So here we go. I blazed through Mishaka Ubivaka and I had a great time with it. I would be surprised if anyone else has heard of this one. I barely believe I've heard of it. At its core, this game is a twin stick platformer and it's a shockingly decent one too. You play as a mouse with a gun and you have to reach the exit while avoiding traps, enemies, and bullets. You die in one hit, so you have almost no leeway in getting to the end. It has a very charming pixel art style where you can see the influences from retro games but it has a very nice clean modern feel too. The bright colors let the things that need to stand out obvious too.
What really kept coming to mind while I played this though was Super Meat Boy and Kero Blaster. I'm not sure what the reputation of those two games are these days. I know Team Meat has burned a lot of good will over the years with middling follow-ups, though I may be the one person who kinda liked Dr Fetus' Mean Meat Machine even if I see why people hate it. I never hear Kero Blaster brought up anymore but that may simply be because it's overshadowed by Cave Story still. Regardless, I mean the comparison in a positive way. Mishaka Ubivaka requires you to do some tricky jumps and dodges on each stage, and while I won't go as far to say that it's a [i]precision[/i] platformer, it's at least adjacent to it. You have to time jumps to avoid buzzsaws and bullets at the same time, remember where the dripping slime is, and still pay attention to the enemies who lock onto you at all times. Something I found interesting as well was you're forced to change weapons from time to time. A barrier won't open unless you pick up the gun. Some are the usual pistols, some are machine guns, some are weird bubble and spinning blade types. Each one works a little differently and makes you tackle obstacles in a different way.
What this game does well is almost always feeling [i]fair.[/i] That's a hard thing to do but every death I had, I knew it was my fault. Everything is laid out from the beginning of each room, it's easy to see exactly what you need to do, though executing it isn't always as simple. I died numerous times because I got greedy in my attempts to squeeze where I shouldn't have or because I just simply wasn't paying attention like I should've. The dripping slime (think like the Chemical Factory level if you played Sunsoft's Batman) got me more than anything just because I didn't include the landing after jumping around obstacles. I died a lot in this game. A lot. But the controls are pretty tight, the obstacles are very clearly not impossible to get through, and the quick restart after every death gave it that really cool "I'll get it this time" vibe. I had a smile on my face when I died a lot of times even, and I think I did yell "Aw, they got me!" in a pretty fun voice at one point too after a risk failed.
If there was any point I got a little frustrated, it was on the final boss. There are three boss fights in the game and they take on a Cuphead-esque template, with multiple phases that progress as the boss takes damage. It's pattern recognition and paying attention to the tells. The final boss has some missiles it shoots out and when they explode, either from hitting another object or two shots from your weapon, the explosion's hitbox is a little in front of where the missile was when it detonated. It's a minor quibble but it made it hard for me to judge the right distance when I was in a bind. The explosions tended to linger longer than I thought so I died a lot from moving just a little too far to one side as well. But as far as tricky action games go, it's from the hardest thing I've ever experienced. It's the only sour note I had with regard to the fairness.
It's a short game, with Steam saying I had 2.7 hours of playtime at the end. I definitely put the Deck down while I got up to take a phone call and other little errands around the house, so I'm sure most people will have a quicker playthrough. For a tiny game from the Rusosphere (the writing is Cyrillic but I'm unsure exactly which country it is from) that cost me 59 cents on sale with only 7 user reviews, none of which are in English, it was much better than my low expectations allowed me to consider. It's not perfect, it's not entirely polished, but it is a fun game that really does show a lot of care in its design. The developer is credited as "Low Res games," which is [i]impossible[/i] to Google, and so I know [i]nothing[/i] about the people behind it. I'd be curious to see what they make in the future.
One caveat I will mention is that I didn't see this AI disclaimer until today. "We used AI to generate textures when painting images for the library. The gameplay screenshots do not contain generative content. The game itself, its code and assets do not contain generated content." I am unsure what this means exactly. I think something is lost in translation there but I'd understand if that were a deal breaker for people nonetheless. If Low Res Games does make anything else in the future, I hope they avoid AI completely, even if I'm not sure exactly what the used it for here.
