I’m not saying that DotEmu’s output is worse than just downloading the ROMs and an emulator for free, but I tried playing their Neo Geo releases that were free on Twitch Prime a while back, and they ran too quickly (I have a 144hz monitor). Nothing in the games’ options to remedy this, either, so I moved on to my next game:

Metroidvania. You start with just left/right movement and jump, but it doesn’t take long for you to get a sword (X button); tapping the attack button while standing still has you move forward slightly each tap, but you’ll bounce back a bit if you attack a shielded enemy, so it’s not as big an issue as it could have been. Your sword can also reflect projectiles back at enemies, but the game doesn’t tell you this directly; instead, it tries to do one of those “teach through level design” moments, except it does this by placing a rapid-fire turret at the end of a low-ceiling hall, so you can’t jump over the shots and will likely get hit a couple times before the intended thought occurs to you.

Shortly into the second biome, you get the titular kunai; LT throws one up and left, and RT throws your other one up and right. They’re not weapons, they’re more like grappling hooks; they latch onto compatible surfaces and let you swing across, or you alternate between them to scale vertical shafts. That said, the connecting string can get stuck if you swing past a corner, and you always automatically jump after letting go, which can cause you to be sent into the occasional low-hanging spike ceiling. Plus, you can’t increase/decrease the length of the connecting string; you have to let go and re-throw the kunai.

At the end of the third biome, you unlock the map, which fills in as you reach new areas. Unlike more well known metroidvanias, the entire room shows up on the map as soon as you reach it, so you can better tell which paths lead to more rooms and which are more likely to have optional collectibles. I don’t agree with the decision to place the ability to check the map so far after the start, though.

Although there’s a good bit of platforming to go with the game’s main selling point, enemy placement and AI are almost exclusively designed around long, flat rooms and platforms. Even flying enemies and teleporting enemies rarely show up outside of spike-free hallways. I’ll never understand these games; rather than try to combine enemies and platforming, it’s basically separated into platforming segments and boring enemy segments. This issue is laid bare during the combat waves preceding the final boss: although the arena changes a few times, it never affects how you approach the enemies; you’re still fighting the same types of enemies as before, only you have to fight way too many for way too long. It’s repetitive, to say the least.

This is made all the more frustrating because this one flying enemy type has a hitbox that only covers one side of its sprite, causing projectiles to pass straight through the other side:

The bosses tend to have at least one cheap hit in their pattern. The first boss has a shield and will be vulnerable while swooping, but tapping the attack button doesn’t always hit the boss, even though tapping the attack button anywhere else never results in an opening for you to be hit. The desert temple boss summons tornados to move along the left and right sides of the arena, and later phases have them spawn so frequently that if you fall in the center, you won’t be able to get out without taking a hit. The black blob boss (right after the you get the gun) can go to the ceiling and drop little blobs from random spots on the ceiling, but neither your sword nor the gun can kill them before they land, and they spawn quite frequently during later phases. Plus, right afterward, the boss will drop down and pull out its own rapid-fire guns before shooting quickly and moving quickly across the floor/wall/ceiling, always toward you, and even if it had better foreshadowing, you’ll still be caught off guard because you’ll be busy dealing with the little blobs that just spawned. The mountain boss has you climb a wall while it breaks the grapple-able tiles from it and spawns spikes briefly on the spot it just tackled; I was never able to avoid the spikes on the last stretch. Then, it shifts to a vertical autoscroller, but the platforms that show up are repetitive enough that you might think you’re supposed to do something else besides keep climbing. The final boss has a swooping attack with no foreshadow animation, and the attack only gets faster as the fight progresses. The boss also has an attack where it throws its scythe directly at you, and the only difference between the foreshadow animation for that attack and the foreshadow animation for its much more common earlier attack of simply throwing the scythe in a C shape…is that the boss holds its pose longer. The boss’s final phase has it shoot a laser at your last-known-location, then swoop the laser around the arena clockwise or counterclockwise (always towards you); you’re supposed to dash past the laser, but if the laser shows up pointing to your side of the arena (which is likely since it targets you when it spawns), you won’t have enough room to dash past without either your top or bottom hitting the diagonal laser.

Overall, this game is hard to recommend. There’s some good platforming, but enemy placement is bland and bosses tend to have elements of trial-and-error, not to mention the repetitive enemy waves right before the final boss. Wait for a good sale.