Games Beaten 2023

[BoneSnapDeez]

I've been sitting on that GBA Breath of Fire forever. Should really roll through that game again, it's so good. Nice reviews folks.

[Markies]

Markies' Games Beat List Of 2023!
***Denotes Replay For Completion***

***1. Dragon Valor (PS1)***
2. Breath Of Fire (GBA)
3. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge (NS)



I beat Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge on the Nintendo Switch this evening!

The big game released last year for me was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge. I had heard that they were developing another TMNT Beat'Em Up by the company that did Streets of Rage 4 and I was already sold. The TMNT Beat'Em Up games on Genesis and Super Nintendo were some of my favorite games on those consoles, so to see a re-imagining of those games got me pretty excited. My friend picked up a copy and I absolutely loved it. Thankfully, another friend of mine bought me the game for Christmas and we decided to play through it on my Birthday weekend.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge plays exactly what you think it would play like. It is made by the same team that did the Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World Beat'Em Up and it plays very much like that one. Add in some Streets of Rage 4 newness and the classic Turtles' game and you have a mixture for some fantastic action. Besides the 4 turtles, you can also play as Splinter, April and Casey Jones. Out of the 7 characters, each one is unique, so it is exciting to go through the game with each character to see how they play and get the different endings. You also have a variety of moves including many throwing your enemy into the screen, which is one of the greatest things ever in a video game. Each stage is different enough and they add in some vehicle levels to throw something different into the mix. You also have a good mix of characters from the old shows that return that brought back many memories from my childhood. You also have a large Super Attack with a meter that fills up quickly and is very fun to use.

The story is fairly basic and really doesn't hold your attention. In fact, it gets in the way a bit of the times, but I don't think anybody is playing this game for the story. Also, some of the enemies and bosses can be quite annoying. Bosses can only be hurt at certain times and enemies that are designed just to be annoying.

Overall, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge was exactly what I wanted the game to be. It's nothing revolutionary or mind blowing or even earth shattering good as Streets of Rage 4 was. But, the game is a very solid Beat'Em Up that uses its source material exceptionally well. It would be perfect to play with kids or people who grew up with the show. If you love TMNT or Beat'Em Ups, this is a must play!

[PartridgeSenpai]

Partridge Senpai's 2021 Beaten Games:
Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022
* indicates a repeat

1. Super Hero Operations (PS1)

2. Lil' Gator Game (PC)

This is a game I’ve been vaguely aware of for a little while, as some close friends of mine played through it and really loved it last year. Well one of those friends was then super lovely and gifted it to me on Steam, so I knew I just had to play it and quickly since I had so much time over the winter break. I streamed about half of my playthrough on Twitch as well, so she could for sure watch me experience as much of it as she could ^w^. I didn’t finish it on stream, but with a little bit of playing after, I 100%’d it in about 5.5 hours. I played it on Steam with my Xbone controller.

Lil’ Gator Game is a story about the titular lil’ gator, who loves playing with their big sister and imagining exciting fantasy worlds to explore. Fast forward to her entering college, and our lil’ gator is having trouble adjusting to just how busy their big sister is. With the help of their friends (and a whole bunch of *their* friends), they put together a big island’s worth of adventure to go through to try and convince their big sister to set aside school work for a while and play together like they used to. It’s not terribly long, but it’s a story that’s delightful, charming, and even a bit queer to boot, and I think anyone with siblings will probably get a lot out of this like I did~.

As for mechanics, the easiest way to describe LGG is “Breath of the Wild but adventure game.” You’ve got quests to complete, islands to explore (one smaller one to teach you the basics, and then a bigger one to use them on), you’ve got a glider, you can climb anything (complete with stamina bars), and you’ve even got a sword and a pointy hat! The one thing you don’t have is… enemies. You’re just a lil’ gator playing with their friends in a nature park. What would be attacking you? You’ve got environmental puzzles to solve, cardboard cutout standees of monsters to slash at, and all manner of people and collectibles to hunt for, but there is never any sort of failure state to fear entering by doing things wrong (not even falling can kill you~). This makes LGG a super chill and fun romp for an adult, and an excellent game for younger folks or those just getting into games for the first time, but something like BotW is just too challenging or intimidating for them to hop right into.

For its aesthetics, you have an island full of simple and pretty cell-shaded environments populated by cute anthropomorphized animals~. While certain aspects (especially your “glider” of a T-shirt you fly around with) are certainly BotW-inspired, the main influence of the game’s graphics are much more Wind Waker in style, and it’s delightful~. The music is very atmospheric and happy, underscoring the action very nicely.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. Lil’ Gator Game wears its heart on its sleeve, and it’s a big, wonderful heart to behold. This is an absolutely excellent game, and a wonderful way to spend part of a weekend, or a wonderful gift for the young (or not) Zelda fan in your life. It’s a super charming indie adventure super worth your time and money, and it’s hard to really be more positive about it than that~.

----

3. Disco Elysium: The Final Cut (PC)

This is a game I’d heard nothing but excellent things about and have been meaning to play for years, but the perfect storm of reasons finally got me to play it. Thing number one was my partner wanting to play it together (or rather, go through individually at roughly the same time) at some point this year, and the other point was it being down to just $10 on Steam. I was about to finish Super Hero Operations, and still had the ability to stay home and no-life the game if I wanted because it was still winter break, so now seemed like the absolute perfect time to go through it, and so I did. Over the course of 50.5 hours in less than a week, I finally played through Disco Elysium. It’s a game so dense and just full of stuff that it’s kinda hard for me to write about and not feel like I’m missing something, but I’ll do my best~.

DE sees you waking up from some kind of stupor, nearly naked in an upstairs hostel room. You pull yourself together and bump into a nice young woman in the hallway, and you’re informed that it’s year ’51 of the Current Century, you’re in the district of Martinaise in the city of Revachol, and you’re apparently some sort of policeman. As for you, all you remember is… nothing. You have no memory of this place, of your name, of your face. Even concepts like “money” or “government” are entirely foreign concepts to our Detective. You venture downstairs where you’re told you’re here to not only investigate a murder, but you’ve been here for three days already. The murder isn’t just a hanging: the body still hasn’t even been taken down after over a week. With no idea what your past or future have in store for you, you meet the man who will end up being your number one compatriot for this adventure, Kim Kitsuragi, and venture outside into the world of Disco Elysium.

DE is first and foremost an adventure game, and a very player-directed one at that. If you’ve played Shenmue, it almost has that quality of “no objective markers. You wanna solve the mystery? Then you best get to detecting, Mr. Detective!”, though I’d say this accomplishes that style of self-directed gameplay in a much more well realized product than Shenmue (even if they’re not quite going for the same type of experience). It has the perspective of a Black Isle CRPG, but there isn’t any combat to speak of. The developers have been very forthcoming with how one of their old favorite games, Planescape Torment, helped inspire DE, but this game has the good sense to omit actual combat mechanics, unlike PT does. Even encounters you could call “combat” still take place within the game’s framework of dialogue trees.

All that out of the way, DE is a very personal as well as a very political story with mysteries surrounding both topics. Martinaise is a constantly shifting and changing world over the days you spend there, with tons of NPCs to meet, locations to explore, and quests to find and do, or not. Figuring out just what kind of person your detective is going to be, even down to trying to learn what your name is or looking in a mirror to even get a picture of what you look like (if you don’t, your picture in the lower left will just be a cloudy haze the whole game), and that’s reflected in the game’s stats and mechanics.

Detective has four primary, Intellect, Psyche, Physique, and Motorics that each contain six skills within them. These skills are not just skills however: They are aspects of his personality (you could even view them as members of his plural system, if that’s something you’re familiar with). A friend of mine described it as a kind of Greek Chorus (the theatrical term) with you at all times, so “the Chorus” is how I’ve taken to referring to the skills as characters. The higher level of points you have in a skill, the more likely you are to succeed not only active checks (some of which can be retried, others of which can’t) in the dialogue, but also passive checks both inside and outside dialogue. In fact, if you have a skill *too* high, then that Chorus member can outright take the spotlight from you and have Detective do things you otherwise wouldn’t’ve had him do. The sheer degree to which your skills are characters unto themselves is just one more thing that makes the world of Disco Elysium so much more engaging and interesting. There’s not only a rich outer world, but a rich inner world to explore too.

The developers of DE are Estonian, and it really shows in how their world is constructed and how their narrative plays out. There are a lot of aspects to the world that will probably be pretty familiar to anyone who’s versed in Eastern European literature, but they do a lot to subvert those tropes as well. DE is not just a very political story in the terms of how its story has Detective working in very political situations to try and sort out the main murder mystery, but it’s also a very politically designed game in how it gets the player to try and analyze their own beliefs about the world in the process. The world of Elysium is one crafted to both be very evocative of the world we live in, but also one divorced enough from real life to let you view things from a fresh angle. From the money-focused “Ultraliberalism” to the likely more familiar “moralism”, the game does a lot to push you to view aspects of our real world from a new angle.

I could write or talk for hours about different analogies and metaphors that DE uses to different effects (and in terms of talking, I already have I assure you x3), but I’ll conclude this narrative section by stating once more that it really does it expertly. It’s hard to really say much more than that because of just how easy it is for one playthrough to be *so* different from another. The way your skills interact with the world, especially passive checks, are done so subtly that it’s almost impossible to realize what you even *could* be missing if your stats were just arranged a bit differently. DE is absolutely a game I intend to replay not only because of how much I know I missed, but especially because of how much I’m excited to discover how much I don’t know I missed.

A lot of the mechanics of the game are wrapped up in its writing, so I’ve already covered most of the mechanical aspects, but I’ll elaborate on another few things here that aren’t quite so explicitly tied into the storytelling as such. You gain EXP by doing quests and gathering information, and a level up gives you another skill point to raise a skill by one. There are a lot of mid-conversation active skill checks you can try to do all manner of things, and raising a skill point (or learning new info diegetically that affects your skill roll) can give you another chance at those skill checks, as well as just generally making that skill stronger. The game uses a system of rolling 2 d6 + whatever your skill is to pass checks as trivial as 8 and as godly as 18, but a 2 is always a failure and a 12 is always a success. The game is very transparent about these active checks, and it’s really nice to see just how clear the game is in general with how its dialogue trees are put together. There’s never any ambiguity in terms of what a dialogue option will do when it comes to outright ending a conversation (or concluding a mid-convo topic) will do, and in a game where it matters *so* much what dialogue options you do and *don’t* pick, that’s a really good feature not to skimp on.

There is also the “thought” system, where you can pick up “thoughts” to dwell on an “internalize” in your Thought Cabinet. After taking however many hours in-game it takes to think about those things, the associated bonuses (usually penalties) from dwelling on it will disappear and give you a new semi-permanent bonus (or penalty) depending on the thought. You can spend a skill point to expand your thought cabinet, or burn a skill point to get rid of a thought you particularly don’t like. Internalized thoughts can have all manner of bonuses, but there’s no way of knowing what that bonus will be until you finish internalizing it. This is the one aspect of the game I don’t so much like the implementation of. It feels a bit tacked-on compared to everything else, and while a lot of the bonuses are truly great and worth having, just how much in-game time (which is large, but not infinite) these take to complete makes them sometimes pretty serious investments. Time only passes when you’re talking to people, so undoing an internalized thought by loading an old save involves undoing a LOT of progress, most likely. That said, you’re also very unlikely to run out of time in the game. You *can* run out of time, but like a game like Fallout 1 or 2, you’d really have to be trying to do that for it to happen. At any rate, not knowing what internalized thoughts will ultimately do is an unwelcome level of opacity in design in a game otherwise very transparent and forthcoming with info, and I never felt that it complemented the rest of the game’s systems the way the other respective system do one another.

The aesthetics of the game are very striking and beautiful. The whole game has this sort of painted aspect to how the graphics look, with details both 2D and 3D looking like they walked out of some twentieth century work of art. Character portraits are striking and give great insight as to who you’re talking to, and the voicework in particular is absolutely excellent. The most major addition that the Final Cut edition (which is basically the only version you can buy these days, and is the version available on consoles too) is fully voicing all dialogue, and damn is it effective. The music is also very good, with the game having a great soundtrack to underscore scenes of all sorts and set the tension appropriately.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. Though this wasn’t the first game I beat this year, really, we’re starting this year off incredibly strong just like I did last year with Dandy Dungeon. Disco Elysium lived up to the hype and then some. It’s an incredibly well crafted thought provoking adventure game not to be missed. This is absolutely in the territory of “how will anyone, including the guys who made it, ever make something better than this?”, though I’m absolutely excited to see them (or anyone else) give it a shot! If it even comes close to this well crafted an experience, then my hat is truly off to them. Until then, the only question left for me at this point is not “if” I will replay Disco Elysium, but “when” x3

[MrPopo]

Previous Years: 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022

1. Void Destroyer - PC
2. Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights - Switch
3. Raging Blasters - Switch
4. Citizen Sleeper - Switch
5. GetsuFumaDen: Undying Moon
6. Hands of Necromancy - PC
7. Project Downfall - PC
8. Chasm: The Rift - PC
9. Cultic - PC
10. Kirby Super Star - SNES
11. Kirby's Dream Land 2 - GB
12. Kirby's Dream Land 3 - SNES
13. Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards - N64

Kirby 64 wraps up the Dark Matter trilogy and is Kirby's one outing on the N64. Like Dream Land 3, it was released late in the console's life, which means the folks at Nintendo have had time to figure out how to pull all they can out of the system. As a result you have a very smooth playing N64 game, although there are still some compromises compared to Dream Land 3 when it comes to things like the level design.

The setup is that Dark Matter is infecting the various worlds to try and get the Crystal Star; in the process it is broken into shards and Kirby must reunite them in order to face the true final boss. At the beginning you rescue your friends like Waddle Dee and Dedede, and they will show up later to assist you. This might be hints on how to get a shard, power ups, or helping you traverse through sections.

Like the previous games in the Dark Matter trilogy there are only a few copy powers. However, they dropped the animal companions that gave you more options in favor of a mixing system. You can shoot a star containing a power into another enemy who grants a power to combine the two. So if you combine fire with fire you get double fire, which is an amped up version of the base fireball dash. But if you combine fire with cutter you now get a fire sword that has a lot of clearance and clears out enemies and bosses quickly. Many of the shards will require particular combinations of powers in order to get; fortunately only one or two require you to bring a power from outside the level. And unlike Dream Land 3 you don't have to finish the stage, so revisits are faster.

The game is a 2.5D platformer; the 3D is used for some camera pans to add depth to your traversal, but this mostly ends up making platforming harder for the wrong reason of having less sense of where you are. Also, weirdly, the game caps how much floating Kirby can do. This gets a bit scary with a few shards that involve diving into a pit and getting out again. A thing I noticed is the game is mostly horizontal, with relatively few vertical scrolling areas, and definitely no larger mazes like you would see in Dream Land 3. It's hard to tell if this is due to hardware limitations or just them not being sure how to render such spaces with how they have the camera operate.

Overall it's a solid Kirby title, but I think I liked 3 better (the minigame heart start challenges not-withstanding). The various mix powers were a lot of fun to use, so that's a major point in its favor.

[ZRofel]

The other day I wrapped up The Fish Files for the GBC. I feel like in most circles it's an incredibly obscure game, but I'm pretty sure I learned about it on this site, so I'm not sure how much background information I need to give. Essentially it's a PAL-only point-and-click adventure game that is arguably the best looking game on the GBC. I forget the exact technique they used, but the developers exploited some aspect of the GBC hardware to create really rich, colorful backgrounds that would look at home on the GBA or SNES. And the sprites, though a bit more limited, mesh with the backgrounds very well. Visually, it was clearly modeled after the early Lucasarts adventure games like Maniac Mansion, Sam & Max, etc., and it honestly holds up really well in comparison. Really, it's a gorgeous looking Gameboy game. Musically it's a bit of a mixed bag. The individual tracks are all very well done and feel like the equivalent of a Lucasarts adventure soundtrack done with GBC hardware. The issue is that there are only a handful of tracks, and each one tends to play for the entirety of one section of the game. Since the musical loop is relatively short, some of the bouncier ones definitely do start to grate after a while.

As for the gameplay, it's remarkably solid for a game from a genre that feels like it really belongs on the PC. Despite the limited control options (just four buttons and a d-pad), the game controls very well, with the player controlling the character directly and hot-spots in the environment being highlighted as the player approaches them. It takes a little getting used to, but once you've been playing for a bit it feels very natural. And the puzzles are also very well-designed, with narrative clues giving you just enough information to put the pieces together yourself (most of the time). I only really got stuck twice. Once because the solution was pretty arbitrary, and once because the hot-spot I needed to interact with was positively tiny and only appeared for a brief window. There are occasional moments of artificial bottle-necking where, say, a random item just won't appear in an unrelated area until you've solved another puzzle or had a certain conversation with an NPC. But as long as the player keeps solving puzzles as they progress, it shouldn't really be a problem.

The one issue that I'm still kind of on the fence about is the script. I'm pretty sure the game was originally developed in Italy by a non-English-speaking team, and it definitely shows in the English-language text. It reads fairly dry and literal, almost like a machine-translated script. That being said, I feel like it's fairly easy to read into the text and see the intent of the original jokes. And looking at things that way, it actually is a fairly amusing story. I'm just not sure everyone playing will feel that compelled to do a deeper reading. There are also a few brief moments of racially insensitive dialog, although I suppose considering the translation, it could be argued some of that was accidental as opposed to intentional.

All-in-all, a fun little title that did a decent job of bringing an underrepresented genre to the Gameboy. I guess the dev team went on to develop an Addams Family game next, using essentially the same engine. I'm definitely curious to check that one out.

[Ack]

1. Northern Journey (PC)(FPS)
2. Hatchpunk (PC)(FPS)
3. Might and Magic IX (PC)(RPG)
4. Star Wars: Empire at War (PC)(RTS)
5. Chasm: The Rift (PC)(FPS)

Chasm was the FPS that started Ukrainian developer Action Forms' decade and a half of game development. The genre was their bread and butter, and while they are mainly known for the Carnivore series, they did manage to provide a variety of titles, including Cryostasis (which I have been seeking for a decade). But they started strong. Not perfectly, but strong with Chasm. It's a game that cribs from Quake and Doom, yet cribs well with some inventions of their own that predate the highly praised dismemberment system of Turok 2 by a year.

While visually Chasm feels like Quake, especially at the beginning, it then goes into a series of different worlds that could just as much be inspired by Exhumed (or PowerSlave for those of us in the US). However, it's a Doom clone in terms of level layout, with limited verticality and an extensive reliance on monster closets. A lot of monster closets. Chasm predicted exactly what Doom 3 was going to do with enemies spawning in right behind you or ready to go right on the other side of the door as soon as it opens. It happens often enough, you'll notice, though Chasm doesn't give you hints like total monster counts during or at the end of the level.

Levels are in blocks of four, with each set pieced together in a way that feels mostly continuous. For a game that predates Unreal and Half-Life and has a level design from the big father figure of the genre, it's incredible watching it come together. Again, it isn't perfect, as that lack of verticality makes for some awkward platforming sections where you think you should be able to jump over something, but it does help make the world feel bigger than each level, though each level can be a strange mazelike structure of its own, complete with deathtraps and secrets.

Your weapons load out in Chasm is a fair mix of classics mixed with some interesting additions which might have been better utilized. The double barrel shotgun is your baby: ammo is plentiful, it has one of the best dismemberment chances of any weapon, and it's powerful and accurate for quick burst damage with the added benefit of being hitscan. The rate of fire isn't great and negates any chance to stunlock opponents, but when a limb flies off, you still feel like a bad ass. That said, your projectile weapons have a bad habit of hitting level geometry that doesn't appear to be right (while hit boxes are great on foes, watching both your and enemy shots hit walls is a common occurrence, even when it looks like you will clear). One weapon involves shooting saw blades, but surprisingly, this weapon doesn't dismember well. It's a strange choice and felt like a let down for what could have been a great use of the game's dismemberment system.

Since I have mentioned it a few times, yes, dismembering enemies is a major component of the game, especially on higher difficulties when you need to reduce threat quickly. Knocking off a limb can reduce an enemy's combat effectiveness as well as do massive damage, and even those that cannot be cut apart experience locational damage, like head shots stunning better than a torso blast. There are rules to how dismembering works, and they are consistent, but you have to know which animations to avoid and when to target what area as well as with what weapon. There is an opportunity to improve your skill here, which is great because otherwise you will likely find certain enemies cheap and annoying. Hell, you probably will anyway.

The original Chasm launched with 16 levels in chunks of four, with the fourth in each one a puzzle-based boss fight. Later, Action Form also developed a three-level block for an expansion that they put out for free. This is included in the new updated release on PC download services. It is ultimately more of the same, with a couple of new enemies that do not feel radically different from what the game already offered. The one cool feature is a new boss battle that requires using one of the game's power ups to win. It's worth playing through once but not really necessary to return to.

Still, Chasm: The Rift is worth a playthrough if you love your '90s FPS. It had been on my radar for decades, so I'm happy to finally experience it. I had a great time.

[MrPopo]

I see you noticed the terrain hit boxes as well. My gut is that the hitbox on terrain is just a single box for a wall segment, without regards to the individual polygons that make up the actual visual of the wall.

[elricorico]

1. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles(Arcade)(XBONE)

2. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles:Turtles in Time(Arcade (XBONE)

Continuing my play of the Cowabunga Collection I ran through the arcade version of Turtles in Time. Definitely brought me back to the days of playing in an arcade with loud music on the jukebox and several arcade machines blaring their own background noise. This is a game I recall beating in the arcade as a kid with my best friend.

The Turtles get a lot more moves and the variety in enemies is increased from the first arcade game. It controls well and if you play well you can keep from getting swarmed by enemies most of the time. I was on pace for a little less than one credit per level until hitting the last three, when it started to get a bit more pricey. Much of that was my own fault though - when I was playing well I would clear numerous enemies without any damage, but if I slipped I would take a number of hits before getting back into the rythm.

I did find most of the bosses fair, but the future Kang boss was a real pain, I just couldn't get any consistent hits in. The game still looks great and sounds pretty good, and most importantly it is a ton of fun. I had forgotten how many little nods to other games existed in this one. I especially liked the foot clan riding fire breathing dinosaurs a la Golden Axe. Too bad the turtles can't mount them too.

This game is a big part of my memories of the couple of years when my small town had an arcade. My friends and I would definitely save up some coin looking forward to playing this on the weekend.

[Markies]

Markies' Games Beat List Of 2023!
***Denotes Replay For Completion***

***1. Dragon Valor (PS1)***
2. Breath Of Fire (GBA)
3. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge (NS)
4. World Of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse And Donald Duck (GEN)



I beat World of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck this afternoon!

Two years ago, I picked up and then beat Castle of Illusion. I had always enjoyed the old Mickey Mouse cartoons and I had heard great things about Castle of Illusion. The game wasn't flawless, but I enjoyed it nevertheless. So, obviously, World of Illusion was afterwards and I was curious to pick up the game as well. I did my last one of the local game stores after beating my Backlog and I found World of Illusion just sitting there. Looking for a simple game and a good game to play as a breather between other games, I decided to pick it up and pop it in. It would be the perfect game to play after the long play through of Breath of Fire.

World of Illusion is mostly the same as Castle of Illusion. You mostly walk through the game. It's not that short as it is only five levels. However, instead of jumping on enemies, you have a magic cape with a short distance to destroy them. Also, the game is two player co-op, as you can play as Donald Duck along with Donald having his own levels in single player. The levels are very unique and varied and it is fun to explore them all. From a candy world to your typical forest and water level, each area is nothing like the one before and that was very exciting. The game moves at a much slower pace, so you have to play by its rules. You are walking most of the time and Mickey cannot take out multiple enemies at a time, so you have to slow down and take your time.

With that being said, some areas and especially some bosses take advantage of Mickey's limitations. He jumps so slowly that one boss can switch course and still damage Mickey even though I jumped over him. Also, near the end, they pile on enemies that take multiple hits and you have to take damage and stages that move much faster than Mickey. With more blind jumps and some frustrating design choices, the game proved more of a challenge than expected and you need to be on your toes while playing the game.

Overall, I still enjoyed my time with World of Illusion. I would say that I probably enjoyed Castle of Illusion much more because of the simpler game play. You get magical powers throughout the game, but they didn't work that great or were just used at certain points in the level. I wouldn't say either of them are great games, but they are nice diversions and simple games to play. If you enjoy small platformers, this one isn't bad to play.

[Ack]

I see you noticed the terrain hit boxes as well. My gut is that the hitbox on terrain is just a single box for a wall segment, without regards to the individual polygons that make up the actual visual of the wall.

Yeah, I'm thinking it's basically just Doom dressed up to look prettier and like it has more angles than it actually does.