SteamWorld Dig 2

It's genuinely impressive that they were able to tack on an entirely new core mechanic to the tried and true metroidvania formula and actually make it work. I had been avoiding this game because it seemed excessively gimmick-y and almost child-like and infantile. And I do still think there's a little bit of all those things there. But it's truly exceptionally well designed for what it tries to be - an engaging and compellingly fun game that makes you want to continue playing until the end. This game really does hold your hand and guide you explicitly through it, with on screen arrows pointing to quest objectives, as well as quest objectives labelled on your map. This is aligned with how deliberately accessible the game is in general; there's very little real exploration to be had here. Metroidvania fans who want a world to explore won't really find that. The world holds almost no surprises - sure, you can decide where in a particular vertical shaft you dig down, but ultimately you're going to reach the same set location whethr you choose to descend the left, the middle, or the right of any given shaft. The core gameplay loop is explicitly designed to addict you to the reward of character progression and to continue running on that progression treadmill right until the end of the game. And in this way, and many others, the game is deliberately designed to be as accessible as possible. Especially if you're using the interface guidance arrows and labels, you can safely turn your brain off, and just follow the dopamine. The world is simple. There's no real lore that I was able to discern - perhaps it appears differently to people who are familiar with the rest of the series. But it's mostly just a small set of disparate biomes, each of which either has no real story at all or a very simple superficial one. The overall story itself is utterly simplistic, but it's enough - the underlying engine driving gameplay is the player character progression loop. But all of this is of course aligned with the game's high degree of accessibility One thing that bothered me about the world is that the developers make excessive use of doors that magically and uncontiguously join disparate areas, and in some cases, far-flung areas, breaking the world's continuity. They also make lavish use of "out-of-plane" areas, what they call, I think, "caves", some of which join together different areas of the main map, which can also confuse the contiguity of the world. The game's combat is just flat out atrocious. It has something of the feel of Super Metroid before you become overpowered - your options can be quite limited given spatial constraints and so your only bet is often to run into mobs and face tank them while spamming attack, as given tight confines, as well as a deliberately slippery-slide-y player controller (substantively low acceleration and deceleration values), precision is beyond you. I can only imagine though that the designer's intent is that you often deliberately avoid combat because of just how awful it is. Yet I do distinctly remember there being times where I felt as if, despite this, there are instances where the devs seem to expect precision, for example one particular boss fight that I won't spoil where it can be quite difficult to getg within melee range without taking contact damage. It was also offputting that almost all of the caves are exactly the same terrain as the area you zone into them from, which adds to the jarringness of the map's spatial discontiguity.