Tummy Bonbons The Sweet Monster

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It's fun, it's juicy, the music will drill itself into your brain and forever refuse to get out, and it costs literally 0 dollars to murder as many children as you can and steal their candy. --- A very cool, and free (!!!) cousin (but pretty different) to vampire survivors and brotato. You're a hungry monster trying to eat all the candy from the children celebrating halloween. You can scare children if your level is higher than their level. When you scare them they ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ DIE (leaving a tombstone behind) and you can steal their candy (which is what matters in life). Every few level up, you get an additional "tummy", which gives you an upgrade (like +50% XP from candy, or -25% damage from enemies), with a trade-off (like your stomach/hunger meter going down 10% faster or your dash costing 10% more hunger to use). All the moment to moment gameplay is focused on movement and XP gathering (here with the hunger mechanic, always going down if you're not refilling it by eating candy, that forces you to keep going; I think leveling up refills the hunger gauge? But as you level up the hunger depletion rate scales kind of strongly, so it's about pacing yourself and managing your candy resources. I think XP upgrades are somewhat of a trap up to the point where you need to keep leveling up not to die of starvation, which is an interesting dynamic), with the mid-term/long-term decision making being almost solely those level-up upgrades. It explores some really interesting design space I think! It's fun to understand the systems, and figure out how to best pick your upgrades. It's really a game about pathing and pacing. Outpacing hunger - balancing dashes with candy collection - and optimizing your movement. But it's not that much about actually navigating a specific space (because it becomes pretty confusing and hard to read) and more about the strategy underpinning your upgrade choices and your movement decisions! Like vampire survivors, the rising chaos and indecipherability of the game's action creates a sort of "layer of abstraction" between the moment to moment gameplay and the actual decision making. It slowly "zooms out" from the minutiae of movement to gain almost an autobattler/incremental game quality, hypnotic while still being tense. I feel like it happens faster here, but you're always on the edge of dying if you can't find a way to keep climbing the steeper and steeper slope of the scaling hunger and enemy damage.