One of the games on my wishlist was suddenly 90% off, so I used some of my Christmas gift card money to buy it:

• Crash Puzzle Hammer-San
  

  23 hours playtime

  26 of 26 achievements

Puzzle. You can move left/right, swing your hammer in the four cardinal directions to attack enemies and break certain blocks, and you can climb up single-tile-high blocks. If you walk off a ledge, you fall straight down, unable to move or attack until you land. You can’t jump.

The game has a lot of really challenging puzzles, and I also like how the difficulty is entirely because of level design; no new gimmicks are introduced after Area 3. Plus, because the mechanics are all reliable and consistent, you don’t need to be actively playing the game to figure out the solutions to its levels (which is extra good because levels can get a bit long and there’s no undo or mid-level quicksave). The difficulty does take a while to pick up, though, as pretty much all of the challenging puzzles within the first 100 stages were also in the free demo (and your save doesn’t transfer so you’ll have to beat them again).

The only major problem is that the game also tries to include action elements, but they’re very underdeveloped and don’t blend with the core puzzle gameplay at all. Enemies frequently serve no purpose other than to distract you from solving the puzzle by constantly respawning and forcing you to break your concentration to kill them, and levels based entirely on the action elements are mediocre at best and irritatingly unpredictable at worst. For example, level 155 makes you drop blocks on enemies to kill them, but the blocks fall slowly because other levels require you to ride them down; meanwhile, the enemies move briskly and turn around abruptly upon hitting a wall or each other or even the blocks you tried to drop on them, so trying to aim is a crapshoot and you’re better off just dropping all the blocks as quickly as possible.

Still, those levels aren’t too common, and the puzzles themselves are really good, so I can recommend this game. Even if the problems I mentioned give you pause, it’s absolutely worth getting on sale.

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I also suddenly won another game on SG (lucky me!):

• Super Magbot
  

  7 hours playtime

  11 of 32 achievements

Technically a Platformer, but this game also won’t let you jump. Instead, you aim a short-range magnet beam using the right stick and push L for blue polarity and R for red polarity; same-colors repel and opposing-colors attract. That might sound intuitive on paper, but it can be easy to lose track of which button attract and repel are on when they constantly switch in a split second. Even after beating the game, I can say I never quite got used to it; you’ll often have to take a moment to look ahead and simply memorize “L, L, R, R,” or “L, R, R, L,” or whatever pattern gets you past it. Left/right movement also has some obvious momentum.

Even if you think those are me problems, there are other issues with the controls. Notably, the magnet powers are physics-based, so aiming the right-stick just a few degrees differently can mean the difference between not jumping high enough to reach the platform and jumping too high into spikes. I gave up trying to get each level’s optional collectibles because I just couldn’t figure out how I was expected to manipulate the game’s physics to reach some of them, and whenever I started to think that I was learning the game better and could go back for the ones I skipped, I’d soon encounter another set that brought me back to my senses.

However, the worst input problem with the game is that your magnet powers don’t activate when you push the shoulder buttons; they activate when you release the shoulder buttons (or you hold the buttons for too long). I cannot stress how counterintuitive this is. When I was first looking at the game’s negative reviews, someone said that the magnet powers sometimes don’t work–even going so far as to link a youtube video–and while that criticism might not technically be true, that’s definitely what it feels like. You’ll push the button in time–you’ll KNOW you pushed the button in time and in range and aimed correctly and using the correct polarity–but none of that matters when you released the button on the exact frame your beam’s connection to the magnet block is broken, before the white outline has had a chance to start fading. It’s all so frustrating because indie games are supposed to be our refuge from purposely-bad game design, yet enshittification has been slowly infecting them as well.

Overall, I don’t know if I can recommend this game. It’s fun when it works, sure, but it’s often not your fault when you lose, even if you don’t count getting the polarities mixed up.

P.S. There are also quite a few levels that are overly long, but at least with these, the game gives you the option to add a checkpoint to most levels. I pretty much left that on for the whole game starting partway through world 2.