Tres-Bashers

I bounced off this game the first time I opened it, probably due to a combination of the controls feeling unwieldy and the fact I was using a keyboard. When I returned to the game with a controller, I was surprised by how much it hooked me. Once you get the hang of moving around, you can fly through the environments, and you feel especially slick when you hold down the attack button to ready your bat, jump into the air and careen toward an enemy, releasing the button at just the right time to smack them in the face. They burst as the word "Bashed!" confidently takes their place, and you're thinking, "Darn right I bashed that guy!" The guys themselves vary widely, with some of my favorites being the scythe-wielding spiders called scyders and the yetis, who are just yetis (gotta love yetis). The floating green recorders also deserve a shout-out. Later on, rooms are filled to the brim with monsters, which changes the fun from timing a blow on a single enemy to doing your best to mitigate damage while hacking away at everything around you. Clearing these rooms often made me feel like a scrub in a fighting game whose only hope at winning was button mashing. Sure, I was sliding across the screen and things were getting blasted, but if you asked me to do exactly what I had just done again, well, I'd wish myself good luck and start flinging myself around again. Of course, part of the fun in games with snappy and fluid controls is the state you enter where you are reacting to the character's movement as it happens. An accidental dash just means you can smack a different target, providing you react quickly enough. Clearing rooms that are packed with enemies is practice at being mostly in control while being mostly out of control. Besides the combat, this game has one of the better metroidvania maps I've experienced. Everything is tightly packed (you can probably sprint across the map in under two minutes), yet you always feel like you are getting lost and moving deeper into the world. In other words, you feel like you're exploring. I never had an issue with knowing where to go next because there are very few barriers to progression. Heck, one of the achievements tasks you with beating the game without a powerup I assumed to be required. Whether or not I will try my hand at this achievement remains to be determined. I usually find myself satisfied with single playthroughs of shorter games, even when they encourage you to play through again. That being said, I have a lot of room for improvement when it comes to mastering the controls and memorizing the map, so I can definitely see myself returning for another run.