Guacamelee is an interesting metroidvania with a world-switching mechanic and a large swath of memes sprinkled around. I quite enjoyed it, even if it continued (with Vadis Story last week) a trend of PC games almost requiring controllers to play ‘properly’. After progressing through almost all the game, I was stopped by one fight that frustrated me to no end.
The game is chock-full of unlockables - heart pieces and stamina, chests full of money - and you get through all of these things once you unlock the critical abilities, uppercuts, ground smashes, switching the world you’re in and turning into a chicken. You also fight pretty quickly through enemies, usually, being able to grab and throw them into other enemies once they’ve been weakened enough. The game is fair with checkpoints - even during boss fights - and you can use money to buy some upgrades. Some puzzles are tough to do with the keyboard, especially the ones requiring you to press D and then SHIFT.
There are a bunch of side-quests in the game, and they all seem like a second thought. Either make them more obvious or add a way for me to track a side-quest I’m doing and give me directions if I want to go do them. The main story itself is pretty interesting, brings you through a bunch of locales while you punch, kick and supplex skeletons and armadillos. Switching between the living and dead world changes the environment around you, adding and removing platforms, sometimes even enemies. The bosses are pretty pattern-based and they were okay. Maybe I wish there would’ve been upgrades to add more damage to your attacks… or how about resisting knockback or an invincibility period?
And that’s where I stopped, during some fight with four enemies that kept knocking me down and immediately knock me back down when I got up. I had no invulnerability at all, no way to attack them and get the fight under control, and I got frustrated after my eighth game over on this fight. Fixing this would be easy, just add some frames of invulnerability after you take damage. And the control scheme didn’t help, as I had to ground-pound and uppercut and change the world to win that fight. No amount of internet jokes could fix that for me.