Rusted Moss

I have played a lot of metroidvanias, and Rusted Moss is definitely one of the better ones and has a hell of a lot of content for its price tag. As I'm writing this, I've just finished the main story and all the new areas the devs added in an update, but there's still speedrunning and the final challenge, the Hard Mode Great Climb, to complete. I think I'll leave it where I am though. Movement in Rusted Moss is separates it from its contemporaries and is really where the game excels. You are armed with Puck, an elastic grappling hook that you can use to swing across the map. By itself, it feel pretty different though nothing too out of the ordinary. But when you combine this momentum based movement with recoil and propulsion from explosions, you have a game that gives you a really cohesive set of mechanics to get good with. And getting good feels very damn good. It can feel unpredictable and unwieldy at first, and I'll admit, there are many moments where it feels like I died because I mistimed a swing by a millisecond or misplaced a grapple by a pixel, but overall it feels pretty fun and fair. It's worth noting that you can beat the core game without having to fully master the movement, but getting to the extra added content, namely an area called "The Great Climb" you get rewarded with a very lengthy challenge to beat. I probably spent as much time in the extra content areas as I did in the main game, if not more. I did have some gripes with the later rooms though. I hope whoever was designing those rooms filled with randomly teleporting, projectile spamming faeries and laser beam shooting snipers steps on a rake. The only thing holding Rusted Moss back in my book are its visuals. There's plenty of areas to explore with their own biomes and a decent variety of enemies, but overall its artstyle is pretty middling. It often takes a function over form approach to a lot the rooms in its expansive map, which feels fun, but definitely feels like you are just playing through a set of rooms someone has been making in a map editor. That isn't to say it's lazy or boring, but there are very few moments that visually leave a lasting impression. Oh also, I don't remember much about the story, but in fairness I did stop playing it for like four months. Something about fae and the Age of Men? Idk. Game good. Worth a buy.

This game effectively has two halves: one where you play a Metroidvania, and one where you play Celeste. Both parts are great. The first half teaches you what you need to know and makes you expand your skillset with tougher enemies that challenge you and your limited HP/healing. Then it grabs a knife and stabs you in the stomach and expects you to deal with the Lenore fight in what is one of the most absurd difficulty spikes I've seen in any video game I've ever played. Once you get past this nightmare, the game opens up a ton by giving you access to a Shotgun. If you played Cave Story and enjoyed the momentum mechanics of the Machine Gun, then you'll love what the game does with this and the Rocket Launcher as they can be used to alter your momentum in ways that INTERACT with the grappling hook mechanics shown in the trailer. All that, and they don't lock you out of an important endgame weapon just for using them. The second half takes place in the DLC areas which can be accessed in the area shown in the first clip of the update trailer with the big pink axolotl. Here, the game steps away from its Metroidvania roots (which I don't think is a bad thing, to be clear) and focuses on platforming sections and enemy combat rooms. This sections are the highlight of the game, and provide a real challenge for any player willing to make it this far. The one problem I have with this game--and this is a major complaint that I wish could be fixed--is that dying to most combat rooms forces you to restart several platforming section rooms that don't normally limit your ability to retry them. Imagine if Celeste Chapter 9 forced you to fight a horde of Hammer Bros and Primal Aspids every 3 rooms, and if you die there you have to restart ALL of your platforming progress as well. You can talk all you want about developer intent, but this is objectively poor design that ruins the experience. Thankfully, there are "accessibility" options that let you skip directly to the combat rooms if you already feel fulfilled from completing a given platforming section. This game is a real gem, and you should play it.

Really great movement! The map (as in the layout of the rooms in relation to each other) is on par with hollow knight and there's a TON of content. It's not afraid to get difficult and it's got some of my favorite enemy designs ever

If you just watched the trailer, know that the game leans into platforming more than it does into fighting, this said, it's really fun. It's been a while since I found a game that made me wanna arrive home just to play it, it's like the standard duration for metroidvanias if you wanna 100% it, doesn't have as much info online as many others but you can figure things out. Probably my second favorite metroidvania after Environmental Station Alpha.

Fantastic Metroidvania that leans more heavily into the "Metroid" side of the genre, especially focused around grappling mechanics! It's not quite like the Grapple Beam - it's much more like being attached with an elastic band. This combined with several different methods for altering your trajectory and momentum create a movement system with a high skill ceiling, which pays excellently into the game's many movement challenges and fights. The game also has some wonderful theming and lore around fae/fairies, changelings, and humanity's relationships with these creatures. This adds to the atmosphere created by the game's excellent soundtrack and varied environments, including a mossy city, rainy factory, windy mountain, flooded chambers, abandoned(?) lab, and the fae home realm, with even more in the bonus areas, The game can be quite difficult at points, but it is also very forgiving, providing many save points placed thoughtfully around difficult areas, respawning you at the last surface you stood on after falling into a pit, and giving the main character the ability to heal on the fly. Speaking of the healing system, you gain more MP for healing whenever you hit an enemy with your weapons, incentivizing active combat where you stay out of your foe's range but continually land hits on them, making combat dynamic, creative, and a whole lot of fun. The game recommends you play it with keyboard and mouse, but I much prefer to use a controller, and while the controls feel a little odd at first, they become highly intuitive, and by the end of the game you will be combining crouching, jumping, grappling, swinging, aiming, and shooting all within the span of the same second, and you'll feel amazing doing it. While I never used them, the game also has accessibility features that can make difficult segments much easier to navigate, so no need to pass on the game for difficulty's sake. This game deserves much more attention in my opinion and I would love to see more Metroidvanias like it, especially ones that focus less on upgrading your stats and more on mastery of the game's mechanics. Highly recommended, and thank you to the dev team for providing such a fun experience!

really good