monster that has it, and eventually, he will drop it, but sometimes the key just spawns in the level too (seems to be preset for some stages). If you die you will lose the items that you collected, you are better off pausing and going back to the main menu when you have 1 hitpoint (that should be fixed because you might as well exploit the game at that point, because it works). After each stage you will get a small story cutscene, technically the game has a final ending so you have to complete, 8 or 9 stages in a row if I am not mistaken. [h1] Pros: [/h1] (+) I liked the world-building, it's very unique in my opinion. You don't really know what is going on at the start, and you don't really know what is going on at the end too. Maybe not for everyone, it just has that eldritch universe that makes you question everything about it. The only nitpick I have is that sometimes the meta jokes were a bit too distracting, I think the atmosphere in this game is very infectious without any humor in it. (+) Multiple endings with an immersive atmosphere, some weird visuals if you are into it. [h1] Feedback: [/h1] [u] Quality of Life [/u] - if you just kept the floor number in the corner it would help a lot, for example, the exit would be on floor zero, and anything below would be -1,-2,-3 or 1,2,3 if you go up. You should not reset items if you die, you are forcing the player to exit into the main menu constantly. I wish the enemies could not hit you for 1 second when they enter a room, or when you enter a room. [u] Glitches [/u] - I had a few random crashes, no error codes. Sometimes when you open the chest, it does not show the item, sometimes you get 2 items instead of 1, and sometimes you don't get an item. It feels like it accidentally selects (reject) maybe. [b] Overall Thoughts: 6/10 [/b] So I played the first game from this developer, and it was very dull in comparison, so this is a big improvement at least in terms of storytelling. I like that you surrounded the world-building in mystery, you never really get a good sense of what is going on. Like I said, there are some small but frustrating issues with the gameplay, and I don't think it needs to be frustrating. How hard it is to add a floor # in the corner, could make it a bit easier on the player instead of me running around like a headless chicken. I thought the endings were pretty neat, overall a very creative narrative. [code]For more niche, obscure and underrated games: http://store.steampowered.com/curator/31294838-Hidden-Gem-Discovery/ [/code]

You're in the weird part of Steam again.

Technically a Roguelike given the randomly generated map, a very weird, bizarre and somewhat hard one. You need to find both a key and a safe to collect tools for the endings, so one needs to go up and down floors dodging enemies and feeding the parasite, it's easy to understand and it can be pretty frenetic and fun. Sadly the movement is very limited and the spawn of enemies and obstacles are usually unforgiving, so it's heavily luck based and this can sour the experience. It's a very interesting take on the genre, with striking visuals and lore/story, so it might be worth checking it out. Esp: Técnicamente un Roguelike dada la generacion aleatoria del mapa, uno muy raro, bizarro y algo difícil. Necesitas encontrar tanto una llave como una caja fuerte para recoger herramientas para los finales, así que hay que subir y bajar pisos esquivando enemigos y alimentando al parásito, es fácil de entender y puede ser bastante frenético y divertido. Por desgracia, el movimiento es muy limitado y el spawn de enemigos y obstáculos castigan fácil, por lo que se basa en gran medida en la suerte y esto puede amargar la experiencia. Es una juego muy interesante del género, con unos efectos visuales y un lore/historia sorprendentes, así que merece la pena probarlo.

I dunno, I kinda like my parasite.

ESP: Tenemos un parásito, y es peor de lo que suena, nuestro objetivo es reunir herramientas para extirparlo, para eso tendremos que explorar habitaciones procedurales en las cuales hay que encontrar un cofre y su llave, a la vez que mantenemos a nuestro parásito satisfecho y esquivamos ataques de otros parásitos mas grandes, un juego muy original y bizarro, con múltiples finales y a un precio económico. Esta en español. ENG: We have a parasite, and that doesn't feel good, our goal is to gather tools to remove it, for that we will have to explore procedural rooms in which we have to find a chest and its key, while we keep our parasite satisfied and dodge attacks from other bigger parasites, a very original and bizarre game, with multiple endings and at an economical price.

i love it

Cons: weird and obtuse Pros: weird and obtuse

"I AM SUPERIOR BECAUSE MY PARASITE IS BIG." Love the art style. Controls are weird at first, but you get used to them.

As a game, MamEP as I'll refer to it for brevity is... interesting. I liked 6 feet behind for its creative mechanics and in that regard MamEP does not disappoint. It takes a bit to get used to everything, as is always the case with abstract games, but this one flows in a way that makes for some surprisingly tight gameplay. The basic loop sees you exploring a randomized series of floors in search of a key and a chest to use it on, before returning to your room to do it all again. At any point you can lock your movement with the space bar, using the arrow keys to instead control the parasite on your torso. This is how you'll pick up everything in the game, and avoid obstacles, as your parasite also serves as your hitbox. Enemies are abundant, and do all sorts of things from throwing projectiles to flinging their own parasite at you. The enemy movements and patterns all seem entirely random, and there's not a ton to memorize. The game is tagged with "roguelike" and throws around the term "bullet hell" a lot, but I wouldn't really call it either. It lacks the reset on death penalties of roguelikes and the memorizable patterns of bullet hells. Its moreso just a short game with a bunch of endings, though I guess that doesn't work as well in the marketing lol. As far as quality of life goes, it's somewhat there. There are definitely things to improve. The tutorial tells you to protect your parasite so it's not hard to figure out the hitbox part, but everything else is a bit more iffy. Doors are sometimes obscured or even hidden by background objects, which makes getting lost a lot easier. Lighter colored doors always move you upwards and darker doors always downwards, but as far as I could remember this was never directly stated. There are arrows above the doors that help with this, but they're small and often hard to quickly read in a dark or frantic environment. One aspect to manage is your parasite's anger, mitigated by eating the "buggrubs" spawned from your own parasite or others. These have no cue before spawning (that I know of), and can spawn when going through a door, making them inaccessible, which is sometimes detrimental since some level configs have no other enemies to rely on. The chest is only interactible if you have the key, so the first few times around it's not entirely clear what object even is the chest. It's also not made clear that you're supposed to return to the room immediately after opening one, especially with the roguelike tag it made it seem like you were supposed to find multiple and do as much as possible before ultimately dying. A lot of this is admittedly figured out on your own after just a few runs though, so it's not bad, I'm moreso just compiling a list since it pretty much accounts for literally all of my criticism of the game, and they feel like things that can be improved in future games. The actual experience is exactly what the store page makes it seem like it sets out to be, a frantic sequence of managing resources while collecting what you can. The lack of visible UI elements denoting your parasite's hunger or anger can seem annoying at first, but I ended up enjoying it a lot, it made the experience way more frantic and keeps you focusing that management. Hitboxes are for the most part very accurate, and you can exploit the invincibility when coming in and out of doors a bit, making for some very tight-feeling escapes. It's all around very fun. I ended up getting around half (four out of the six if I remember right) of the endings, and all but one of the achievements (the one for doing an 8+ tool surgery without painkillers). Story-wise, this game is unsurprisingly abstract, though not especially hard to follow. It doesn't do the sci-fi trope of throwing capitalized nouns at you that end up being important story elements, nor does it drop you in the middle or end expecting you to piece things together backwards. Honestly, the story feels very straightforward to me, with some underlying themes to analyze (it gave me a trans allegory vibe). It's always hard to talk about stories in abstract games since so much is often metaphorical and really only knowable by the dev, but I did like it a lot even without thinking about any potential deeper meanings. Overall, it's only $3 even at full price so I'd say go for it. You'll have a pretty fun couple hours with it regardless of what you get out of the story.

Can we keep it? Worth a buy for an artsy/Lovecrafty/claymation horror type mood.