Red Obsidian Remnant deserves a bit more speech. It too is an overhead action Roguelite, except its dungeon runs are short and overall more compact. You can pick your difficulty, which determines both how many levels you will face as well as the individual enemy difficulty. Beating the game will unlock the next difficulty, up to I believe Nightmare? Easy is only three levels, and you will breeze through it. Normal is a “modern” normal, in that it is still pretty easy. While playing on Normal, I found myself wondering what the point of the block button was, as evasion handled everything better.
Hard is “where the game really starts”. Upon starting a Hard run, I found out what the block button was for after seeing half my life depleted in a single room. (You can be hit during a dodge. On Hard, enemies are finally aggressive enough for that to actually matter. On Easy, enemies are so lethargic that you can kill them before they ever attack in the first place.)
There has been some effort put into the combat system. You have three weapons equipped (out of around six types), and each weapon is tied to its own attack button. Each weapon type has its own combo string, ground special, air special, counter, and ultimate. (Specials and Ultimates consume part or all of your Anger meter, which builds through combat.) While it doesn’t get extremely exotic, weapon types are a bit more than just the typical speed/range/damage trade off. Crossbows are projectile weapons, the shiv is thrown like a boomerang and you can teleport to it, great swords and shivs can be charged by holding the button, one handed swords have launchers and an aerial shield bash that readily knocks down flying opponents, etc.
One negative of the combat is that hits lack “oomph.” Attacks do interrupt actions (and some attacks do have some hefty knock-backs), but sometimes it feels like you aren’t incapacitating a target as much as you’d expect. When in a crowd with sprites overlapping, you can be taking hits without even realizing it unless you are looking at your life bar. And while the game lets you freely switch between weapons/attacks, it isn’t always quite as free as you might expect, particularly if you go by experiences with some other beat’em-up/action games that have similar different-weapon-per-button systems.
There are a few clunky design decisions. The clunkiest is the storage space that you have for unequipped equipment. the implementation is so clunky that I’d guess it was implemented some time after development. Attempting to pick up (non-consumable) items will attempt to equip it. For weapons and armor, this will replace the currently equipped item. For accessories, you can only pick up an accessory if you have a free slot (though you can manually drop an accessory to free up space.) However, you have a separate “storage” space for unequipped items that is only accessible through the shopkeeper. You can’t access through the regular equipment menus, nor can you directly put items into storage. To put an item into storage, you have to leave it on the ground, then go to the shopkeeper and tell him to “recycle” all “discarded” items. That will put all items on the ground (throughout the level, not just the current room) into your storage space. To equip an item from storage, you again have to talk to the shopkeeper, and the item it replaces (if you don’t have a free slot) will…of course itself be dropped onto the ground rather than put into storage.
The biggest shortcoming is the game’s translation. This is a native Chinese game that has been translated to English, and the English translation is somewhat lacking. The game is playable, but there are numerous spelling and grammar issues in descriptions and the in-game guide. Some descriptions are down right confusion, due to weird word order or incorrect word choices. Some elements of the game aren’t covered at all in the guide.
