ivysly.com - reviews

Cairn

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I liked Cairn a lot. You pretty much do nothing else but climb in this game, and they did a great job in making it fun. Cairn is a simple game but well polished, and it offers a nice range of optional challenge that push its mechanics as far as any designer could take them. It’s also a pretty game, with gorgeous handdrawn splash art on load screens and a unique, utilitarian, cel-shaded art style that is perfect for allowing the player visually map out the wall for crags and holds. I was really struck by the awesome performance of the main voice actor(s?), whose grunts, screams, and heartbreaking, desperate whimpers grounded the climbing with realism and stakes. Quickly the tone is set that climbing is SERIOUS BUSINESS, and you are always one step away from critical injury or death. It’s a totally artful wrapping around a game that is proud most of all about its systems, and you can tell every element of the game is designed to work with each other mechanically and narratively. It’s a highly deliberate game, which I admire.

On the other hand, I think Cairn is weighed down a bit by the secondary mechanics and the general inconsistency of player feedback making it hard to strategize and improve at specific skills. Still I think they did pretty much the best job you could making a climbing game, and obviously better than any other climbing game I’m aware of, even my own ha ha. Over time you sort of develop an intuition for what constitutes a solid hold, and how to avoid slipping off, but, honestly, I can’t say that at any point in the game I felt like I had substantially improved at it. A lot of times it really looked like I had a strong hold, but I slipped off anyway - it can be hard to determine if your strategy will pan out, even with practice. I chalk (LOL) this down to a really ambitious mechanic by a studio that doesn’t have the millions to make it perfect. It really does seem at times like magic, too, especially how often the game seems to know which limb you want to move. I probably manually selected a limb one out of twenty times. The belaying is designed in a really interesting way to be a sort of imperfect checkpoint system, as your pitons can break unpredictably (even with perfect installation) and you’ll still take damage from long falls. This was a highlight to me. it’s a really smart way to have the player create their own difficulty. I took pride in free-soloing some routes that I knew I could do without checkpoints, making an otherwise easy climb much more thrilling. I can’t speak to the accuracy to real rock climbing (the only thing I know about climbing is when I did it as a young kid and the movie Free Solo) but I was surprised that they didn’t allow for a few things I have seen real climbers do, like jumping from one position to another, and the climbing under overhangs felt inconsistent at times in a way that makes me feel they didn’t really account for it mechanically despite it being a relatively frequent obstacle. I have a lot of little gripes like this regarding the climbing system, even though it is overall really excellent, because it invites such nitpicking. it’s so intricate and ubiquitous you quickly start feeling all these tiny markers of its internal systems without being able to fully comprehend them. I want to engage more with it at an intellectual level, but the game seems to want you to play more with your intuition. fair enough.

I think the survival mechanics really worked against the spirit of the game without adding much other than a time pressure, a pressure I think works against Cairn’s choose-your-own-path ethos. A few times I personally wanted to take a more challenging route, but I took the easy one anyway as I was running out of resources. There was a section near the end which forced me to turn off the survival mechanics entirely, as I was softlocked by hunger with no food (and no means to get any more). I consider this a major blemish on an otherwise focused work, and the optionality of the mechanic implies to me the designers’ own lack of confidence more than it being purely implemented as an accessibility toggle. I also want to tack on to this point that the consumable buffs sometimes felt cheap in the way that they are wont to do in games, and I often felt like I cheated myself when I could only surpass a difficult route after chugging a few buffs. I can’t quite say it’s cynical of the designers to include these crafting and survival mechanics as the game is already incredibly lean and they are perfectly thematic inclusions, but i just don’t think they were given the same attention to detail.

Vague spoilers this paragraph, though I won’t get into anything specific. I felt personally affected by the story, which is about a skilled but self-destructive obsessive who is not content until she achieves the impossible, a person who isolates from her loved ones in pursuit of personal perfection. The protagonist Aava is, time after time, confronted with her own problems and how her obsession affects others, and each time she chooses herself. There are multiple endings, and they are all delightfully unsatisfying. I think I need to go back to therapy after playing this.

Tomb Raider (2024 Remaster)

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Tomb Raider is an honest game, honest about its gameness, in a way I didn’t expect, though in retrospect I’m not sure what else I should have expected. If the typical oddball middle-budget game design of the 6th and 7th console generations shaped my adolescence, the unending stream of risk averse committee designed AAAA storefront experiences that followed completely alienated me. something in my adulthood has been driving me backward, not just to my childhood but to a period before anything for which I would have any feelings of nostalgia. there’s something about the freedom they had in the 20th century to just try anything, a freedom from convention. Tomb Raider, a game everyone knows about, for which they made a $115,000,000 budget movie starring angelina jolie, is a surprisingly idiosyncratic game wonderfully free from convention.

Tomb Raider is really nothing like Mario 64 in a way that begs just that comparison. It almost feels like a modern statement about some homogeneity of control schemes and character controllers in games where you move a guy around, but damn if they highkenuinely didn’t just come up with a truly worthy branch of the 3d Platformer lineage out the dome and nobody decided to iterate on it because it doesn’t immediately tranquilize you. If Mario is about jerking off, with all sorts of silly techniques you’ll never actually need to progress through any of the game, then Tomb Raider is a good fucking, not in the sense that it’s hard but because it just takes a little more thought and deliberation, more cooperation with the game, exploration, and the reward is so much greater even when the result is the same. the challenge is so much more layered, so much more systematic that even just the action of clearing a small gap becomes a source of intense satisfaction and anxiety. Tomb Raider does have its own share of masturbatory techniques, but they are so brazen in their uselessness you’d think it were deliberate commentary. Mario never prepared me for this, maybe it shouldn’t have. I’m getting tired of comparing the two. We’ve been doing it for 30 years. She’s out of his league.

The traversal system in Tomb Raider uniquely creates a challenge out of obstacles that would be trivial to pass in any other game. Lara isn’t a bounding box with a gravity force but a truly physical agent that operates under believable rules, and visually, audibly struggles to navigate the world in a way that matches the player’s own contact with purposefully textural mechanics. the grid based system alleviates the guesswork of jumping in a novel way, while still remaining tricky to execute and satisfying to land a rapid, calculated sequence of maneuvers. you’ll find all sorts of interesting details in the system, like how landing from a jump without running or rolling out of it allows you to instantly jump again without anticipation—your knees are already bent. careful players might find out you can initiate the two-step running jump by taking a walking step before a running step, allowing skilled players to do so with a shorter approach. there’s a kind of maturity to the systems here that would never fly in modern industrial gamedev. the level design matches this careful attention to detail. they really pushed how natural you can make a grid of blocks appear, and they found every permutation they could of the arrangement of these blocks to form unique platforming challenges. not to mention all the little clever, efficient setpieces (including many surprises i won’t mention—best to experience them blind), like a waterfall section that has you tumbling back down the rapids at every mistake, or a drop into a huge underground reservoir with partially submerged statues, leaving you to dive uncomfortably deep to explore for goodies and exits before having to come all the way back up for air. did I mention the swimming is just as fleshed out and natural as the platforming?

on the other hand I didn’t love the boring combat and how often you are required to engage with it. It really brings down the eerie vibes (and the vibes are just impeccable, I mean I love when a game relies on ambience instead of music and actually let me comment on just how good the sound design is in this game, which is very good, feels both intimate and spacious in a way that really sells every flavor of dank evil cave) of exploring an ancient, possibly supernatural, maybe even a smidge liminal sort of space when suddenly a door opens and unleashed is a band of rabid gorillas making oddly human sounds and you gotta just jump on the nearest platform they can’t climb and wail on the triggers for a while. The amount of wanton animal murder rouses some latent vegan part of me because holy shit does it feel bad to be forced to essentially execute dozens of helpless animals every ten minutes. I guess it is a form of ludonarrative harmony, though, that a ransacker of ancient human gravesites would take no issue in killing the way Lara does, and her superhuman precision in wiping out even the most distant targets with her double uzis implies she has had a lot of practice doing so. I understand why they put this in the game—she is sooooo hot and badass when she got her guns out—but it would be a lot more interesting if she could have used them more against smarter, more justifiable human targets, and as an added dimension to puzzles. The constant hostility of these animals feels for some reason like an echo of a greater theme, that Tomb Raider believes these dead exotic civilizations would have been so cruel and evil were they still around, that you, the hero, are well within your moral duty to kill everything and take all their shit. Just felt worth mentioning after the splash screen at the start that says “sorry the game is low key racist, thanks for buying it”. There is more generally an undercurrent of brutality to the game that lands between tastefully mature and flagrantly pornographic, made more suspicious in retrospect by the voyeuristic torture simulation aspect that the Tomb Raider franchise has become infamous for. the game matter of factly portrays Lara’s many modes of death in a way that reminds me of Rain World, except uncomfortably recontextualized by our avatar’s apparent design as a sex object foremost. the camera does not pan away but leers directly at the dead woman just as it would were she still alive, allowing the player to orbit and zoom on her corpse for a long time before selecting a savepoint to return to. prior to playing this game, my only preconceptions about Tomb Raider were of white painted ledges and pornogore snuff movies, just one of which I can dispel with confidence.

Another elephant: remasters are stupid. I would rather just play a nice port with gamepad support. art doesn’t really need to be fucked with, but I understand some people get really sad if they do not make a lot of money next quarter.

Playing the Tomb Raider remasters with modern controls will absolutely rob you of the carefully crafted platforming challenges that literally define the whole game. the specific interplay of mechanics originally designed for the game are instrumental to the game’s pace and feel. modern is only a fix if you view gameplay as a problem. entire mechanics are removed, like the back step and multiple jumping techniques, and most platforming sections become repetitive and toothless. i’m not saying classic controls are better because they are harder. the problem is that modern controls essentially cut away half of the gameplay, leaving a corpse of a game obviously meant for a different set of systems. if you just don’t fuck with tank controls you’d be better off playing a different game. i mean this in the least judgmental way (i have quit games over far more petty quibbles ask me about it). there are other games that would suit you better than the travesty that is an amputated Tomb Raider. don’t waste your time.

While I mostly stuck to classic graphics, I also took a peek at the new visuals here and there. it’s clear to me that not only did this game really not need a graphical overhaul, it seems they went out of their way to make it as shit and flat and ugly as they possibly could. I can’t lie and say the classic graphics are always easy to look at, but the game undeniably had an artful, deliberate goal with the severe, vibrant vertex lighting that got replaced with a ubiquitous gloomy haze and modern color grades draped lovelessly over strangely literal, realism-hopeful (ai-upscaled?) reinterpretations of the original environment textures, totally massacring the gestural impressionism of the source material. with the level geometry unchanged, it feels like an overly ambitious modpack. there are lots of choices made to make the game’s environments seem more realistic when the dreamlike quality of the original levels ironically felt more immersive. They completely missed the strange appeal of a game where you never see the sky, choosing to add skylights where they never were before. I really don’t understand what they were going for. It’s clearly the worst genre of graphical update a game could receive, and one of the most heinous executions of that genre I have ever seen. You can find more tasteful texture mods for Minecraft. And don’t get me started on what they did to Lara Croft. the very 90s bombshell femme fatale thing she had going on was certainly not a groundbreaking feminist statement by any means but at least it was more interesting than the sex doll we got in the remastered graphics, doubtlessly created for aging millennials who grew up yearning to merely fuck this psycho queen, a recreation of their wistful memory of the Sex Object instead of the reality that she is a Kill Person, about whom one more correctly should feel an ocean of fear and a droplet of sadistic arousal when she gets torn to pieces by panthers or impaled in suspiciously overbloody spike pits—SORRY! don’t blame the messenger, the designers just put all that stuff in the game themselves.

Copy Kitty

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Preliminary warning: If you play this game, it is crucial you switch to the “advanced” input mode. It’s not really any more difficult. The default settings are really, really bad.

Copy Kitty triggers a feeling of familial recognition I last had while playing Rabi-Ribi: these people, too, are perverts. But while Rabi-Ribi was a sort of uneven work with a voyeuristic perversion that worked against its themes and mechanics, Copy Kitty makes no pretense about gratuitously, ubiquitously indulging its own age-regressive power fantasy. It is not so often you get such direct passage into the squishy, gooey, plushy heart of a game’s author and it is especially less often that you get to pilot it yourself to such decadent heights. This game really does feel like a little kid designed it, if a little kid could be born with a mastery of gameplay programming and technical art, plus drawings good enough that you could hang them up on the fridge without embarrassment. It’s the kind of game a little kid might pray every day to be brought to existence in the magical way you think games work when you’re young, a naive ideal game form that, in reality, is just a little too idealistic, only communicable in a breathless chain of “and then”s. And then you combine the lightning and the explosions to make lightning explosions, and then you set the lightning explosions on fire, and then you blow up the terrain and it flies everywhere in big flaming chunks, and then you fight a giant robot and then when you beat the giant robot you get in the giant robot and then fight another giant robot, etc, and then a wise and weathered adult like you or me would say, yes sweetheart that would be delightful wouldn’t it, and then the little kid grows up to actually make that game real.

Rain World

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Uugghhhhh it’s so good. Really masterfully designed in how it gets you exploring both the environments and game mechanics, though it can be cryptic to its own detriment. The non-player-creatures stand out as highly believable, unsettlingly real animals that act in unpredictable but natural ways. it’s also hard to fathom how such a small team could achieve such heights in visual (gorgeous, semi-procedural environment art) and audio (truly creepy and strange creature noises and tasteful, huge ambient soundscapes that are admittedly a little hampered by the sort of forgettable soundtrack—i think a stronger choice would have been no music at all with a different method of conveying that you are e.g. about to be eaten by some kind of juiced up crocodile) design. I really was not prepared for the atmosphere of this game. it’s really a treat.

Rain World knows that it is a simple game. you are not rewarded for exploration with a double jump or bigger muscles to throw rocks harder but with cool new places encrusted with cool new layers of cool new types of crust, and with cool weird new organisms that make you squirm with disgust(ed delight). Getting eaten by something new in a new, exotic, concrete bolgia is its own reward. Rain World is not a horror game but it is scary in the way that real life is scary. anything can happen and you don’t know what will until it does. even then, you can only prepare for what you know has happened before. Rain World is not above surprising you with a new type of dying. it’s bold but it works because it knows what it wants to be and how all its constituent parts should be in order to meet that goal.

the major problem with Rain World is just that it can be very hard to tell what you are really supposed to do or where to go, and the game doesn’t really account for this much. the slow pace of the platforming and level layouts can make experimentation annoying, especially while trying to avoid death by random predator or just flopping off a cliff. it’s difficult to remember how to get around, even with the map, which has been purposefully restricted in utility. maybe I am a new school gamer, but any time i need to whip out the pencil and paper to remember which areas link where (which I have got very close to doing, I still don’t fucken remember how to get to half the map) I think as a designer you have failed unless the integrity of the game is built around that, and I still probably wouldn’t play even Wizardry without an automap. I understand the intention of mystery and letting the player discover things, but I think some of the discoveries in Rain World are more frustrating than satisfying (I could have done X the whole time?).

I happily recommend Rain World but please know that you are looking at a very specific type of game that can be frustrating to some people. It feels in some sense like a game for game developers. I just wanna take it apart and look at its insides, and those of the people who made it.

Antonblast

Thu, 16 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

really polished visual style (some find it too cluttered, I think it’s fine) and a lot of very very cool moments but the platforming just isn’t there. levels alternate between so easy they’re playing themselves and unsatisfying puzzles that are easy to figure out but awkward to actually execute, transformation gimmicks that largely feel similar to one another, and very unconfident level rhythms with strange decisions leading to a pattern of seemingly post-hoc remedial signposting (there’s even an option to turn this off, which is a terrible sign) and a bit of rail-roading to force the player in the right direction in a way that feels kinda unnatural. it feels good to blow through crates and enemies, but there’s a lot of cruel moments where you are given little time to react to level hazards making the most fun strategy suboptimal the first time through a level.

Antonblast feels too easy and too difficult at the same time in a way that kind of just turns out boring. the best sections are some of the set pieces in a few level sections and boss fights, they are absolutely next level and what I want to see from more indie devs in the future: economic, cinematic gameplay that plays on existing mechanics while providing a unique self-contained spectacle. those parts are just too far apart. I really wanted to like this game and it has a lot of great qualities but I will not finish it because I’m not having fun.

Baroque

Sun, 02 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Baroque interprets the roguelike formula in a uniquely macabre way. There is sometimes little difference between winning and losing. Navigating its strangely industrial corridors is haunting and tense, and this tension is further enhanced by the game’s unsettling sound design and music. This is a very beautiful game by all metrics, one of the best looking games I’ve seen for the Saturn (which is the version I’d recommend playing) complete with absolutely dope CGI FMV sequences.

The game really is quite FUN, but sadly just a little too brutal. It has an interesting and tactical item system and unique enemies with different strategies, and the combat feels better than you’d expect, but you can very easily find yourself stuck in a run that is doomed to fail. And since the character controller has such sluggish movement, losing a run can mean sacrificing an hour or two for absolutely no progression in the main story. Roguelikes are at their best when you can play them at your own pace. Baroque’s moment-to-moment gameplay is just too slow for the rather interesting strategy game beneath it. On the other hand, the slower pace fits the atmosphere perfectly. There is some dissonance between Baroque’s intention to be a narratively substantial RPG and its commitment to traditional roguelike trappings, and that can be frustrating as someone who is invested but not enough to play the game for hours at a time just for breadcrumbs.

Still, there is no other game that feels the way Baroque does, and despite its obvious borrowings from games like King’s Field and Mystery Dungeon, this is a game that has no substitute - not even the remake for the PS2 and Wii. Ultimately you have nothing to lose playing through the dungeon once or twice, and I recommend doing so just for the wicked vibes alone. Check out the HQ concept gallery download from this page if you wanna see some crazy shit

Kirby Super Star Ultra

Sat, 11 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Every time I play a Kirby game I’m always blown away by the polish and Super Star Ultra has polish in excess. each ability has a particularly fleshed out moveset compared to prior games with unique but intuitive controls for each, and they’re all pretty satisfying to use because of how unreal the visual and sound design is in this game, not to mention how tight and deliberate Kirby’s controls are on their own (and Meta Knight is a whole lot of fun in his own right being the Vergil to Kirby’s Dante). the attention to detail is unmatched. the music is so cracked it’s unfair—i don’t think I’ve heard a better game soundtrack in my life. it’s a great example of that infinite Nintendo money put to good use. I only wish it weren’t so easy, and that I played it as a kid. play co-op if you can.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

It’s cool that everything explodes when you kill it. The boss fights are hit & miss, with all of them having very nice art. Sadly the level design is agonizing and largely consists of long corridors full of the same enemies. The second half of the game’s map is even worse: you are constantly required to switch to and from a very slow flying state to access new areas, as it was obviously not designed to be traversed normally.

Fucking around in the inventory menu gets increasingly tedious because they couldn’t have a sane item system. Most items just serve to clutter your inventory. This game suffers greatly from completely pointless RPG mechanics that detract from the entertaining parts of the game. You are drip-fed small servings of fun between long stretches of boring nothing, well hidden by satisfying bells and whistles that make you feel like something is happening when it’s not.

It is hard to shake the feeling that the developers wanted to stretch out the play time as long as possible, but they didn’t want to bother actually making it worth playing for that long. It’s a waste of time.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is what happens when you decide to add everything to a game. It’s worth playing for the presentation alone, but one shouldn’t be ashamed if they’ve had enough before it’s over.

Metroid Dread

Tue, 23 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This game likes to make you feel like you’re in charge of the exploring when in reality it pushes you through fairly linear environments. Less player freedom but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The robot chases were a cool change of pace. The shooting and jumping and blowing stuff up feels great as usual. I liked the bosses, especially the final boss. The map was kinda too huge for its own good and felt annoying to navigate at times, and much of the enemies being quicktime events felt very boring after a little while. It was dece.

Kero Blaster

Mon, 06 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This is a great little run & gun that does little to innovate but nails the execution. That’s all that really matters anyway. Good study material for level designers. It looks nice and the music & sound design is great.

There is some crust in staying so true to its roots. The control scheme is pretty awkward. Switching weapons is a pain, and sometimes turning around while shooting doesn’t work the way you’d expect. You also have to retread the entire level on a game-over, which can get a little annoying in the later levels (which are relatively long) but the game is only about 2-3 hours anyway so this is hardly an issue.

Bottom line is that you should play Kero Blaster if you’ve ever enjoyed a game where you shoot a gun and “side scroll”.

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup

Mon, 06 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup puts the Playing Game in Role-Playing Game.

It’s the best game ever made. Ok, not really. But good luck finding another strategy game that offers the same level of tactical depth without any of the boring parts.

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup simultaneously remains a capital T “Traditional Roguelike” and utterly breaks the mold of tradition by actually caring about the player. There is no grinding. There are no tedious, multi-step rituals to accomplish basic tasks in the name of fluff. It is pure tactics. Everything that is not tactics is taken out. If something is not tactics and they can’t take it out, it is automated. It does not require a google search or wiki to play (and beat).

Also it’s free and you can play it in your browser. You have no excuse!

Minecraft

Mon, 20 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

It’s boring. It has severe pacing issues. The challenges presented are more tedious than stimulating. The “RPG” elements are basically non-existent. The combat is terrible. Building is creative but also completely unrewarding. Minecraft doesn’t know what it wants to be and accomplishes nothing well, except that initial feeling of awesome scale that quickly turns to disappointment when you realize there is nothing to do in its infinitely huge world.