I don’t mind the higher difficulties, it’s the time wasting that drives me mad.

Really hard bosses? Sure, just let me respawn immediately next to it instead of making me go through a minute of walking before every retry.

Tough platforming challenges? Do it like Well Dweller and have a health item respawn at the beginning of the challenge so you can keep practicing as much as necessary.

Finished Afterimage!

I had good time with it, but it’s a massively flawed game.

The Good: Colossal maps, with a lots and lots to stuff to find - if you’re in the mood to chill and explore a huge world (while probably getting lost) you’re going to love it. Combat is solid with a lof of diferent weapons. Map is very open with plenty of different paths.

The Bad: Story is borderline incomprehensible, likely due to a bad translation. There’s some really cryptic stuff and you’ll almost certainly need a guide if you’re going for the true ending. Map and fast travel are serviceable, but not as good as they needed to be for the size of the game. Switch 1 performance is “playable” at best.

Playing MIO: Memories in Orbit!

This is a challenging game. You die easily, and healing is limited to a few specific locations in the map. Maps are full of “gotcha” moments with enemies dropping out of nowhere and not-very-obvious “touch this and you lose life damage” spots. Dying sends you back to one of the (very few) save points, even for bosses.

The end result is that you keep replaying the same location a lot, which is making this game really frustrating to play.

Which is a shame, because the rest of the game is really good. Cool powerups, decent combat, interesting customization options, great atmosphere.

Sorry to hear about your PC, specially with how the prices are these days a new SSD is going to cost an arm and a leg.

After a lot of debugging I think it’s not a disk issue but rather a power management problem. Made some configuration changes and so far it looks stable… let’s keep monitoring.

Afterimage is on my wishlist, it looks good, hopefully the good outweighs the bad. Looking forward to your final review of the game.

Most likely the final review will be positive.

Crazy week. Spent two whole days at a company event, got home absolutely wrecked yesterday, thinking… “OK, let’s take it easy, relax, avoid stress next few days”… only get a bunch of hard crashes in my personal PC this morning, suspecting a dying SSD. :/

Playing Afterimage!

Another metroidvania. It’s definitely a flawed game, but I’m enjoying it a lot. Might even end up rating it as a “flawed gem”.

The maps in this game are absolutely massive, the biggest I’ve seen in this genre. They are this game’s biggest strength, there’s so, so, so much to explore. If your goal when playing a metroidvania is to just chill and run around opening areas, finding paths and opening treasure chests you’ll have a blast.

At the same time, those huge maps conflict with other design choices - the game has a “soulsvania” system where you have to collect your soul or lose XP every time you die, which would be a massive PITA if not for the game being absurdly easy. The lack of guidance (“just keep going east”) makes it easy to get lost and keep exploring areas at random, which hurt the sense of progression and pacing, and the fast-travel system which would be “OK” in other games feels inadequate for this scale.