1. Pokémon Moon - 3DS2. Tony Hawk's Underground - GCN3. Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising - PC4. Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War II: Retribution - PC5. Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness - PSP6. X-Wing: Imperial Pursuit - PC7. Star Wars Republic Commando - PC8. X-Wing: B-Wing - PC9. Blazing Lazers - TG-1610. Tales of Xillia 2 - PS311. Shining Force CD: Shining Force Gaiden - Sega CD12. MUSHA - Genesis13. Sonic CD - Sega CD14. Final Fantasy Legend III - GB15. Tales of Zestiria - PS316. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - Switch17. Horizon Zero Dawn - PS418. Tales of Berseria - PS419. Battlefield 1 - PC20. Turok 2: Seeds of Evil - PC21. Mass Effect Andromeda - PC22. Starflight 2 - PC23. Armored Hunter Gunhound EX - PC24. Space Megaforce - SNES25. Persona 5 - PS426. Torment: Tides of Numenera - PC27. Cosmic Star Heroine - PC28. Prey - PC29. Strafe - PC30. Mystic Origins - NES31. Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia - 3DS32. Ultra Street Fighter II - Switch33. The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky - PC34. Ultima IV - PC35. Environmental Station Alpha - PCSo I was watching SGDQ and Hollow Knight came up, and it looked neat and I decided to look for more Metroidvanias after I binged them last year. This was the first of them that I completed, and I'm hoping the weakest, because I'd be really sad if the other two were worse than this one.
So Environmental Station Alpha, like Axiom Verge, takes a lot of cues from the original Metroid. It's mostly the work of one guy with some support for art and music. The basic plot is that this station suddenly went dark and you are a little robot sent to investigate. There's a mystery, blah blah blah. It's all an excuse to have you navigate a labyrinthine world and pick up movement upgrades. The graphics are also in that NES pixelated style, though it's not shy about using some screen effects to do things like show that a room is hot or you're underwater. Your character only occupies the space of a single block, and it's sort of reminiscent of the protagonist of I Wanna Be The Guy. This is not an accident.
This game is extremely execution heavy, at times to its detriment (especially with many of the late game bosses). Aside from a standard double jump and a boost (that starts off horizontal but later gains a vertical version) your main mobility tool is a grapple beam that is pretty well modeled to give you a lot of momentum. This can be used with the right jump angles to launch yourself up shafts and will be a source of getting into a lot of places you need to be. And for the most part this platforming is tight and fun, with a lot of obvious escalation of how to pull things off.
But then there's other parts where the developer got too into that "I Wanna Be The Guy" mindset of requiring near perfect execution, and that's in the main game (I won't get into some of the optional items and the true ending). It turns several sections into major slogs. Now, if it was just that failing meant you had to try again, it would be one thing, but many times you're in hostile territory and you will quickly see your health whittled down by repeated attempts. I'll contrast with AM2R, which had several of the optional expansions behind parts that required tight execution of either chained shinesparks or wall jumps, and the penalty for failure was having to try again. The nasty stuff was always 100% optional, whereas some of the nastiest stuff in ESA is mandatory.
This all comes to a head in the later boss battles. All of the boss battles are challenging, with you needing to read patterns to avoid attacks (as your health is always pretty low compared to damage output; there's no 100%ing your way out of the fights like in Metroid). But once you get the boost things really take a turn for the nasty. The thing is that the boost makes you invincible for its duration, and from that point forward every boss has one or more attacks that require you to boost through. And not just a quick dodge; many times it's sequential dodges. It takes a potentially fun mechanic and just utterly beats it into the ground, before giving you a final boss fight where you are relentlessly spammed with attacks and frequently find yourself with no where to dodge (and when an attack takes off an eight of your HP you notice those moments really quickly). It forces you to play on the level of a low percentage speed runner because a traditional approach just gets you killed. Personally, I think it was overdone and made those fights feel a lot less fun (it didn't help that your dash is short enough that you need to have extremely good timing to not take damage anyway on the backside).
This game definitely had potential, but it gets pulled down by a shitty difficulty curve and a little too much feeling that the dev thought he was being clever.