#38: Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet
(XBLA)
Let's get this out of the way, ITSP is beautiful. I listed it as one of my top games of the year for both visuals and atmosphere, because I really think that despite being a XBLA game, it is easily one of the best of the year at just taking you to a completely different place. The hand drawn visuals are just awesome. They also do tons of work to make sure the game has no HUD, which also does wonders for pulling you into the experience.
The puzzles throughout the game also do a good job of grabbing you and bringing you into this new world. They are strange, at times clever, but they just generally fit this alien world, which of course makes you feel like you are on an alien world. The boss fights are also pretty decent, a lot of the time they are more like a big puzzle than anything else.
From there, things get a little shakier. The combat mechanics are really solid, but as time goes on, combat becomes a serious nuisance. There is no reward for fighting. Enemies rarely even drop health for you. All combat ends up doing is holding you back from your objective, the risk of getting damaged with no reward in return. As the game went on, I found myself getting annoyed every time an enemy was in my path.
The exploration aspects of ITSP are really disappointing, Theres no real secret paths or shortcuts to find by exploring, in fact, exploring is mostly useless. Each area has a pretty linear path to make it through, then, you can do a looooong backtrack later once you pick up more abilities to use those other paths and pick up upgrades, but it feels like this stuff was more thrown in to give the game metroidvania elements rather than truly implemented into the game. I would have preferred a game with a linear level by level map with side paths that contain the upgrades, rather than the annoying backtracking.
The game is also unfortunately short, like 4 hours or so, with little replayability. For the $15 price tag I like a little more value ideally, but oh well. There is a lantern run co-op mode which is supposedly pretty decent, but not tons of people own the game, so you might have problems finding a partner.
ITSP is a pretty good game, but man, I just feel like it could have been way more.
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