ICEY

ICEY is a chinese made 2d action platformer that i have been meaning to play for a long time. And unfortunatly, its not that good. Storywise it tries to play a meta narrative like Stanley Parable, except that this game is much less inflexible because it is so so linear, and the result dialogue you get from the narrator is not as surprising/well written as in Stanley Parable.

Then there is the gameplay, which tries to translate devil may cry into the 2d space. There is a very big arsenal of combos and tech and they interact with each other in satisfying ways. However there are so many flaws that prevent the initially satisfying combat to reach its full potential. The enemies for once arent all that fun to fight against, with some abysmal attack hitboxes. The game also feels unresponsive at times, and it could have a better i-frames on the dash animation, as well as a few moments of invulnerability after you take damage. This last point is ridiculous in the game considering the amount of enemies they throw at you, you can get 1 instakilled simply as you get stunlocked by enemy attacks during the air, its very frustrating.

So yea it takes 2 hours or so to beat, considering that i have searched in all rooms for secrets and alternate endings and such. Honestly, considering how much big flaws it had, i have trouble recommending. Salt and Sanctuary is still the 2d sidescroller combat that is the benchmark for me, and this is quite a big distance from that.

I'll just say this right now: This is one of those games where it's best to go in as blind as possible. Yeah, I know that some people hate it when that's said, and I get why since a good deal of the people who say this literally don't mention anything about the games in question, but if you want some kind of selling point: This is an incredibly solid 2D sidescrolling action game. Don't look at the Steam description for this (and, honestly, the way it's written kind of turned me off originally), but check out some gameplay videos!

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You're still reading this? OK, time for an actual review.

I love metafiction. When it's done right, that is. With metafiction, games tend to fall into two camps: They're either incredibly clever with the way it handles said metafiction, such as Undertale, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, and pretty much anything that the former members of Galactic Cafe worked on (The Stanley Parable, The Beginner's Guide, Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist), or they decide that "HEY GUIZ WE'RE A VIDEO GAME!!!1!! OH LOOK ITS A BOSS FIGHT* LOOK AT HOW CLEVER WE ARE FOR POINTING IT OUT!!!!!1!!!XDXDXDXDZDXD" is somehow a good way at being meta. Unfortunately, I feel like more often than not, games tend to go for the latter route (which is baffling to me since things like film, television, and literature almost never do this outside of, I dunno, Animaniacs, I guess. I bring that up since I feel like it might be responsible for this line of thinking due to how young video game developers that do this tend to be, though if it is people forgot that it was at least kind of clever with the way it did things most of the time), though thankfully a good deal of them don't go too overboard with it.