Dungeon Munchies - Zombie Business Inc
If there's a setting where you get to be flamboyant as possible, it would be something like this. A game that involves a lot of dissections, gooey stuff, and juxtaposition with cooking. The name speaks for itself, you hunt to eat, so that you can become a better fighter, while uncovering some nebulous conspiracy deep within the underground of what used to be human civilization.
As a zombified minion, you are under orders from your summoner to battle through the dungeons and meddle with the political hierarchy of certain creatures that has taken over. I'll be honest, that's all I mostly read through the hours I've played this, the story does unfold, but I had too much fun seeing the goofy nature of it, I kind of didn't care much about how it unfolds.
There aren't many games out there made by Taiwanese devs, so this one in particular takes Metroidvania like not many has done better. It keeps getting fun and challenging the more you explore and reach deeper. And it's also the weirdest one I've played to date, too.
A floating anime ghost with a chef getup tells me that I've been summoned for a great awakening. An awakening where her, and the minions together fight against bureaucratic leaders that control over people's life. You know, being the outlier that changes the paradigm of current society. Something like that. Spread some anarchy around.
Doing so, required me to grow stronger, go further up, keep defeating bosses, and finally unravel the ground conspiracies, and maybe some allegorical tidbits about Taiwanese society, something like the white terror era. The game didn't try to shoehorn in on the commentary, but it was evidently noticeable that the game was saying more than what was kind of presented early on.
At first glance of this, you'd go "ha, silly banana". But after pondering for a while, there seems to be some philosophical connotations being expressed from this anthropomorphic banana. And there's more of that in droves after prolong play session. The game makes plenty of allegorical statement about society's standards, justifying means for the end of things, and trying to seek deeper meaning in life. This acts as also as an interesting dichotomy for the slimy, gushing, silly violent exterior of the game.
There's obviously some smart people writing and designing this game, because not only is the narrative non-linear, but the gameplay is unique but also with depth. It is a Metroidvania, but with a twist of having gameplay elements like wave clearing, bullet hell, and farming, A collective integration of borrowed gameplay design while adding interesting nuances and fluidity to the overall experience.
It's obviously based in some fictional version of Taipei, Taiwan, but you don't need to read up an entire history or maybe even some bits of Taiwan to understand the metaphorical storytelling in here. Unless you have a real hard time catching up on the humor and the lingo.
2D diablo simulator here is an interesting game where you farm and create multiple kinds of weaponry and wearables. Your main selection of arsenal are both primary and secondary weapons, both melee and ranged. The best way to play is to go Gung Ho.
The game is already fluid and flexible enough to cater to various different play styles. Want to win untouched, I have to learn to detect attack patterns and dodge projectiles. Half the time it's easy, yet also hard, and it gets challenging the further I went into the levels. But nothing is unfair, it's all asking me to get better, both in how I play and the stats of the items I have.
Each weapon fire differently, primary weapons are mainly melee or ranged weapons requiring two hands, secondary ones are scythes, ray castors, shotguns etc. There's a lot of variety, that are unlocked once you start collecting materials from the enemies.
But it's all about cooking too, because you'll need them to make wearable items, equipped upto 7 of them, these carry abilities like healing your health, spewing toxic gas to enemies, increasing damage, allowing you to jump way higher, etc. There are permanent items from doing quests like a disembodied extra pair of legs, which allows you to run over walls, and allowing you to jump twice.
Boss battles are quite exhilarating and challenging too, they will throw whatever they can, even if you've had experience playing Metroidvanias before, the game throws a wrench or two in between battles and will leave you in quite a haze. Sometimes even button mashing helped, but I had to figure out how to also beat the bosses, even if they're like phasing from here to there.
It's a short game about 10hrs long, but the experience is so well tuned and so much fun to go through, even with the entire game feeling unique, this feels definitely like one of those GOATs. But ah, it's also in early access at the moment, the game will grow, and from the looks of how the developers are doing, I can't wait to see what they'll add on next till the final product arrives.
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This game looks like so much fun! I've heard nothing but good things, and the style is on point. Definitely going to have to check it out for myself. Thanks for sharing!!