Pudding: Lyre Knight

my first time playing anything from Katatema. right out the gate, the game throws a lot of quirky design decisions at you, such as eschewing a gun for the player character for a shield that harms you but deflects bullets, or the "Happiness Ring", which is something that ought to be experienced rather than described. its pulled off very well, especially with how its applied through the actual level, emphasizing figuring out the solutions to making progress over having the solutions themselves be difficult to perform (hence the game being called a puzzle/bullet-hell hybrid rather than a straight bullet-hell). combine all this with the fact that the game rewards experimentation with special items (that give lore, and maybe unlock other routes?) and a fair amount of endings (there's 5 in total, which is surprising considering the game really has two real levels, essentially), and you have a pretty unique take on the bullet hell genre as it is. but what really makes Pudding: Lyre Knight stand out is its approach to storytelling. it uses a couple different techniques, but the most prominent and notable is out it has characters, mainly Cygnus, displayed with their avatars on the left-hand side of the screen, talking to the player while they try to complete the run. this forces a player who is interested in the story (and the gameplay is so interconnected with its story that i can't imagine a player not caring about it) to divide their attention between reading the dialogue to parse the story and paying attention to the level for more accurate play. i can't think of any top-down shooters that do this, at least to this degree, perhaps because it could be very annoying in theory, but Pudding is easy enough that i never felt frustrated by this, and even if i did, delivering the dialogue with RNG against level design with little-to-no RNG reduces any possible annoyances. as a result, i found this way of delivering the story pretty entertaining. i also have to single out the wonderful presentation. the amount of detail put into this fantasy world is impressive, full of thoughtfully written lore, some entertaining hints about the layers beneath the cutesy surface of the world, and especially the wonderful, melancholic, faux-orchestral OST, which really sells the vibe Pudding: Lyre Knight is going for. really enjoyed my time with this one, and its already convinced me to play some of the other English-translated Katatema i can find.