Croixleur

Rice Digital have made it their mission to distribute Japanese ‘Doujin’ games – indie games made by small groups of hobbyists. Croixleur is one of these, and is sure to impress upon first glance.

Don’t let the barrage of text dialogue at the beginning fool you into thinking there’s a real story to this game, though. Essentially, your character is trying to reach the top of a tower full of monsters, with each floor requiring her to defeat a certain number in order to progress.

It’s a standard hack and slash dressed up in a shiny package. The sprites are lovely, the art is well-drawn and your only objective is to kill monsters. Which is fine, that’s not a bad thing. In fact it’s pretty fun although you’ll want to customise the controls to your liking (thankfully you can do this) or get a gamepad. My only real gripes are that the camera can be a bit fiddly, and there doesn’t seem to be that much variation in the monsters except for colour so it can feel a bit like you’re doing the same stages over and over. You sort of are, in a way – while every now and then you choose between two doors at the end of the stage, there isn’t too much difference between the paths. Having plenty of cool weapons to choose from does soften the monotony a little, though, as do the huge bosses. These big monsters stalk around stages trying to crush you and your puny sword. Why. Won’t. You. Die?!

It’s not a gripe but it’s worth noting that the game is unforgiving. Permadeath, for one. The game tricks you into thinking there are continues by asking if you would like to continue after you die, then smiles sweetly as it kicks you right back to the beginning. Secondly, the enemies get stronger as you go along,  of course that’s to be expected but rare health restores mean you can’t really afford to get hit, which is a problem the further up the tower you go. Enemies do drop coins which you can collect to store up power attacks but these are so precious you’ll find yourself having to judge carefully when to use them.

You don’t have much time to think, however. A timer ticks away at the top of the screen, giving you 15 minutes to complete the whole game (10 if you want to see an alternate ending, apparently). By the time you reach the later stages, you’ll find that your fighting needs to be tight in order to finish within the time limit. If that’s enough for you, there’s always Score Attack and Endless Mode – more opportunities for you to either punish yourself or exercise your controller fingers.